The Worst Hard Time Part 12

We had a crystal moment s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hands of time, A golden, singing moment Made for love and rhyme. What if it shattered in our hands What if it shattered in our hands As crystal moments must?

Better than earthen hours Changing to lifeless dust.

25. Rain THEY WORKED THROUGH the hottest days of summer, st.i.tching a flag forty-nine feet long by twenty-nine feet high, the biggest in the world. Every musician in the Texas Panhandle was summoned to fall in line, forming another superlative: the largest single marching band ever a.s.sembled on American soil-2,500 instruments. Amarillo had never looked so good. All was in place on the afternoon of July 11, 1938, for President Roosevelt's visit to the southern plains. He chose Amarillo, headquarters for Operation Dust Bowl, because it was the only city of any size in the broken land and because Bennett had told him to go out, have a look, see how farmers were holding the land down, taking what he had started and making it their own. the hottest days of summer, st.i.tching a flag forty-nine feet long by twenty-nine feet high, the biggest in the world. Every musician in the Texas Panhandle was summoned to fall in line, forming another superlative: the largest single marching band ever a.s.sembled on American soil-2,500 instruments. Amarillo had never looked so good. All was in place on the afternoon of July 11, 1938, for President Roosevelt's visit to the southern plains. He chose Amarillo, headquarters for Operation Dust Bowl, because it was the only city of any size in the broken land and because Bennett had told him to go out, have a look, see how farmers were holding the land down, taking what he had started and making it their own.

The crowd was enormous, nearly a hundred thousand people in a city with less than half that population. They jammed into Ellwood Park under uncertain skies and lined the streets for three miles back to the station. At 6:45 P.M., P.M., a train pulled into Amarillo from the east. Word went out: he's here! The crowd stirred and a ripple of cheers followed. The wind was gathering force, and the light seemed to fall out of the sky sooner than it should have. The heat dissipated quickly. As clouds thickened, Amarillo's leaders worried that a duster was about to dump a load on the leader of the Western World. a train pulled into Amarillo from the east. Word went out: he's here! The crowd stirred and a ripple of cheers followed. The wind was gathering force, and the light seemed to fall out of the sky sooner than it should have. The heat dissipated quickly. As clouds thickened, Amarillo's leaders worried that a duster was about to dump a load on the leader of the Western World.

Some people had driven for two days on drifted roads to get a glimpse of the president. He was not one of them, but many felt that this crippled man from New York had kept his promise: he had not forgotten them. The flatland was not green or fertile, yet it seemed as if the beast had been tamed. The year had been dry, just like the six that preceded it, and exceptionally windy, but the land was not peeling off like it had before, was not darkening the sky. There were dusters, half a dozen or more in each of April and May, but nothing like Black Sunday, nothing so Biblical. Maybe, as some farmers suggested, Bennett's army had calmed the raging dust seas, or maybe so much soil had ripped away that there was very little left to roll. Amarillo had begged the government to send its CCC soil-saving and tree-planting crews to the Panhandle, and when they came, they were greeted like firemen arriving at a blaze. Rows of spindly trees-little more than sticks in the ground-now ran through the land, nearly forty million saplings, 3,600 miles of living hope, planted within the most tattered parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In addition, farmers were paid a stipend to list their soil and plant gra.s.s alongside the work done by the CCC. Nearly a million acres were under contract as part of Bennett's blueprint to rescue the land. Bennett hoped that seven million acres would eventually be replanted in gra.s.s, a prairie reborn in "that delicate miracle the ever-recurring gra.s.s," as the poet Walt Whitman called it.

