Dark Valley Destiny (19 page)

A prairie fire marshaled the resources of the whole community, the men fighting the fire in shifts and the women furnishing food and drink and, when necessary, nursing care. If the fire was near a town, hoses, pumps, and even bucket brigades were manned to wet down the area and divert the blaze from the houses.

The battle might go on for days. When the immediate danger had passed, one might see a sooty man resting against an outcrop, and a few yards away a jackrabbit, peering at him from under singed ears; or a coyote, dragging a blackened tail, limping along on burned pads and ignoring both man and rabbit—natural enemies bound in a truce of exhaustion.

As the frontiersman stood under the big sky of the prairies, it never occurred to him that he could have anything to do with the weather. Neither did it occur to Howard, who felt himself a pawn of fate. Mountains of cumulus clouds might pile up without blotting out the sun; anvil-topped thunderheads might hurl thunder and lightning. "Here," a contemporary writer puts it, "the age-old litany of the wind . . . blows impartially on the just and the unjust. Here the single eye of the sun, blazing indifferently on good and evil, is rarely out of sight. Under such a sky, time itself seems eternal."
⁴¹

The sky seemed immutable, its nature remaining unchanged even when tornadoes swept out of it. Howard knew about storms and "cyclones." One of his earliest childhood recollections was that of crouching in a storm cellar, dank, dark, and perhaps reptile-haunted, while a storm raged without. Thunder rattled the cellar door shielding him from the downpour. Through the cracks between the boards he could see vicious blue flashes of lightning, which, like a stroboscope, fixed blown leaves and branches in a tableau of destruction.
⁴²

Howard describes another storm with the authenticity of experience. A tornado roared through Cross Plains in the middle of the afternoon, in July of 1935. The storm struck just as Robert was lowering the east window of his room. The doors and windows were still open when the wind hit, or the low pressure in the center of the twister might have caused them to burst outwards. Robert had the impression that the house expanded as the wind roared in; but then Robert, and probably most other Texans as well, failed to grasp the principles of the physics of; tornadoes.
⁴³
 j

Several homes were damaged and many windows broken—"blown out," Robert said. This storm, which swooped down upon Cross Plains without thunder and lightning or even threatening clouds, brought a ; spatter of rain, which turned to hail, followed by the scream of the twister. It was over so quickly that Robert had no time for fear—onl\ a confused bewilderment and a curious exhilaration.

As Howard explained to Lovecraft, Callahan County lies in th "cyclone belt," which includes most of West Texas and all the Great Plains.
⁴⁴
Terrible storms sweep down the Callahan Divide; occasional tornadoes swirl over the land like avenging angels. Howard railed against the helplessness of man before such a storm. He must cravenly crawl into cellars while all he has built is destroyed.

In Robert's bleak view of the world, the earth and its creatures are locked in an endless war of extermination among individuals, races, : species, climates, and terrains. A man must either fight or flee, be master I or slave. If the universe is a matter of blind accident, thought Howard,, a mindless contraption in which man is trapped, then man's only major ; goal is to win freedom from it.

The sky, however, is not so immutable as it seemed to Robert. It was built by life acting on life; for the very air is the product of organic metabolism. As Lewis Thomas wrote: "[The sky] is a vast permanent bubble of air breathed out by chloroplasts, tough enough at its outer membrane to glance away and ignite all the meterorites that have made
■
gray rubble of our neighboring undeveloped, underprivileged planets. "It is our planet's unique possession, the sky, and we made it all by . ourselves."
⁴⁵
That we could also destroy the sky all by ourselves became^ clear with the arrival of the dust storms of the 1930s. Unlike the earlier ; sandstorms, the dust storms were man-made. This difference troubled Howard.

Sandstorms are typical of West Texas, especially in February and. March. Northers, howling down from the Arctic Circle, drive sand beforej

120 i

them, assaulting the bare legs of children, abrading faces, filling mouths with grit, and irritating eyes. These conditions obtain whenever the wind is high on the prairie, as before a thunderstorm, or when a hurricane sweeps inland from the Gulf, passing over a sandy area with a wind velocity high enough to carry the sand aloft. But these sandstorms are short-lived, either blowing themselves out in a few hours or being wet down by the rain that follows the wind.

