Great Plains (23 page)

As it turned out, the Russian Mennonites made ideal plains farmers. Which figured, since they had already been practicing on the steppes for nearly a hundred years. They knew how to build houses from sod, how to use manure and grass for fuel, how to be content on an isolated frontier. The same plagues of grasshoppers that sometimes attack the plains attack the steppes; the Mennonites drove them from the fields with flails into the surrounding grass, then set the grass on fire. Most important, the Mennonites knew what to plant. Each Mennonite family had brought a bushel or more of Crimean wheat with them from Russia. This wheat, a hard, red, short-stemmed variety later called Turkey Red, was resistant to heat, cold, and drought. It was the right crop for the plains, and the Mennonites knew to cultivate it with four plowings, to make the soil hold moisture better. With this wheat and this technique, Mennonite farmers were able to move from the river valleys onto the drier, windier tablelands where no one else had yet figured out how to farm.

A problem with hard wheat was that it was more difficult to mill than the soft wheats. Millers in Minneapolis and the East did not like it, and paid less for it. So the Mennonites built their own mills. Their Turkey Red wheat kept them in business through drought years when many other plains farmers were going under. In the 1890s, the Mennonites attracted the attention of an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture named Mark Alfred Carleton. He was interested in finding good varieties of crops for dryland farming; his title was Cerealist in Charge of Grain Investigations. Carleton noticed the success of the Mennonites' Crimean wheat, and of another possibly Russian wheat called Red Fife which had been growing well on the Canadian plains. He decided to take a trip to Russia. His superiors were reluctant to send him with no knowledge of the language, so he learned it. He left for Russia in the summer of 1898, and travelled to parts of the steppes which were even colder and drier than the plains, figuring that grains from there would be more than strong enough for America. On the Khirgis Steppes, in the real Russian boondocks, Carleton obtained from a farmer named Gnyezdilov a variety of wheat called Kubanka. When he brought it back, it proved even better for some kinds of dryland farming than Turkey Red. Another variety of wheat which Carleton found, the Kharkov, worked well on the northern plains, and both varieties were also highly resistant to black stem rust, a grain parasite which wiped out many wheats on the plains in 1904. Carleton went around to millers, urging them to buy more hard Russian wheat. He also began a campaign to get Americans to eat more macaroni, since hard wheats made good pasta. Eventually, people listened to him. By 1914, farmers on the Great Plains were producing tens of millions of bushels of Kubanka and Kharkov wheat.

When the Mennonite elders met with President Grant in 1873, he had assured them that the United States was not likely to be in a war for another fifty years. Not counting the brief Spanish-American War in 1898, Grant was only off by a few years. After America entered World War I in 1917, Congress passed the first universal conscription act since the Civil War. This act contained a clause exempting from combatant service “members of any well-organized religious sect or organization at present organized and existing” whose beliefs did not allow them to participate in war. The act said that such people would be given non-combatant service, but did not spell out what that service would be. About half of the Mennonites who were drafted agreed to perform noncombatant service. The other half said that any service at all which aided the conduct of war was wrong. They reported for induction and then refused to wear uniforms or follow any orders, so the Army imprisoned many of them. The Kansas City
Star,
the Chicago
Tribune,
and much of America reviled them. The fact that members of this isolated, strange sect spoke German did not improve their standing in public opinion. Mobs painted their meeting houses yellow or burned them down. Several Mennonites were tarred and feathered. Teddy Roosevelt said the Mennonites were not fit to live in America. Eventually, seventy-six Mennonites, the grandsons of men who had left Russia rather than serve in the Czar's Army, were court-martialed, given terms of from ten to thirty years, and sent to the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

World War I changed the Great Plains more than any event in recent history. At the war's start, America, Canada, and Russia were the leading wheat-exporting nations of the world. Largely because of seeds brought from the steppes to the Great Plains, America was now selling as much wheat to the world's major wheat-importing nations in Western Europe as Russia was. When the Turkish Navy blockaded the Dardanelles in 1914, it stopped the flow of Russian wheat down from the Black Sea. Suddenly, like one kidney when the other is removed, the Great Plains had to work twice as hard. Farmers began to plow up land they had not considered planting before, and hundreds of thousands of acres of marginal land went under new lightweight tractors. By 1920, there were twice as many plowed acres on the southern plains as there had been in 1910. The price of wheat went from around $1 a bushel in 1914 to $2.10 a bushel in 1917. Farmers became rich, bought better equipment and more land, acquired more debt.