Elsewhere in 1938, the recovery and the energy of the New Deal had run out of steam. More than four million people lost their jobs in the wake of government cutbacks, and the stock market fell sharply again. Some of the gloom that enveloped the country at midterm in President Hoover's reign was back. In the Dust Bowl, the fuzz of a forced forest and the re-tilling of tousled dirt did not stop the wind or bring more rain, but it was a plan in motion- something something -and that was enough to inspire people to keep the faith. As Will Rogers said, "If Roosevelt burned down the Capital we would cheer and say, 'Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.'" The High Plains had been culled of thousands of inhabitants. In No Man's Land, the plague, as nesters called it, had killed or forced out nearly one family in three. It was almost as bad in the Texas Panhandle. But as the dirty decade neared its end, the big exodus was winding down. The only way that folks who stayed behind would leave now, they said, was horizontal, in a pine box. -and that was enough to inspire people to keep the faith. As Will Rogers said, "If Roosevelt burned down the Capital we would cheer and say, 'Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.'" The High Plains had been culled of thousands of inhabitants. In No Man's Land, the plague, as nesters called it, had killed or forced out nearly one family in three. It was almost as bad in the Texas Panhandle. But as the dirty decade neared its end, the big exodus was winding down. The only way that folks who stayed behind would leave now, they said, was horizontal, in a pine box.

Melt White had found his way back to the place where his daddy was buried, next to the old XIT on the outskirts of Dalhart. He bought a colt with his savings from picking cotton and took his horse out for a run every day, scouting for a place where he could dig himself a toehold. There was going to be water available soon, all over the Llano Estacado, water from below. People were drilling deep and tapping into the main vein of that ancient, underground reservoir of the Ogallala Aquifer, as big as the gra.s.sland itself, they said. These new boomers, a handful of men in town, wanted no part of Bennett's soil-conservation districts. They wanted money to pump up a river of water from the Ogallala, pa.s.s it through a tangle of pipes, and spit it out over the sandpapered land. They would grow wheat and corn and sorghum, and they would make a pile, using all the water they wanted, you just wait and see. They talked as if it were the dawn of the wheat boom, twenty years earlier. Melt thought they had not learned a thing from the last decade. The High Plains belonged to Indians and gra.s.s, but few people in Dalhart shared his feelings.

Could the soul be returned to a corpse left to the winds? Could Comanche ever ride free again, lords of the tattered plain? Could bison ever find a home on land that had given up its gra.s.s? Could the turf that evolved over eons, tailored by nature's calibrations to take fire, drought, eternal wind, and cold into its life cycles, ever be rest.i.tched to sterile ground?

The land all around Roosevelt's parade route showed signs of terminal disorder. How to explain a place where black dirt fell from the sky, where children died from playing outdoors, where rabbits were clubbed to death by adrenaline-primed nesters still wearing their Sunday-school clothes, where gra.s.shoppers descended on weakened fields and ate everything but doork.n.o.bs? How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts, where static electricity made it painful to shake another man's hand, where the only thing growing that a human or a cow could eat was an unwelcome foreigner, the Russian thistle? How to explain fifty thousand or more houses abandoned throughout the Great Plains, never to hear a child's laugh or a woman's song inside their walls? How to explain nine million acres of farmland without a master? America was pa.s.sing this land by. Its day was done.

Roosevelt had first tasted prairie dust in 1934, when it blew into the White House. Now he was at the source. The rain started just after the president's train pulled into Amarillo. What are the odds of that? Hundred-to-one, local reporters said. It came in showers at first, the tight clouds frayed at the bottom, and then developed into a downpour. People strained to hold the big flag in place, but it grew heavy as it took on the weeping skies. They wanted the president to see the biggest flag in the world before it broke under the weight of water. Roosevelt rode slowly in an open car, through the rain, down the three-mile length of town to the park. He was hatless, and water splattered off his gla.s.ses and ran down his nose, but he kept his political face forward, jaw out, smiling and waving. The rain pooled in the streets, and people stood in fast-rising puddles, their shoes wet, to get a glimpse of the president. When he pa.s.sed by the big flag, Roosevelt ordered the car to stop. He saluted the seamstresses standing near their creation, and the young men trying to hold the flag above ground. Music still poured forth from the world's biggest marching band, even as the instruments were pelted. Now the giant flag began to sag; the young men could not keep it from drooping. The stars and stripes bled away from the 150-square yards of cloth onto the wet street, bled purple.