In contrast, the 1930s saw thousands of tons of soil rise up and invade the stratosphere. Boiling black clouds thundered away, but the squalls that followed showered dust instead of rain. Dust storms assumed many shapes; some rolled in like thunderheads, darkening the sky until the chickens went to roost. Some soared into the upper atmosphere, occluding the sun with a reddish haze and sifting down silt over everything.
⁴⁶

Although the windows were closed, all furnishings would be covered with silt as fine as talcum powder. Dust clung to curtains and walls and rippled across plates laid for dinner. Beds, toothbrushes, clothes in the closet, and even food in the refrigerator were filmed with dust. There was no way to keep it out.

On the Great Plains, the dust drifted into dunes. Animals died, and there were reports of migrating birds falling out of the air, suffocated by flying dust particles. In Nebraska in 1933, a "blood rain" fell, composed of gypsum, volcanic ash, and silt particles that had lain for a quarter of a billion years in the red Permian beds, which stretched from Kansas to Texas.

The stage was set for these storms when the first settlers broke up the thick grass-root systems that shielded the prairie from the winds. The technological advances of the twenties replaced the plow horse by the tractor to pull plows through the heavy sod. Soon the mechanized combine displaced the hired hand, as the tractor had the horse, and the "wheat kings" of the twenties came into being. They plowed and sowed and reaped an ever-growing area, breaking more and more sod until finally only the rainfall held the soil in place. And they prospered until 1930, when Nemesis struck.

In the summer of 1930, according to the Weather Bureau, the longest recorded drouth began. It receded in 1931 and worsened in 1932. In 1934 no end was yet in sight. No moisture held the topsoil to the land. A wind not strong enough to create a sandstorm could easily

DARK VALLEY DBIT1NY

«coop up the powdery soil that lay naked to the sky, no longer glued together by a film of moisture.

The first major dust storm to reach the East Coast was borne on a gale that originated in Canada, swept through the Midwest, and turned New York's sky yellow, making dusk of its afternoon. Another dust storm, which spun out of the Midwest, covered 1,350,000 square miles, towered three miles into the sky, and simultaneously eclipsed the sun in six states.

During the 1930s, some states reported from one to three hundred dust storms a year. Each "black blizzard" further diminished the arable land. Snows in New England were yellowed by New Mexico's soil. Three hundred miles out in the Atlantic, liners were powdered with Midwestern silt.

By 1935 droves of people fled what had come to be called the Dust Bowl. Among those who stayed, a gallows humor developed into the typical Texan tall tale,
lost
, ran an ad in a weekly paper,
in last week's sandstorm, a small
160
acre farm. anyone knowing anything of its whereabouts please contact the owner
. Next week the reply appeared:

found, one acre of the lost farm in my vacuum cleaner. owner can claim it by presenting himself. . . .

Callahan County suffered the same drouth and was battered by many dust storms; but the county, already arid, lay on the southern edge of the eroded area and so was spared some of the devastation. Furthermore, the discovery of oil had turned people's attention away from farming. Since the natural contours of the land were not suited to the plowing of vast fields of grain, less land was laid open to wind erosion. But the people did not escape an erosion of the spirit as the heat bore in and the dryness permeated their very bones.

Howard wrote dramatically of the dust storms. He told of a scorching sun in a cloudless sky; then the rising gusts of wind; then the appearance of a long black bar across the northwestern horizon. The bar rose like a vast black cloud and swept on like a sable curtain miles wide and hundreds of feet high. Before it, whirling black dots resolved themselves into buzzards and other birds fleeing the storm. Then with a roar it was upon one, turning reddish-brown and filling the victim's hair, eyes, and ears with sand, sometimes continuing for days on end. After the wind fell, dust veiled the sky for a day or two, tinting the sun yellow and giving the landscape an ensorcelled appearance.
⁴⁷

Thus the terrain of Texas, awesome in its immensity, variety, and cataclysmic climate, nourished Robert Howard's view of the world. The violence he saw around him in the natural world was reenforced by vividly-remembered tales of violence; for Texans were great storytellers who enjoyed talking about their heritage. Each had a different tale to tell of conflicts between pioneers and Indians, cowboys and gunmen, Rangers and outlaws, cattlemen and rustlers, Texas and Mexicans, as well as the grass wars, the fence wars, and the railroaders' stand against train robbers.

