The Worst Hard Time

Whereas Dalhart was a place of opportunity and hope, Boise City, Oklahoma was a place where hope died. The town had been founded on a fraud—the promise of trees was in its name, which came from the French name for “woods,” le bois. The Southwestern Immigration and Development Company sold lots at forty-five dollars apiece. The brochures advertised a lush place with plenty of clean water and infrastructure. The fiction helped them sell three thousand lots by 1908, “one year after Oklahoma became the forty-fifth state.”

Boise City offered nothing to its landowners. There were no railroads or even tracks, and no plans to build either. The settlers saw none of the beautiful houses or businesses in the brochures, and the local well “was a stockman’s crude tank next to a windmill, full of flies.” Furthermore, the company did not even own the land that it sold. The developers were arrested, tried for fraud, and sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. By 1920, Boise City had 250 residents and its nearby county “at the far end of No Man’s Land was approaching 3,500 people.” There were hopes that the Oklahoma Panhandle, where Boise City was located, would become “the greatest wheat-growing country in the world.”

Previously, no one had wanted to settle in No Man’s Land. It was where some people, most notably Captain William Becknell and his thirty-man army, had nearly died of thirst. Spain was the first to claim the territory, which the nation then sold to Napoleon. The territory was then sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, then ended up in the possession of Mexico in 1819 as part of their claim of Texas. In 1836, the Republic of Texas owned “all territory north to Colorado.” When Texas was admitted into the Union in 1845, it was on the condition that there would be no slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line. As a result, “an orphaned rectangle, 35 miles wide and 210 miles long” was left over, unattached to any state or territory. Its unclaimed status, in addition to its “unlivably arid” land, gave it its name.

In the late nineteenth century, the Oklahoma Panhandle was a haven for “outlaws, thieves, and killers.” The Santa Fe Railroad pushed as far north as Liberal, Kansas, which was on the Oklahoma border. Kansas was a dry state, disallowing the purchase of alcohol, so a place called Beer City developed across the state line. It was comprised of “bars, brothels, gambling houses, smuggling dens, and town developers on the run.” Beer City was the first settlement in No Man’s Land, but it disintegrated two years after it was set up due to “law, taxes, and land title companies” coming to the Panhandle in 1890.

The indigenous people for whom Oklahoma is named (the state name is a combination of Choctaw words—okla, meaning “people” and humma, meaning “red”) lost their homes in a land grab which turned Oklahoma City, Norman, and Guthrie into towns overnight. People only settled No Man’s Land when there was nothing else left in the state to take.

Hazel Lucas’s family settled in the grassland “just south of Boise City” in 1914—"the peak year for homesteads in the twentieth century.” Hazel was a little girl when they arrived, and she was excited to be there. Her father, William Carlyle, had chosen the land because it was free, whereas the old XIT ranch property could cost up to “$10,000 for a half-section.” By 1910, more than half of the two hundred million acres that had been homesteaded nationwide were in the Great Plains. Though the land was coveted, Hazel missed trees and did not want to live in a hole in the ground with critters crawling around. She also did not want to live in a leaky sod house.

Many of the settlers in the Southern Plains were from the Northern Plains—people fleeing the brutal winters in Montana, for example, where temperatures dipped to forty below zero and froze cattle in place. The federal government offered free train rides to prospective settlers to take a look at No Man’s Land, just as the realtors selling bits of the XIT ranch had. In 1915, William Carlyle made a dugout and “started plowing the grass on his half-section, a patch of sandy loam.”

Though their patch of land was fertile, the Lucas family would not have survived without the help of windmills. Windmills were introduced to the west as a result of the railroad industry. Railroads required windmills, for they were the only means of generating the large amounts of water needed “to cool the engines and generate steam.” The mechanic Daniel Halladay invented a smaller version of the famous Dutch windmills, and the Union Pacific Railroad Company bought many. Later, a nester was able to purchase a windmill kit for around seventy-five dollars. Still, one had to dig for water. Sometimes it was only thirty-feet below the earth’s surface; in other instances, it was “three times as deep.” Some homesteaders used “steam or horse-powered drills” to dig, while others dug holes by hand.

While trying to dig for water, nesters feared grass fires. Hazel Lucas “was petrified of prairie fires.” A few years after her family had arrived, a lightning strike lit up a field in New Mexico and the resulting fire spread all the way to Texas and Oklahoma. Fires were a “part of the prairie ecosystem”—necessary for the land to clear out “excess insect populations” and to help the grass regenerate. When there were not fires, there were floods. In the spring of 1914, the Cimarron River flooded, knocking out a newly completed dam.

A few years after the First World War, William Carlyle “Carlie” Lucas built a home above ground. He invested in building materials, emboldened by the possibility of making a lot of money off of selling wheat for the war effort. When he was finished, the family enjoyed going to bed without first having to scan the floor for snakes. Then, one afternoon, a strong windstorm came. The Lucas family fled to their old dugout. The next day, Hazel poked her head above ground and saw their home being carried away with the wind. Four days later, the family searched for pieces of their home.