Prairie is much easier to plow under than it is to restore. When the war ended and the price of wheat fell, plains farmers did not respond by taking land out of production. Instead, many of them used their new equipment to plant as much as possible, partly in an attempt to outrun the debt which buying the new equipment had entailed. Farming the plains became a speculative venture. People who lived elsewhere bought plains land and planted wheat on it during vacations in the fall; then, if the price was high enough, they returned to harvest in the summer. Much of the plains was dry during irregular rainfalls in the 1920s. 1931 was wet, and a good year for wheat production but a bad year for prices. Then, in 1932, the rain stopped. People had been farming the plains long enough to know that drought returned in regular cycles. This time, much of the native sod of grasses and roots which had held the soil in place since the last Ice Age was gone.

So began the first of the great modern eco-catastrophes. 1933 was drier than 1932. Early in '34, planting seemed ridiculous; plows turned up a dust as dry and fine as cornstarch. In February, the wind began to blow and the dust began to fly. In mid-April, a giant dust cloud, black at the base and tan at the top, rose from the fields of eastern Colorado and western Kansas and began to move south. Inside the cloud, darkness was total, and remained for hours after the cloud passed. People in the cloud's path thought the end of the world had come, and went to churches to await it. The storm left dead birds and rabbits in its wake, and drifts of dust six feet deep against the sides of houses. On May 10, another dust storm came up, on a wind from the west. This one blew all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, and blocked out the sun in New York City for five hours. People came home from work in an eerie half-light like the light during an eclipse. Dust got into the threads of water bottles and inside watch cases. Great Plains dust showered ships three hundred miles out in the Atlantic. All of Chicago was inches deep in it. That one storm dropped an estimated twelve million tons of plains topsoil on the city. All year, the dusters kept blowing. They were identified by color: brown dust storms came from Kansas, red ones from Oklahoma, and dirty-yellow ones from Texas and New Mexico. Farmers watched their fields disappear before their eyes. Tumbleweeds blew up against fences, caught the dust, and were buried. Fence lines were so deep in dust that cattle with mud-coated lungs could stagger away over them. People crammed wet newspapers around windows and doors and slept with wet handkerchiefs over their faces. Lung disease was everywhere. In the winter, snow mingled with the blowing dusters. These were called “snirt” storms.

In the Fick Fossil Museum, in Kansas, is a photograph of a towering dark-brown cloud with tucks at the bottom rolling across the earth. The caption reads, “The Grandfather of Them All—First Duststorm of 1935.” This may be the same storm that inspired a famous American folk song. On April 14, 1935, a black dust storm from western Kansas blew down into the Texas panhandle. The songwriter Woody Guthrie, who was living in Pampa, Texas, took a look at the approaching storm and wrote “So Long, It's Been Good to Know You.”

In Washington, D.C., dust hung in the air of the congressional hearing room as officials of the Department of Agriculture asked for more money for soil conservation. Dust came into the Oval Office and settled on President Roosevelt's desk. By the fall of '34, Roosevelt had approved a drought-relief program, Congress had passed emergency crop-support measures for farmers in the plains states, and the Department of Agriculture had begun paying ranchers for skinny, dust-sick cattle no one else would buy. One soil-conservation idea which Roosevelt came up with and liked a lot was planting a line of trees in a twenty-million-acre windbreak, or “shelterbelt,” all the way across the Great Plains from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This idea was widely laughed at, and agricultural and forestry experts persuaded Roosevelt to modify the program so that individual farmers could plant shelterbelts around their fields and houses instead. The rows of wind-bent cottonwood, hackberry, elm, honey locust, and pine that you often see to the windward of abandoned or long-gone farmhouses are the mark Roosevelt left on the Great Plains.