At Ellwood Park, there was no shelter for the honored guest. It had been dry for six years; no one expected a downpour in mid-July. No one even brought an umbrella. Roosevelt was helped out of the car and up to a grandstand. He stood, using the heavy metal braces to lock his knees in place. The crowd roared, everyone on their feet. He was their savior, and he did not betray their trust in him. Some of his experts had told him that it had been a monumental failure to settle this part of the world and that all the conservation measures and tree planting could not bring life back. People had killed this land by their own greed and stupidity-and, yes, hubris-and it could not be restored. Let it die. If Roosevelt believed this, he never let on. Standing in the rain, hair wet and suit drenched, he looked radiant.

"I think this little shower we have had is a mighty good omen."

Thunderous cheers rose, lasting several minutes. It could have been the Texas high school football champions.h.i.+p, for the roar. Yes, sir, a good omen. What else could this land throw at them? What fresh h.e.l.l could there still be? The rain pounded the crowd as the last of the big flag's color leaked onto the street, purpling the water like food dye in a creek. After the cheers and applause settled, Roosevelt resumed his speech. As he got into it, he took on the nester's chip, the righteous anger of the victim.

"I wish more people from the South and the East could visit this plains country," he said.

Yes, sir, Mr. President-we're not all dead, people said to each other. d.a.m.n straight. Tell it to the world!

"If they did you would hear less talk about the great American desert. You would hear less ridicule of our efforts to conserve water and restore grazing lands and to plant trees." He told the crowd how their topsoil had blown all the way to his family home on the Hudson and how people in the East did not understand these nesters, but he would never give up on them.

Roosevelt had always believed in the power of restoration. He was also starting to believe that the Dust Bowl could have been prevented. He had taken to heart some of the conclusions of the Great Plains committee, and he saw a way out in Operation Dust Bowl and his own tree-planting design. What happened on this hard ground was not a weather disaster at all; it was a human failure. A year earlier, in a speech at the dedication of Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, Roosevelt said if only Americans had known as much thirty years ago as they knew today about care of the arid lands, "we could have prevented in great part the abandonment of thousands and thousands of farms in portions of ten states and thus prevented the migration of thousands of dest.i.tute families."

The president said nothing about hindsight on this day, however: he was all suns.h.i.+ne in the rain. "We seek permanently to establish this part of the nation as a fine and safe place which a large number of Americans can call home."

He praised the nesters for their guts and sprinkled half a dozen compliments on local pols before departing with a wave and one last flash of the smile and strong chin. Then it was back to the train, a quick ride to get out of the rain, and away, never to return to the High Plains, away to a world war, fought by some of the same young men straining to hold the flag on the wet streets of Amarillo, away to a day when the Dust Bowl would be forgotten, the flat land left to the winds, the towns shriveled and lost, the last survivors bent and broken, telling stories of a time when the sky showered the land down on them, not knowing if people believed them but not giving a d.a.m.n if they did.

Epilogue.

THE HIGH PLAINS never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed. All told, the government bought 11.3 million acres of dusted-over farm fields and tried to return much of it to gra.s.sland. The original intent was to purchase up to 75 million acres. After more than sixty-five years, some of the land is still sterile and drifting. But in the heart of the old Dust Bowl now are three national gra.s.slands run by the Forest Service. The land is green in the spring and burns in the summer, as it did in the past, and antelope come through and graze, wandering among replanted buffalo gra.s.s and the old footings of farmsteads long abandoned. Some things are missing or fast disappearing: the prairie chicken, a bird that kept many a sodbuster alive in the dark days, is in decline, its population down by 78 percent since 1966. The biggest of the restored areas is Comanche National Gra.s.sland, named for the Lords of the Plains, which covers more than 600,000 acres, much of it in Baca County. Plans are underway to reintroduce bison to the shortgra.s.s prairie, as was done in tallgra.s.s preserves in other parts of the Great Plains. never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed. All told, the government bought 11.3 million acres of dusted-over farm fields and tried to return much of it to gra.s.sland. The original intent was to purchase up to 75 million acres. After more than sixty-five years, some of the land is still sterile and drifting. But in the heart of the old Dust Bowl now are three national gra.s.slands run by the Forest Service. The land is green in the spring and burns in the summer, as it did in the past, and antelope come through and graze, wandering among replanted buffalo gra.s.s and the old footings of farmsteads long abandoned. Some things are missing or fast disappearing: the prairie chicken, a bird that kept many a sodbuster alive in the dark days, is in decline, its population down by 78 percent since 1966. The biggest of the restored areas is Comanche National Gra.s.sland, named for the Lords of the Plains, which covers more than 600,000 acres, much of it in Baca County. Plans are underway to reintroduce bison to the shortgra.s.s prairie, as was done in tallgra.s.s preserves in other parts of the Great Plains.

