The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929. In three weeks, the stock market lost 40 percent of its value. Brokers had taken unnecessary risks, and banks had gone on “speculative binges,” using people’s savings accounts as collateral for stock purchases. Meanwhile, most Americans continued to work the land. One in four people lived on a farm.

On the High Plains, things were still good. They associated the stock market crash with “city slickers.” Meanwhile, they had “record harvests, a new railroad, and even dreams of a skyscraper in town.” They did not notice a problem until the price of wheat began to follow the course of the equities market. Though most of the country was in a drought, that did nothing to push the prices of wheat back up.

In Boise City, the Lucas family was preparing for its first harvest. Carlie Lucas had died, leaving the farm to his widow, Dee, and his brother C.C. Hazel, their daughter, had married Charles Shaw and went to live in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Lucases needed the crop to come in properly, as they had to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy new farm machinery. They had no electricity and still lived in a dugout.

A few miles from the Lucas farm, the Folkers family was doing well. Fred Folkers had bought a tractor, a new car, a new house, and a piano for his daughter, Faye, who was becoming a talented musician. He owed it all to his half-section of No Man’s Land. Still, debts were piling up. In addition to growing wheat, he also had fruit orchards. Nebraska offered tax incentives to those who planted trees and for Fred, his orchard was a way to defy those who did not think that apples and peaches could grow in No Man’s Land.

A June storm could be trouble for a wheat crop. The cold of late spring and the heat of early summer usually resulted in hailstorms. One June, hailstones as big as grapefruits fell on the Lucas farm. Dee Lucas told her children to go to the root cellar. When the family emerged, they saw that their crop was lost. In fact, the storm had crushed most wheat crops in Cimarron County, while elsewhere on the High Plains, wheat came in just fine. In southwestern Kansas, the harvest was up by 50 percent. Yet, on the Lucas farm, a year of work was gone in a few minutes. Dee and C.C. fell to their knees and began to cry. The children watched them and worried.

By the end of 1932, a quarter of all banks had closed and nine million people lost their savings. The stock market had lost fifty billion dollars, and two million Americans lost their jobs. In the cities, people stood in line for food—young, well-dressed people. Some of those same people slept under bridges. What was ironic was that there was so much grain, much of it going to waste at train stations, because no one could afford to buy it. Productivity increased, but wages dropped and jobs disappeared.

Hazel Lucas heard about a job opening in 1930 at the New Hope School outside Boise City. However, the school could not pay her. Farmers were in too much debt to pay taxes, and without the taxes, teachers could not be paid salaries. The school offered to pay Hazel a warrant, a paper which she could later cash in for ten dollars. Hazel accepted it. Then, when she took it to the bank, she was turned away. John Johnson’s bank would not cash the warrants. Hazel worked the school year without pay.

The grain continued to come in “green and upright.” However, in Texhoma, the price was only twenty-four cents a bushel. That was not enough to cover the costs of running a farm and having enough to live on. The price of wheat now offered only four hundred dollars for a year, whereas in 1921, the same amount brought in ten times as much. Farmers begged the banks to help, but the banks were too busy foreclosing on farms. To avoid having their property sold off, farmers got together and devised a scheme to bid only a dime for farm property—no more. The bank and Sheriff Hi Barrick, who was present to keep order at the auctions, grew wise to the tactic, but no one could do anything to stop it. Meanwhile, millions of acres had been left abandoned after the price collapse, leaving the land stripped.

In Baca County, Colorado, farmers were determined to make it the dry farming capital of the state. Baca was the last section of the Southern Plains “to be torn up and planted,” partly due to resistance from cowboys. The Santa Fe Line extended into the county in 1927. In Springfield, Baca’s county seat, streets were paved and there was electricity. Another town, Richards, sprang up nearby.

Ike Osteen was only twelve when he and his brother Oscar went out on the family tractor and asked if people wanted their grass turned. They charged one dollar per acre. Due to their mother being widowed, this became how income was brought into the household. Ike noticed that there was a good market in bootlegging—that is, the illegal production and sale of liquor—but he decided to stick to plowing fields.

Ike got up “well before the sun” to get cow chips for the stove and, in the winter, ensured that the animals had enough hay. Ike gave his earnings, which were substantial, to his mother, who was trying to raise eight children in a dugout. Fortunately, Baca was “the largest wheat-producing county in Colorado.” What his mother wanted more than the income the boys brought in was for Ike to remain at Richards School and make it all the way through—no one in the family had before.

