The Worst Hard Time (39 page)

A
T YEAR'S END,
Don Hartwell was worried about his health, his long shadow of debt, the dead land, and about an America that still seemed lost seven years into the Depression. In his summary of 1936, he wrote in his diary that it was the driest year ever in Webster County, Nebraska. He wanted to spend New Year's Eve at a dance in the town of Red Cloud, to put behind him the past twelve months of misery. But a cold drizzle and then a norther packing dust and snow kept Hartwell and his wife at home near Inavale. They ate cornmeal and ham and went to bed early. On New Year's Day, he recorded in his diary the simple facts of life on the farm, the wind at twenty-two miles an hour, gas selling for twenty cents a gallon, which meant it took a full day's work at one of the government road jobs to fill up your tank.

"Many things of importance have happened," he wrote, "and we are also thankful for some things which did not happen."

Ike Osteen had walked away from his dugout in Baca County. Hazel Shaw had given up on No Man's Land after losing her baby to the dust. The German Borths had been forced to break up their family, sending the children south to escape death from pneumonia. But in the Republican River drainage of southern Nebraska, Don Hartwell tightened his grip on the land, holding on to it because he had nothing else. At the start of 1937, about nine million acres of former homestead land were orphaned in Nebraska. Hartwell was trying to fend off complete failure—losing the farm to the bank, losing his wife, all his
dreams dissolving. He still made a little money playing piano in towns on the Kansas-Nebraska border, banging out dance tunes till early morning. People liked favorites, old-timey songs, but Hartwell would often end a set with the words, "Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky" from "Stormy Weather," and damn if people didn't care to hear it, Hartwell liked to play it.

Jan 10

Influenza is hanging like a pall over the country. Hundreds have died in the large cities & it is gradually closing in on this country. Smallpox was the popular disease last winter.

Jan 11

We have only 2 old sows, 6 fall pigs & 5 horses now & I doubt if we can get feed for them much longer. So—I don't know. I don't know whether we can even stay here this year. I wish we could see our way clear again.

Feb 14

Well, it's Valentine's Day again! I think everyone has a sneaking desire to send one to someone besides his father or mother or other 'accredited' associates & has still more desire to get one the same way, but few, oh so very few, ever do.

Feb 18

The air is filled with dust today. Very bad dust storms are reported in W. Kans., Okla. etc, but that is not unusual for the drouth dust & wind program of this country for the last 4 or 5 years.

I didn't get home from Superior until 3 a.m. so am rather tired.

Feb 25

In Chicago a man offered to give away his baby so he could keep his car and, of course, there is much righteous indignation. But at least he dares to be honest. I'll bet anything that thousands of others would do the same thing, if only they dared to and could.

Mar 4

It is fair and clear today, warm in the afternoon. I didn't get home till 2:30 this a.m. But I don't know yet for sure what we are going to do this year & I don't know where or how we can borrow any more money to keep going on this year.

Mar 6

I haven't felt extra well for the last 2 weeks. Our yard is bare as the road. I sowed blue grass last spring, but last summers drouth killed it out.

Mar 18

We are still wondering what we are going to do this year. We, like the rest have nothing left to mortgage to keep 'farming,' so I don't know. A terrible school house explosion at New London, Texas, 450 killed. Some of our tulips are coming up.

Mar 30

Verna & I went to Harry Chaplins sale. A big crowd was there. He, like many others, has lived here many years but also, like many others, is being forced out of the country by the continuous drouth of the last few years.

Apr 4

Some people live in hopes of 'something happening,'—I have always lived more or less in fear of it. And, contrary to popular belief, very many of the things we live in fear of DO happen.

Apr 10

I did some disking in the field W. of the feed yard in the afternoon. The first disking I have done this year. But we don't know from one day to another what we can or will do this year!

Apr 14

Partly cloudy & more or less dusty all the time. I did some disking on the W. bottom in the afternoon. But I don't know yet if & how
we can stay here this summer, so it is not very encouraging to try to do very much. Very warm.

Apr 15

Well, my hunch concerning last year proved to be utterly correct. 1936 was one of the most complete failures ever known, even here. All the alfalfa & corn I put in last year was utterly destroyed by hot winds except a little fodder on the bottom.