The Indians never returned, despite New Deal attempts to buy rangeland for natives. The Comanche live on a small reservation near Lawton, Oklahoma. They still consider the old bison hunting grounds between the Arkansas River and Rio Grande-"where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun," as Ten Bears said-to be theirs by treaty.

The trees from Franklin Roosevelt's big arbor dream have mostly disappeared. Nearly 220 million were planted, just as the president envisioned. But when regular rain returned in the 1940s and wheat prices shot up, farmers ripped out the shelterbelt trees to plant grain. Other trees died in cycles of drought over the last half a century. Occasionally, a visitor comes upon a row of elms or cottonwoods, st.u.r.dy and twisted from the wind. It can be a puzzling sight, a mystery, like finding a sailor's note in a bottle on an empty beach.

The United States was founded as a nation of farmers but less than 1 percent of all jobs are in agriculture now. On the plains, the farm population has shrunk by more than 80 percent. The government props up the heartland, ensuring that the most politically connected farms will remain profitable. But huge sections of mid-America no longer function as working, living communities. The subsidy system that was started in the New Deal to help people such as the Lucas family stay on the land has become something entirely different: a payoff to corporate farms growing crops that are already in oversupply, pus.h.i.+ng small operators out of business. Some farms get as much as $360,000 a year in subsidies. The money has almost nothing to do with keeping people on the land or feeding the average American.

Only a handful of family farmers still work the homesteads of No Man's Land and the Texas Panhandle. To keep agribusiness going, a vast infrastructure of pumps and pipes reaches deep into the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation's biggest source of underground freshwater, drawing the water down eight times faster than nature can refill it. The aquifer is a sponge, stretching from South Dakota to Texas, which filled up when glaciers melted about 15,000 years ago. It provides about 30 percent of the irrigation water in the United States. With this water, farmers in Texas were able to dramatically increase production of cotton, which no longer has an American market. So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is s.h.i.+pped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart. The aquifer is declining at a rate of 1.1 million acre-feet a day-that is, a million acres, filled to a depth of one foot with water. At present rates of use, it will dry up, perhaps within a hundred years. In parts of the Texas Panhandle, hydrologists say, the water will be gone by 2010.

During a three-year drought in the 1950s, dusters returned. There were big storms covering roads and spinning over towns but nothing like Black Sunday. Droughts in 19741976 and 20002003 made the soil drift. But overall, the earth held much better. Why no second Dust Bowl? In 2004, an extensive study of how farmers treated the land before and after the great dusters of the 1930s concluded that soil conservation districts kept the earth from blowing. There was also irrigation water from the Ogallala to compensate for drought, but it was not available in many parts of the dry farming belt. What saved the land, this study found, was what Hugh Bennett had started: getting farmers to enter contracts with a soil conservation district and manage the land as a single ecological unit. By 1939, about 20 million acres in the heart of the Dust Bowl belonged to one of these units. Hugh Bennett died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His legacy, the soil conservation districts spread throughout America, is the only New Deal gra.s.sroots operation that survives to this day.

Dalhart still stands, a windblown and dog-eared town at the crossroads of three highways. It never recovered its population from pre-1930; barely six thousand people live in Dallam County now. At the entrance to town is a striking monument: an empty horse saddle, dedicated to the XIT cowboys. Every year, Dalhart holds a celebration for the old XIT ranch and the ghosts of cowboys who ran through its gra.s.s during the glory years. After moving out of Dalhart, John McCarty, the town's biggest booster, never returned. In his later years, he took up painting, concentrating on art that depicted dust storms as heroic and muscular. Born in 1900, the same year as Dalhart, McCarty died in 1974. In a home he built at the edge of town, Melt White lives with his wife of more than sixty years, Juanita. He worked as a house painter and paperhanger, though he still considers himself a cowboy by trade and inclination. He keeps a couple of horses out back on land next to the old XIT. He curses the day farmers came to the Panhandle and tore up the gra.s.s.