Dick Coon saw the market collapse as an opportunity to buy more property at lower prices. There was talk of building a college in the town, and newspaper editor John McCarty did not think that Dalhart would be affected by the troubles of 1929. Doc Dawson, on the other hand, was worried about the money he had invested in farmland outside of town, which had not yet turned a profit. When Loretto Hospital opened in 1929, Doc and Willie Dawson felt free to farm full-time.

One financial prospect was no longer explored: striking oil on the old XIT ranch. The price of oil had crashed not long after the stock market. A lack of regulation, as well as excessive consumption, had sparked a global depression. The bank in Dalhart was in trouble too, and its account holders had not been receiving statements. When they got their statements at the end of the year, the documents showed that their savings had been drained.

Willie Dawson continued with “the literary society, the country club, and dinner parties.” At the beginning of 1930, Doc Dawson used the last of his savings to buy property in town. He was worried about his sterile fields. He tried to plant cotton, but that too failed. The only vegetation that did grow was tumbleweed, which no one really wanted on their farms. Dawson hired a field hand to get rid of it so that he could plant winter wheat.

In 1930, Bam White and his family still lived in the shack he had rented shortly after they arrived in town. It cost three dollars a month, which was a great deal. Still Bam told his sons that he wanted to roam—a tendency that he attributed to his indigenous heritage. Yet, satisfying that urge would be of no use to his family. He decided to put down roots in the town, and decided to find and buy his own house. He earned money by performing odd jobs in the field, and by selling turnips and skunk hides.

Due to his dark skin and work-worn hands, Bam did not always feel welcome in Dalhart, where people wore “new clothes and [dined] fine and [drank] the best hooch from the county stills.” Still, he did not have it nearly as bad as a black man who came into town one day, got off a train at the station, and tried to get a drink at Dinwiddie’s, presumably not noticing the sign warning black people not to let the sun go down on them in Dalhart. The following day, the stranger disappeared. People said he had been killed, and were indifferent to the possibility. The thought of the man’s potential murder frightened Bam.

With enough money saved, Bam finally bought a house. It was a “half-dugout.” The roof was made of tarpaper, and the walls were extremely thin. Lizzie said that it was too cold, so Bam and his sons insulated it with six additional layers. They divided the dugout into two sides—a dining area and a sleeping area. There was no running water, no electricity, and no toilet. Melt was responsible for bringing in buckets of water for cleaning and cooking and collecting cow chips for the stove. Bam knew that his home was not much, but he was proud to call it his own.

Throughout the Southern Plains, wheat harvests were abundant. However, last year’s harvest still had not been sold. The elevators at the train station, where wheat was stored until it was transported to major cities, were stuffed. Wheat was now only thirty cents a bushel. Those who had gotten into farming to make quick money—salesmen, barkeeps, druggists—quickly got out. No one understood why they could not sell. The drought had persisted through 1930 in most of the United States, but the High Plains had gotten the rainfall it needed to produce good crops, which no one was buying. There was plenty of advertising and plenty of hungry people, but there was simply too much wheat and not enough buyers. Farmers suggested that the government could purchase the wheat and use it to feed the hungry, but President Herbert Hoover rejected the idea right away.

To retaliate against the government’s inaction, the farmers “burned railroad trestles” to prevent their grain from going to city markets, and “hijacked milk trucks” and spilled out their contents. They also planned a strike. They were going to withhold all remaining wheat and corn until people took notice of their suffering. Baca County had had a record harvest, as did Texas, most of Kansas, parts of Nebraska, and the Oklahoma Panhandle. The government insisted that they could do nothing; it was a free market. On the other hand, they were proud of the grain production. No civilization had ever produced so much grain.

None of the settlers intended to leave No Man’s Land. They loved their home, and they clung to a hope that the next decade would be better than the previous one. Then, on September 14, 1930, a windstorm “kicked up dust out of southwest Kansas.” It made its way to the Texas Panhandle and looked like nothing anyone had ever before seen. It was not a sandstorm, for it was the wrong color—much too dark. It also was not a hailstorm, though the sky suggested “the kind of formation you would get just before a roof-buster.” It rolled, instead, “like a mobile hill of crud, and it was black.” It also hurt. It felt like getting swiped by sandpaper.