The Worst Hard Time

Dalhart’s First National Bank was not open for business on June 27, 1931. Customers banged on the door and were met with a sign saying that the bank was insolvent. On the same day, the heat reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the hottest day in the town’s short history. Dalhart was starting to feel like the rest of the country—desperate and meaner. It now seemed as though the boom of the previous decade had burst, as though it were only hot air.

Doc Dawson had put money into First National and was worried about his future. He had no pension and Social Security did not yet exist. He had always refused money from patients, taking their offers of livestock and old cars instead. He was also frequently sick with a number of ailments, including Bright’s disease, tuberculosis, and asthma. He did not sleep much and the work of farming was hard on his body. He wanted “to make the dirt work for him,” but “his fields looked dry as chalkboard.”

A crowd formed outside of the First National Bank. They wanted their new sheriff to force it to reopen. Their accounts were guaranteed by nothing but the bank’s good reputation. The new sheriff, Harvey Foust, tried to calm the crowd. There was nothing he could do; it was the federal government’s concern. In November 1930, 256 banks failed. Sheriff Foust, who had been a hero just a year before for killing a pair of dangerous bootleggers and promoted from deputy to sheriff, was now drunk on the job. He seemed like a haunted man.

In the DeSoto Hotel, its owner, Dick Coon, tried to keep people’s spirits up. People thought that Dick Coon and other big shots kept their money in mattresses or dug ditches. However, Dick was in trouble. His properties were losing money due to the inability of people to pay rent. Still, he kept his poker face. Only his friends knew his concern.

The only business that flourished in the midst of Dalhart’s decline was the brothel, the Number 126 house. The prostitutes who worked there showed off the business’s prosperity by frequently getting their hair done and buying new clothes. The owner, Lil Walker, drove a pink Cadillac. They drove past Uncle Dick Coon’s “crumbling empire,” waving and shouting “yoo-hoo,” leaving behind the scent of their perfume.

It infuriated John McCarty to see that the one business flourishing in his beloved Dalhart was a whorehouse. He insisted that the establishment had to go. When he went to the printer with a story advocating for the removal of the brothel, the printer shook his head and refused to print the story. The men of Dalhart needed those girls, he insisted. McCarty withdrew the story.

As the ranks of the unemployed grew, they moved from town to town by rail. Two million Americans were living like this. Some were farmers and factory workers, while others were merchants and bank clerks. As many as eighty people per day arrived in Dalhart at times. Sheriff Foust was responsible for putting them back on the train. If they were black, they could be arrested for vagrancy as soon as they stepped off the tracks, then sent to work on a chain gang for four months. In September 1929, over 1.5. million people were unemployed. That number tripled by February of the following year. President Hoover insisted that the economy was not sick; Americans simply no longer believed in themselves.

By the end of 1930, eight million people were unemployed. The financial institutions that previously seemed invincible were now out of business, and bankers were regarded as swindlers who had stolen people’s property and life savings. In 1930, 1,350 banks failed, losing $853 million in deposits. The following year, 2,294 more banks collapsed. Then, at the end of 1931, the Bank of the United States in New York folded. It held deposits of two hundred million dollars. That bank failure led to the loss of twelve million jobs, or 25 percent of the work force.

John McCarty worried about the survival of his newspaper. He had taken the paper from a weekly to a daily. Its circulation growth had been “robust.” McCarty begged his advertisers to stick with him. He would only print good news, despite what was happening on the prairie.

Some people said that Jewish people were to blame for what was happening, and that they did not belong in a place where its citizens believed themselves to be “of the highest type of Anglo-Saxon ancestry.” They blamed a “Jewish system of banking” for the collapse of the economy. Father Charles E. Coughlin, the radio priest from Detroit, spoke to a million listeners each week and revealed the original Jewish names of Hollywood movie stars, “as if detailing a sinister plot.”

Herzstein’s store, however, filled a need in Dalhart, Boise City, and at their headquarters in Clayton, New Mexico. They provided their customers with complete outfits, stitched to size. To help their customers continue to buy clothing after the Depression, they slashed their prices “below their break-even point.” Still, they were falling behind, like most businesses. In 1931, more than 28,000 businesses failed, and those who retained their jobs saw their wages fall by a third or more. The typical factory worker went from making twenty-four dollars per week to sixteen dollars per week.