Boise City is alive-but barely. With just three thousand people, Cimarron County has lost nearly half its pre-Dust Bowl population. Fred Folkers was ten thousand dollars in debt at the start of the war. But four-dollar wheat got him out of it, in the same way that wartime factory production finally got the United States out of the Depression. In 1948, at age sixty-six, Fred had a heart attack. He continued to farm right up until his death in 1965. His wife, Katherine, outlived him by ten years. She died at the age of ninety. The children, Faye and Gordon, still own the homestead, land where Katherine ironed centipedes in the walls of the dugout. Hazel Lucas Shaw had another child, Jean Beth, to go with her son, Charles, Jr. Hazel's husband, Charles, died in 1971, of heart disease. After surviving the Dust Bowl and two subsequent tornadoes, Hazel outlived all her friends from Boise City. She died in 2003 at the age of ninety-nine. Though she never returned to live there, she told her grandchildren she always missed No Man's Land.

Inavale, Nebraska, where the Hartwells lived, is a ghost town. Webster County, with four thousand people, has lost more than 60 percent of its population from the 1930s. Years ago, a neighbor found Verna Hartwell burning her late husband's diary. The diary was rescued and after Verna's death turned over to the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln.

Approaching his ninetieth birthday, Ike Osteen lives with his wife, Lida Mae, not far from the dugout where the family of nine children pa.s.sed their days in a hole in the ground. After leaving Baca County, Ike worked on the railroad and road projects, and then joined the Army. By the time Hitler's forces occupied most of Europe, Osteen was in boot camp. The soldier from the dugout landed in France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, fought the Germans through hedgerows, saw friends bleed and die. When the war was over, he thought about his place in the world and was drawn back to Baca County. It takes a certain kind of person to make peace with land that has betrayed them, but that is the way with home. Ike's mother died at the age of ninety-two. Most days, Ike puts in a full day's work around the house and usually spends some part of an afternoon sorting through the living museum of his life on the High Plains. He loves it still.

NOTES AND SOURCES.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

INDEX.

Notes and Sources

INTRODUCTION.

The quotes and descriptions of Dalhart, Boise City, and Baca County come from interviews conducted by the author and reporting trips to the High Plains. Ike Osteen was interviewed at his house in Springfield, Colorado, on April 25, 2002. Jeanne Clark was interviewed in Lamar, Colorado, on April 22, 2002, with follow-up phone conversations on April 3, 2003, and June 1, 2003. Melt White was interviewed at his home in Dalhart on November 21, 2002, with follow-up phone conversations on August 3, 2003, and September 12, 2003.

The figure on percentage of the population that left the Dust Bowl versus the number who stayed is from the U.S. Census Bureau population surveys, 1930 and 1940, www.census.gov.

Donald Worster is quoted from his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979). (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979).

1: THE WANDERER.

The story of the White family migration comes from Melt White, as told to the author, November 21, 2002, Dalhart, Texas.

Descriptions of the XIT ranch from the author's visit to the XIT Museum, Dalhart, Texas, and Six Thousand Miles of Fence: Life on the XIT Ranch of Texas, Six Thousand Miles of Fence: Life on the XIT Ranch of Texas, Cordia Sloan Duke and Joe B. Frantz (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1961). Cordia Sloan Duke and Joe B. Frantz (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1961).

Early years in Dalhart and the Dawson family story from High Plains Yesterdays: From XIT Days Through Drouth and Depression, High Plains Yesterdays: From XIT Days Through Drouth and Depression, John C. Dawson (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1985). John C. Dawson (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1985).

John McCarty's story is from the Amarillo Public Library John C. McCarty Collection, Introduction to the collection, no t.i.tle, Amarillo Public Library, Amarillo, Texas.