Apr 16

The big alfalfa fields which used to be so common in this country are all gone now. Just bare, windswept infested fields remain.

Apr 24

Today is the worst so far this year. A mile gale from the N.W. & blinding dust. One can't do much & it doesn't look as though there was any use of doing much anyway. Wind, dust & drouth are getting worse every day.

Apr 30

April is ending! I wonder if we ever will live here another April.

May 20

The dust still hangs in the air & the drouth is getting worse all the time. I planted corn on the W. bottom. The heat & dust were stifling 1–3 p.m.

May 25

Well, I finished planting corn—until I start replanting it. It seems nothing grows for me even after I get it planted. The air still is sort of hazy & dusty but clouds gathered in the S.W. at 6 p.m. Verna and I went in the cellar for awhile.

May 29

Went to R. Cloud ... We took our lawn mower & rake along & cleaned up the cemetery lots.... I went to Riverton to play for a dance—not many there. I doubt if I go again.

June 1

I finished re-planting corn today—I guess.

June 19

Today was as mean as one could ask for. A driving S.W. wind, dust coming in clouds from the river & at 6 p.m. a vague dusty cloud from the N.W., which passed with a few drops of rain. A crowd gathered for an out door picture show but none was held.

June 22

The drouth really got going today. I weeded the corn N. of the feed yard—but the horses have taken to giving out so I don't know just how I will get along. Bad luck seems to follow me.

July 2

I laid a thermometer on the ground at the base of a hill of corn today, it registered 137 degrees!

July 4

Today is Sunday & the 4th of July, a quiet combination in Inavale. A clear sky, a blazing sun. I swept & dusted in the forenoon. We had cherry pie for dinner. We didn't go anywhere. We used to years ago, but those days are gone—forever, I guess.

July 7

The drouth still continues its way of destruction & despair. First the alfalfa seed didn't come up because of drouth now nearly all the cane I sowed is destroyed & it is now starting to destroy the corn, corn is damaged about 20 percent.

July 14

Some Russian aviators flew from Moscow to California over the N. Pole today, that would be easy compared to raising corn in Webster C., Nebraska.

July 15

I placed a thermometer out in the field beside a stalk of corn, it registered 140 degrees! No wonder things burn! A carnival is in R. Cloud but I haven't been to one for a long time.

July 16

One small cloud formed in the W., another in the N.W. This one went S.E. & gave Red Cloud rain & hail, we got a light shower at 7 p.m. One of the horses got sick in the afternoon. I don't know—it seems as though we haven't much left to do much with.

P
EOPLE SHUNNED BAM WHITE
in Dalhart, blaming him for that picture show that made it seem like the nesters had killed the land out of greed or ignorance. They called him half-breed and traitor to Texas, even if all Bam did was guide a plow across a desiccated field as the documentarians filmed him. Most days, Bam didn't care what people said to him or about him. Gossip in town wasn't worth a cup of curdled spit. But it hurt when young Melt came home from school, fevered over what people had said about his daddy. Melt was proud of his father. Seeing him up on the big screen at the Mission Theater made him a bigger man. Bam, Andy James, and the old XIT cowboys knew they were right, that the nesters had ripped up the grass without a thought to what it might do to the natural order. That huge sand dune on the James ranch looked like a transplant from the northern Sahara, all misshapen, growing daily. The irony was that Andy was a rancher; he never got into the wheat game, and the desert dunes on his ranch were somebody else's dirt. More than 700,000 acres in Dallam County were seriously eroded, by the calculation of Hugh Bennett's men. It would not change a thing to say it wasn't so. Much of the land felt like the powdered residue left after an explosion.