Some farmers plowed deep furrows around their fields to stop them from blowing, stretched snow fences, and met in churches daily to pray for rain. By the hundreds of thousands, others left. Because so many were from western Oklahoma, these people were called Okies, but refugees came from every Great Plains state. A person who stuck it out in Williams County, North Dakota, noted later, “The people who moved away then never came back.” The years of the Dust Bowl were the beginning of some of the plains' biggest farm holdings, as surviving farmers bought the others out. In some counties, the blowing was so bad that farmers could find nobody to sell to. The federal government eventually bought millions of acres of windblown land and began trying to restore it to grass. The Comanche National Grassland, in Baca County, Colorado, is one of the results. A land company which had once tried to get people to buy farmland in Baca County had advertised it as part of “what is known as the ‘Rain Belt'” of eastern Colorado; in the 1930s, much of Baca County blew away.

Of the farmers who survived, many got government help, through crop support or other payments. They learned to hold on to their topsoil by contour plowing, leaving crop stubble standing in their fields after harvest, strip farming, and planting windbreaks. In 1941, the rains came back, world war made the price of wheat go up again, and some farmers again made lots of money. After the war, a recent invention called the deep-well turbine pump, which could move water much more efficiently than the old centrifugal pump, showed farmers on the southern plains that they were sitting on a great reservoir of groundwater, and they began to mine it for irrigation at a rate which now threatens to drain it within fifty years. Geologists named this reservoir the Ogallala Aquifer. Its water has turned a number of Dust Bowl counties greener than they ever were before. When it runs dry, the desert which came in the 1930s to depopulate the farms and eat big holes in the prairie will return.

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Today the Great Plains are more than linked to Russia; they are also, in a sense, aimed at it. The propellants which deliver American nuclear missiles to their targets are solid fuels which all happen to absorb moisture from the air during storage. Solid rocket fuel is often made of explosives, like nitrocellulose, and oxydants, like ammonium perchlorate, suspended in a neutral substance, like aluminum powder with a polymer binder. Solid fuels are safer and easier to handle than liquid fuels. Unfortunately, the solid part of the fuel absorbs water vapor as readily as it did the explosive chemicals, and once the fuel gets even a little wet, it changes. Modern ballistic missiles control their flight not by flaps and fins but by directing the flow of thrust out the back end. For this to work, the fuel must burn at a regular rate. Fuel that has been wet burns erratically; in particular, it develops fissures, or “grain cracks,” which combustion follows. A bad grain crack can burn at such an angle as to melt through the outside of the missile and cause it to tumble. Even more vulnerable to moisture than the fuel is the circuitry of the missile's on-board computer and guidance system. The easiest way to wreck a nuclear missile would be to keep it in a damp basement. For this reason, the Air Force prefers arid places for its land-based missile installations. The driest part of America which is the farthest from major population centers and the closest (via the Great Circle route above the Arctic) to the Soviet Union happens to be the northern Great Plains. Of America's 2,750 or so land-based nuclear warheads, about 1,850 sit on top of Minuteman and MX missiles there.

Driving on the prairie near Great Falls, Montana, or Minot, North Dakota, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, you might not realize right away that you are in a weapons system. A nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high Cyclone fence; but to the imagination, it is the end of the world. The sign on the fence does not mention the destructive power of thousands of Hiroshimas sitting just a few yards away. It does say that this is a restricted area, and that deadly force may be used to prevent intrusion. In the lonesomest stretch of prairie, you could find no faster way of meeting people than rattling that fence for a minute or two. Attached to the fence are sensors which set alarms ringing in Air Force control centers whenever anything bumps against it. Cattle, horses, antelope, and big tumbleweeds set off alarms from time to time. Depending on where the alarm comes from and how many false alarms they've been getting recently, security forces then jump in vans or armored vehicles and head for the silo at full speed.