Quotes from the newspaper are from the Dalhart Texan, Dalhart Texan, May 1, 1930. May 1, 1930.

Property records and civil cases came from the public records on file in the Dallam County Courthouse, Dalhart, Texas.

The early history of Dalhart from The Book of Years: A History of Dallam and Hartley Counties, The Book of Years: A History of Dallam and Hartley Counties, Lillie Mae Hunter (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer Book Publisher, 1969). Lillie Mae Hunter (Hereford, Texas: Pioneer Book Publisher, 1969).

Comanche tribal history came from a variety of sources: Author interviews with Comanche tribal elders, among them Lucille Cable of Lawton, Oklahoma, and Ray Niedo of Indianola, Oklahoma, conducted on October 2 and 5, 2003.

Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community, Morris W. Foster (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1991). Morris W. Foster (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1991).

Comanches: The Destruction of a People, T. R. Fehrenbach (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). T. R. Fehrenbach (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).

The New Encyclopedia of the American West, Howard R. Lamar, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). Howard R. Lamar, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998).

Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, Oklahoma, author visit May 15, 2003.

Comanche Nation, Comanche Tribal Home Page, www.comanchenation.com.

Gra.s.slands and ranches, in part from United States Forest Service files on history of the national gra.s.slands, La Junta, Colorado, provided to the author by the Forest Service. Also, "The Panhandle of Texas," Frederick W. Rathjen, Handbook of Texas online at www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook; Rathjen's The Texas Panhandle Frontier The Texas Panhandle Frontier (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1973); and (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1973); and The Gra.s.ses of Texas, The Gra.s.ses of Texas, Frank W. Gould (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1975). Frank W. Gould (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1975).

Wesley L. Hockett's quotes are from his oral history on file in the Special Collections of the Amarillo Public Library, Amarillo, Texas.

2: NO MAN'S LAND.

Descriptions of Boise City from author trips to the town and from interviews, notably Norma Gene b.u.t.terbaugh Young, interviewed at her home in Boise City, Oklahoma, on September 8, 2003.

Early description of fraud from the Cimarron News, Cimarron News, various editions, and records provided by the Cimarron Heritage Center, Boise City, Oklahoma, September 9, 2003. various editions, and records provided by the Cimarron Heritage Center, Boise City, Oklahoma, September 9, 2003.

How people lived in part from Commerce of the Prairies, Commerce of the Prairies, Josiah Gregg, Max W. Moorhead, eds. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1990). Josiah Gregg, Max W. Moorhead, eds. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

Early Boise City descriptions and family histories from The Tracks We Followed, The Tracks We Followed, Norma Gene b.u.t.terbaugh Young, ed. (Amarillo, Texas: Southwestern Publications, 1991). Norma Gene b.u.t.terbaugh Young, ed. (Amarillo, Texas: Southwestern Publications, 1991).

Early Panhandle homestead stories in part from author visit to Oklahoma Historical Society, Oral History Program, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, September 9, 2003.

Anecdote on preacher and postal worker from Young, The Tracks We Followed, The Tracks We Followed, previously cited. previously cited.

The Hazel Lucas Shaw story and larger story of the Lucas family from author interview with Charles Shaw, Hazel's son, on September 21, 2003, and from Suns.h.i.+ne and Shadows Suns.h.i.+ne and Shadows (1984), a self-published family history written by Hazel Shaw, given to the author by Mr. Shaw in 2002, as well as personal correspondence from Mr. Shaw to author, September 22, 2003. (1984), a self-published family history written by Hazel Shaw, given to the author by Mr. Shaw in 2002, as well as personal correspondence from Mr. Shaw to author, September 22, 2003.

The Folkers family story from author interviews with Faye Folkers Gardner, on April 30, 2002, and Gordon Folkers, on May 2, 2002, as well as Mrs. Gardner's self-published family history, So Long, Old Timer! So Long, Old Timer! (1979), given to the author by Mrs. Gardner in 2002. (1979), given to the author by Mrs. Gardner in 2002.

Descriptions of mid-1920s life in No Man's Land from author interview with Imogen Glover at her home in Guymon, Oklahoma, on April 29, 2002.