The very society in which he lived, moreover, underwent rapid and violent change with the coming of the oil boom, with its fortune seekers, roustabouts, and dance-hall girls. The onslaught of Northeastern industrial ideas and mores on Western agrarian culture was itself cataclysmic. Together these elements nurtured the violent phantasies of a youthful writer who never learned to cope with reality.

And so his boyhood wandered into youth, And still the hazes thickened round his head, And red, lascivious nightmares shared his bed And fantasies with greedy claw and tooth. . . .
^l

Sometime in 1933 Robert Howard decided that tackling the story of frontier Texas was too much for him. He told August Derleth that, if he wrote any chronicle, he would deal only with Callahan County in the years following his arrival in Cross Plains. While a history of the county might lack the general appeal of the story of frontier days in the whole state, Howard observed, the oil boom was vibrant with color, violence, and sudden change.
²

And so, indeed, it was. A few miles up the road from Cross Plains, during the early years that Robert Howard lived there, lay the town of Pioneer. Here, for example, a jail break was accomplished in a most unusual way. When a bunch of Jack Tindall's mule skinners whooped it up in Pioneer, the constable threw the more obstreperous members of the group into the small local jail, planning to keep them there until the effects of the liquor wore off. Their comrades, scarcely more sober than the prisoners, demanded that the constable free the jailbirds. He refused. Thereupon the teamsters loaded the jail, inmates and all, onto their wagon and headed for home.

The sheriff—more angry than alarmed—placed a long-distance call to Jack Tindall, demanding the return of his jail and his prisoners.

"Let them go," advised Tindall. "Tell me how much their fines are, and I'll take the amount out of their pay." On the strength of this promise, the men were released; and once freed they gallantly returned the jailhouse to its rightful owner.
³

The history of Callahan County was both colorful and violent, and the past left an indelible stamp on the people who lived there in the twentieth century. Callahan County, an area of some twenty-eight miles on a side, was named for James A. Callahan, a Georgian who came to Texas in the 1830s to fight for Texan independence. Callahan was taken prisoner when Colonel James W. Fannin lost the battle of Coleto to the Mexican army. The Mexican general Santa Anna, who had captured the Alamo and ordered all the male defenders killed, sent orders for the massacre of Fannin's men.

Although General Jose Urrea, who had promised the captives mercy, protested this order in vain, a heroic Mexican lady, Panchita Alvarez, with the connivance of her husband's fellow officers, smuggled several of the prisoners away in time to save their lives. Callahan was one of the survivors, either because of the efforts of Senora Alvarez or because his skill as a wainwright made him more valuable alive than dead.

Still, Santa Anna's cruelties inspired a ferocious hatred in Anglo-Texans that has ever since reinforced interethnic hostility between Anglo-Texans and Hispano-Texans. In his letters Robert Howard revealed his share of rancorous contempt for persons of Mexican descent. When telling Lovecraft how a rancher killed a Mexican and sewed the corpse in a cowhide, only to have a detective come searching for the body, Robert wrote: . . just why so much trouble was taken about a Mexican I cannot understand." In another letter he stated: "The main thing I dislike about Mexicans is their refusal to speak English. . . . You know he's lying, but there's nothing you can do about it. You restrain your impulse to strangle him."
⁴

Fear and hatred of Indians, likewise, persisted in Callahan County in Robert Howard's time. The unsettled land that later became Callahan County had belonged to a peaceable and sedentary tribe of Indians, the Tonkawas, who had been farmers until they got horses and learned to hunt buffalo. Later, reduced by smallpox and wars to a few hundred survivors, they reverted to an agricultural life. They were mainly friendly to the whites, although this tolerance did them little good. In 1859 they were driven into Oklahoma with other Texan Indians and were massacred there by fellow Indians when they refused to join in an uprising against the whites who had driven them forth.