Still, in the spring of 1937 in this place of next year people, it was hard to corral the impulse to put something in the earth. Nobody had money for tractor fuel, or hiring farm hands, or even for buying seed. The government handed out seed for grass and gave grants for gasoline, so long as people agreed to try a new way of tilling the ground. Bennett's project, Operation Dust Bowl, was in full swing. An army of CCC workers, aided by unemployed farm hands, was called to duty each morning from barracks on the High Plains, in a war against dirt. The CCC workers pushed the huge, creeping dune on Andy James's ranch around, trying to level it, and then making furrows so that the dust was shaped to offer the least resistance to prevailing wind patterns. The dune had been fifty feet high at one point, topping the roof of any barn, a monster that had grown to nearly a mile in length. They seeded a section of the exhausted ranch with African desert grass and cane. And while they did not say it would ever be a working spread again, they did say it might spring back to life, an awakening of green. In a few years, some grass might grow again without the help of the CCC, and maybe some wild plums in the draw will take hold, some sagebrush, maybe some tamarisk, and it could look in parts like it did when the James family had first come to the High Plains and pronounced it the most heavenly place on earth. If they could make it work here, Big Hugh said, they could do it anywhere in the Dust Bowl. Dallam County was the lab. Bennett started out working with 16,000 acres, but the project expanded quickly to 47,000 acres, with a goal of ten times that size. After so many years of destruction, of hearing how they had killed the land, people wanted to be a part of restoration. It felt good to be trying to heal something.

The Whites planted corn and some grass on the patch of ground outside their two-room house. There was a little section of intact sandy loam that had not been dusted over or ripped up. Bam had kept it in grass, and though it browned early and looked dead for most of the last six years, it held the earth down. Another part of the ground was as hard as cement. When Bam took his hoe and hacked at it, he could barely make a dent. He got his axe, called out to his boys to come have a look, and tried to split the armor of dirt. Only after repeated big swings could he make a slit. He ran the horse-drawn plow, the same one that was in the picture show, over some bundled-up dirt, and got it moved around enough to get some seeds in there. He planted alfalfa because he wanted a little hay to give his two horses, and because after
it was cut the stubble would be left on the ground as a way to hold the ground in place. The rain came right in the spring, an inch one day, half an inch another, then ten days of sun, followed by a two-inch downpour. Bam told the children they might actually have something to show in the summer.

Doc Dawson took time off from his duties at the soup kitchen to give his land a final go. It looked so defeated: tumbleweeds snagged against the barbed wire, the surface shaped like an old brown rag. There were dunes ten feet high and hillocks of red dust from New Mexico and heaps of that sickly yellow sand that blew in from other parts of Texas. He followed the advice of the CCC crews, plowing in furrows so the wind would ripple instead of rip and lift, and he pushed the dunes around. He tried planting grass seed as well and drilled holes for corn and maize, which had always been easier to grow than a toenail.

People across the Panhandle had finally agreed to strict conservation, setting up sanctions for any landowner who let his property blow. It was out of character, not very Texan, to allow a committee of farmers and ranchers to determine whether one individual was not in compliance with the laws of nature, but then it wasn't very Texan to let the New Deal conservation men have the run of the Llano Estacado. But they had begged for the help, sending a telegram to Washington. Even Dalhart's lone banker, Lon C. McCrory, had joined in the plea for outside relief, saying, "We need somebody to save us from ourselves."

The remedial efforts did not keep cattle from dying or black blizzards from rolling over other parts of the Dust Bowl. In 1937, there were more dusters on the High Plains than in any other year—134. To people who lived with death and gray land, it had become the palette of life, almost unnoticed. But to people who had been away or came to the Dust Bowl with fresh eyes, the sight of this sick land was shocking. A minister's son, Alexandre Hogue, had grown up on a relative's ranch not far from Dalhart, left for the city, then returned with a plan to paint what he saw. Hogue was a careful student of the land, studying the way a grove of trees he remembered from his youth now
looked like standing skeletons, or how farm animals gnawed on fence posts, or what happened when their eyes were hardened wide open with dust, and the pained expressions on their faces. He saw death on the plains like a black plague. Hogue painted starving animals, drifts that covered tractors and homes, a surfeit of predatory snakes and bugs, a landscape of rotting hell.
Life
magazine ran his paintings in 1937, calling him "the artist of the Dust Bowl." The painting that drew the most attention was an oil-on-canvas piece named
Drouth Survivors,
a portrait of an agrarian nightmare, with surreal touches. It showed two dead cows face-planted into a drift, the top of a leafless tree buried by dust, a tractor half-smothered by sand, a fence drifted. After
Life
ran the painting, it hung in the Pan-American Exposition in Dallas.