Farming statistics from the annual Yearbook of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929). United States Department of Agriculture (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929).

Oklahoma settlement in part from It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West, Richard White (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Richard White (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

Information on windmills, dugouts, and first homes in No Man's Land from author interview with Janie Harland of Texhoma, Oklahoma, on September 3, 2003, and her oral history on windmills in Panhandle Pioneers, Panhandle Pioneers, compiled and edited by the Texhoma Genealogical and Historical Society, vol. 7. compiled and edited by the Texhoma Genealogical and Historical Society, vol. 7.

The Government Bureau of Soils and John Wesley Powell's Report on the Arid Lands Report on the Arid Lands (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1878) provided early description of aridity and potential for agriculture in the High Plains. (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1878) provided early description of aridity and potential for agriculture in the High Plains.

3: CREATING DALHART.

The White family travails from author interviews with Melt White on November 21, 2002, at home in Dalhart, Texas.

Town-building years from the Dalhart Texan, Dalhart Texan, various editions on file at the XIT Museum in Dalhart, Texas, and from previously cited Hunter, various editions on file at the XIT Museum in Dalhart, Texas, and from previously cited Hunter, Book of Years. Book of Years.

Dawson family details are from Dawson's previously cited book, High Plains Yesterdays. High Plains Yesterdays.

Kansas details are from Kansas: A Guide to the Sunflower State, Kansas: A Guide to the Sunflower State, Federal Writers Project of the WPA (New York: Viking, 1939). Federal Writers Project of the WPA (New York: Viking, 1939).

Story of early southern plains town-builders from oral history, Federal Writers Project, 19361940, public records, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html.

4: HIGH PLAINS DEUTSCH.

Ehrlich family history taken in part from author interview with Juanita Ehrlich Thompson of Albuquerque, New Mexico, on July 18, 2003, and from Willie Ehrlich's oral history audiotape on file at the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oral History Program, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, recorded July 17, 1986, as well as from an unpublished family history, Seventy-Eight First Cousins Seventy-Eight First Cousins (1990), compiled by Yvonne Fortney Jones and Georgia Ehrlich Fortney and given to the author. (1990), compiled by Yvonne Fortney Jones and Georgia Ehrlich Fortney and given to the author.

Borth family story from author interview with Rosa Borth Becker, of Shattuck, Oklahoma, on September 12, 2003.

Information about early German settlement in the High Plains from author interview with Mildred Becker, curator, Wolf Creek Heritage Museum, Lips...o...b.. Texas, and from exhibits at the museum during author visit September 10, 2003.

Details on home life, food, and routine of Russian Germans in High Plains in part from oral history archive of tape recording with George Hofferber, Oral History Program, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The story of the Volga Germans is drawn from several sources: Conquering the Wind: An Epic Migration from the Rhine to the Volga to the Plains of Kansas, Amy Brungardt Toepfer and Agnes Dreiling (Lincoln, Neb.: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1966). Amy Brungardt Toepfer and Agnes Dreiling (Lincoln, Neb.: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1966).

The Czar's Germans, Hattie Plum Williams (Lincoln, Neb.: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1975). Hattie Plum Williams (Lincoln, Neb.: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1975).

Displays at the Wolf Creek Heritage Museum, Lips...o...b.. Texas, author visit September 7, 2003.

American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, Lincoln, Nebraska, author visit June 22, 2003.

"The Migration of Russian-Germans to Kansas," Norman E. Saul, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 1974, vol. 40, no. 1. Spring 1974, vol. 40, no. 1.

Population gains in the High Plains from the United States Census, 1870, 1890, 1900, 1910, and 1920, www.census.gov.

Story of Scandinavians from Oslo on the High Plains, Oslo on the High Plains, Peter L. Petersen, Norwegian American Historical a.s.sociation, vol. 28, Peter L. Petersen, Norwegian American Historical a.s.sociation, vol. 28, [>] [>], 1979.

5: LAST OF THE GREAT PLOWUP.

Early tree-planting from Plains Folk, Plains Folk, Jim Hoy and Tom Isern (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1987). Jim Hoy and Tom Isern (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1987).