The Worst Hard Time

The silence that falls across the Southern Plains still scares people, Egan says. The land, vast and empty, feels like too much. It scared everyone, from Spanish settlers like Coronado, who came in search of gold, to Anglo traders, Germans from Russia, Scots-Irish from Alabama, and even some of the Comanche who “chased bison over the grass.” It also scares the people who drive over the prairie today in their Expedition and Outlander trucks. It has scared them all due to its weather—“the most violent and extreme on earth”—which demands “humility,” yet promises nothing in return.

When one travels through the Great Plains, one sees “more nothing than something.” In some places, there are “scraps of life,” such as shacks, skeletal trees, and a former schoolhouse “with just the chimney and two walls still standing.” Fence posts, which may have once enclosed great ranches, are “nubs sticking out of sterile brown earth.” These “scraps of life” tell the story of the Great Plains—a place that was ravaged by a blizzard of black dust storms.

One can drive past the fence tops, which lead to “small farms.” Beyond those are towns, such as Springfield, the county seat of Baca County in southeastern Colorado. There are fewer than two people per square mile in Springfield. A hundred years ago, it would have been called “frontier” country. It is less populous now than it was in the 1930s.

Egan, who narrates, goes to a house a few blocks off of Main Street. It is made of “sturdy stone.” A “small, brittle woman” answers and directs Egan to Isaac “Ike Osteen, who is on the ladder out back, fixing the roof. Osteen is eighty-six years old, but still “springy,” and he agrees to talk about the drought, which he pronounces “drouth.”

It is only a few years into the new century, and the Southern Plains are enduring another drought. People in the area worry about a second Dust Bowl. However, Ike Osteen says that no one “who lived through the Dirty Thirties believes that.”

Ike Osteen was one of nine children who grew up in a dugout. His father arrived in Baca County via the old Santa Fe Trail in 1909, when Congress was encouraging the settlement of the Southern Plains, which still remained in the public domain. The government instituted a homestead act, “promoted by railroad companies and prairie state senators,” which offered prospective settlers up to 320 acres. The first Osteen settlers arrived, believing that a dam was being built in No Man’s Land on the Cimarron River. When they arrived, there were no jobs, but people told them about the availability of land. The Osteens dug into the earth and were impressed with the sod, which went “down deep.” They agreed to become homesteaders.

Ike’s father died when he was only forty-six. The family still had their 320 acres and a windmill, “which pumped water 140 feet up from the Ogallala Aquifer.” The water was then “piped into small storage tanks” from which the cattle drank. The easy availability of water and grass kept their cows fat. The cows produced plenty of milk and thick cream. The Osteens traded their cream in town in exchange for “flour, coffee, sugar, [and] a jar of [liquor].” They also had hens that regularly laid eggs.

In 1929, the year that the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began, the prices of wheat had crashed, then the land dried up and no rain came for years. The land had been overturned and there was no longer any sod to hold it in place, so “the soil calcified and started to blow.” The dust clouds were “ten thousand feet or more in the sky” and seemed like “moving mountains,” penetrating everything. Darkness covered the prairie, and then it moved to the East. The livestock went mad, then suffocated. Children died of dust pneumonia and people avoided hugs because the electric shock could knock a person down. During the Dust Bowl, Egan says, taking a breath could kill you.

Jeanne Clark, who lives just up the road from Ike Osteen, is another witness to the Dust Bowl. Her lungs remain scarred from dust pneumonia. Her mother, Louise Walton, a former Broadway dancer, had moved to the plains due to a respiratory problem. The doctors in New York told her to go west, recommending the dry air of the Southern Plains as a remedy. The Western Plains have had a reputation among “lungers,” or “pilgrims with respiratory ailments,” since the late nineteenth century. There was a time when Colorado City was called “Little London” due to being full of people with English accents who were “fleeing the foul industrial air of urban Britain.” Louise’s health improved. She then married a rancher and had Jeanne. Then, the dust storms came.

By 1934, it was dangerous to go outside. The sky was filled with soil and the dust felt “like a nail file” on the skin. People wore respiratory masks if they had to go out, and rubbed the inside of their noses with Vaseline to help filter out dust. They covered their windows with wet sheets and stuffed wet towels under their doors. Children were quickly sent home from school before an oncoming storm.

April 14, 1935 is known as Black Sunday. A day that had started out as “quiet, windless, and bright” was, by afternoon, sending “waves of sand” over the prairie. The dust appeared like a “black wall.” Jeanne Clark recalls feeling as though she were “caught in a whirlpool.” It was the worst duster of all the storms, carrying “twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal.” Afterward, Jeanne became sick with dust pneumonia, and a doctor said that she might not live for very much longer.

Melt White lives south, in Dalhart, Texas. Though nearly everyone he grew up with is now dead, he remembers how the people of Dalhart had fought against nature—herding rabbits and then smashing their skulls to prevent the animals from eating their few crops, the plagues of grasshoppers, and how people spread arsenic over the land to kill the insects. White insists that the land was never meant to be plowed. He believes it was designed for indigenous people and their buffalo.

 Growing up, Melt White was teased about the color of his skin, “which seemed too full of the sun, even in winter.” He later learned the family secret: he was of partial Apache and Cherokee ancestry.

The Dust Bowl “covered one hundred million acres,” and the Southern Plains were the “epicenter.” A quarter-million people left the Plains to escape the dust storms. However, a majority of those who left were poor tenant farmers “ruined by the collapse of the economy.” Most of those who lived in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl stayed in their homes and endured it.

The U.S. government has long treated the Southern Plains like “throwaway land.” Later, it was the place where Japanese-Americans lived in internment camps during the Second World War, and where German POWs were imprisoned. The only “growth industries” in the plains today are pig farms and prisons. Though it is still a site for harsh weather, nothing has matched the Dust Bowl storms, which scientists call “the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.”

After the Dust Bowl, the farmers learned to treat the land with more respect. They restored some of the grass and formed soil conservation districts. Then, “barely a generation” later, the Great Plains entered the era of global farm commodities and, once again, farmers demanded too much from the land.