Relatives from Philadelphia would visit and wonder why the Herzsteins had remained in the Southern Plains. They had originally come west over the Santa Fe Trail, and were the first Jewish people in New Mexico, beginning in the 1840s. They had staked their claim in Liberty, where they were hoping a railroad line would lay tracks. Then, one day in 1896, Black Jack Ketchum rode into Herzstein’s general merchandise store and robbed Levi Herzstein, one of the store’s owners, of all of the store’s cash and much of the merchandise. Levi organized a posse and hunted Black Jack “up among the dormant volcanoes north of the Llano Estacado” and into No Man’s Land. Herzstein moved forward to shoot Black Jack, who pulled a pistol from his side and shot Herzstein in the stomach.

It took four years for the authorities to catch Black Jack Ketchum. In the meantime, Black Jack was shot in the arm by a conductor while trying to rob a train. The shotgun blast shattered his arm and led to it being amputated. He was soon to be hanged in Clayton, New Mexico, which supposedly had “more guns per capita than any place in the West.” Clayton was also the place where Morris Herzstein, the surviving brother, set up a new store and settled down. Black Jack was set to be hanged on April 26, 1901, the same week that Simon Herzstein, Morris and Levi’s nephew, arrived from Philadelphia with his wife, Maude Edwards. When they got off the train in Clayton, Maude looked around and was horrified by the saloons and the advertisements for Black Jack’s execution, but Simon found the town fascinating.

Black Jack Ketchum’s execution was set for 1:00 PM. People came from hundreds of miles to see, and newspapers from St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Denver sent correspondents to report on it. Black Jack was not yet thirty-seven. He had a shock of black hair and he had gained more than fifty pounds in jail. His last words as the noose was put around his neck were, “Let her rip.” However, the hanging went wrong. The tightened rope did not cleanly snap Black Jack’s neck behind the ear; instead it caused his head to pop off. No one was sure how it happened, but a decapitation by hanging was rare, one of only a few in the recorded history of American execution. The sight of Black Jack’s hooded head breaking and rolling to the feet of the crowd was Maude Edwards’ welcome to the High Plains. Simon Herzstein never tired of telling this story.

Simon Herzstein was an astute businessman. He never kept a ledger; all of his account records were in his head. He often let people buy on credit, confident that they would pay. Privately, Simon loved baseball, poker, and bridge. He also loved to throw big dinner parties, which Maude also enjoyed. The company distracted her from “the wind and the empty skies.” Conversely, Simon loved the West—its freshness and its indigenous heritage. When the town began to fold financially, Simon stayed in good spirits, never letting anyone know that he, too, was in dire straits. Then, the town of Dalhart went after Simon with foreclosure papers for not paying his taxes in over a year. Dick Coon owned the property in which Herzstein’s was housed. He asked his lawyer what could be done to save “the only man on the High Plains trying to keep people dressed to match their lost dignity.”

As Dalhart fell into further debt, people in other parts of the Panhandle tried to retain hope that the harvest of 1931 would save them. They were sure that the land would provide. Meanwhile, American families in Arkansas foraged for dandelions and blackberries. Further east, in the Carolinas and West Virginia, there were stories of “each kid getting a shot at dinner every fourth night.” In New York, 500,000 people were getting eight dollars a month on city relief.

On the High Plains, the wheat poured out of threshers in the early summer of 1931. On the Texas Panhandle, two million acres of sod had been turned—300 percent more than ten years ago. In Baca County, Colorado, two hundred thousand acres were turned over. In Cimarron County, Oklahoma, another quarter million acres were turned. The wheat harvest had hit a record of 250 million bushels nationwide. By the end of 1931, the prairie was a different land—“thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the Southern Plains.” Still, the market remained at nearly 50 percent below what it cost farmers to grow grain. It was the lowest price ever.

Then, the land hardened. The grain toasted in the heat. Bam White looked in the sky, scanning it for a “sun dog,” a phrase he used to describe a “halo” that promised rain. He awaited it throughout July, August, and September, but saw nothing. The livestock was lethargic in the heat. The rains left and did not return for another eight years.