Though the weather on the prairie was violent, the sky would become “open and embracing” after a storm. The indigenous animals were uniquely charming, and the sky seemed to go on forever. Hazel Lucas rode her horse Pecos to visit the James boys, one of the last big ranching families, whose property extended into both Texas and Oklahoma. One day, Andy told her how to eat grasshoppers. When she was sixteen, Hazel met Charlie Shaw. In the fall of 1922, Hazel rode Pecos to a one-room schoolhouse “sitting alone in the grassland.” She took her first job there as a teacher. There were thirty-nine students in eight different grade,s and seventeen-year-old Hazel taught them all.

Hazel taught her students how to play basketball, which she had played in high school, and safely guided a group of players through “a fit of hail” in her horse-drawn wagon. She wondered about life in other places, and knew how much faster American life moved there. She knew about “flappers, gangsters, and stunts,” such as the two men who played tennis on the wings of a biplane. Yet, in Cimarron County, most people still didn’t have electricity.

In fewer than ten years, wheat farmers on the Great Plains “went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth.” There were new machines that made planting and harvesting easier, and in some cases, the profit margin was “ten times the cost of production.” In 1910, the price of wheat was eighty cents a bushel. By 1915, it was double. Farmers increased production by 50 percent and were helped when the Turkish navy blocked the Dardanelles, making it impossible for Russia to supply Europe with grain. That customer base was supplied by farmers in the Great Plains.

When Carlie Lucas first arrived in No Man’s Land, he hoped to make enough money to feed his family. A few years after his arrival, he was making $8,000 a year from wheat farming—a handsome six-figure salary in today’s dollars. A worker on the Ford assembly line made an eighth of what a successful farmer took home in pay. Ida Watkins, “the self-described wheat queen of Kansas,” said that she earned $75,000 in 1926—more than the salary of any baseball player, except for Babe Ruth, and more than what the president of the United States took home in pay.

Hazel Lucas and Charles Shaw got married when she was eighteen. They were both working as teachers, but Charles wanted to leave the Panhandle for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied mortuary science. Hazel enjoyed Cincinnati but returned to Oklahoma to work when they began to run out of money. She secured a better-paying job, with additional duties as a bus driver. When she stepped off the train in Texhoma, she felt back at home in No Man’s Land.

Hazel Lucas was one of few women in No Man’s Land. Women were rather scarce, and Will Crawford was one of the territory’s many bachelors. He was originally from Missouri, and had arrived on one of the free trains. He was an exceptionally large man, and liked to say that he was “fatter than any man in three states.” He worked as a farmhand, mostly in exchange for food. One day while reaching into the front pocket of his specially-made overalls, he found a note from Sadie White from Wichita, Kansas. She has stitched Will’s garment and was impressed by its size. He wrote to her, then built a more comfortable home—two rooms above his dugout. Will went away for a week and returned married to Sadie. They moved into the new home Will had built.

The Folkers family were Will Crawford’s closest neighbors. They also arrived by a free train with very little money. Katherine Folkers disliked the emptiness of the prairie and cried herself to sleep at night. Fred Folkers planted an orchard, which was successful for a time.

Those who prospered on the Southern Plains were, in many instances, “first-generation aristocracy.” Country clubs were newly established for the farmer-businessmen. They ignored those who warned that the prosperity would be short-lived, and that the land would not be sustainable for agriculture.

Fred Folkers started his wheat farm with the help of a horse-drawn plow, and then he bought a tractor. Suddenly, it took only three hours to do the same work. He also had a Case combine and a one-way plow. The one-way plow was a temporary blessing, but later a curse, due to its efficiency at ripping up large sections of grass. By the late-1920s, Folkers harvested ten thousand bushels of wheat, and by 1925, he could transport it out of Boise City by train. The wheat was then sold in Chicago, New York, and Europe.

Soon, signs of prosperity were evident everywhere in Boise City. People drove around Model Ts. A clothier from Clayton, New Mexico arrived and took orders for suits and dresses. Simon Herzstein took trips to New York and arrived back with outfits “that could make a prairie couple look like a pair of dandies from the picture show.”

John Johnson’s bank loaned money to people all over the county. People were happy to mortgage their farms in exchange for more money for farming equipment. By 1929, Boise City had grown exponentially: there was a theater, a hotel, a bookstore, a bank, a newspaper, a creamery, a few cafes, and a telephone office. The Folkers bought appliances, dresses for Katherine and Faye, more land, and “a big-shouldered house to replace the crumbling shack” in which they had lived for ten years. The sound of centipedes behind the walls made it difficult for the children to sleep. For Faye’s birthday, they bought her a piano and provided her with lessons.

The High Plains was a happy place in the 1920s. The population was growing. The banks seldom said “no” to an upstart and, after Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act, every town had a bank to cater to its farmers. They offered forty-year loans at six percent interest. No one thought they would be unable to pay that back.