The Worst Hard Time Part 4

Any last words?

"Let her rip," Blackjack said.

The trapdoor sprang open and Ketchum fell through. But the hanging went wrong. Instead of snapping his spine behind the ear, the tightened rope caused Blackjack's head to pop off. Some said the sheriff had greased the noose so it would slide quickly and snap the neck. Others said it was the way the noose was tied. But decapitation by hanging was extremely rare, and Blackjack's case is one of only a few recorded in American execution. His hooded head broke clean and rolled around at the feet of the crowd.

Welcome to the High Plains, Morris Herzstein told Maude Edwards, late of London and Philadelphia.

Simon Herzstein never tired of telling the story about Blackjack's decapitation. It became part of the lore of the store as Simon traveled the High Plains selling fine clothes to nesters, cowpunchers, and their wives. When people would ask him what a Jew was doing peddling stiff collars in No Man's Land, he said he was doing the same as anybody else, only taking a different route. He let people buy on credit and never kept a ledger. It was all in his head. He knew they would pay. He loved baseball, poker, and bridge. He loved throwing big dinner parties, giving Maude something to take her mind off the wind and the empty skies. And he loved the West, the freshness of it all, the Indians who came into town to trade from Navajo lands, the sons and daughters of Comancheros, who could match Simon story for story.

When the banks closed and people scrounged for food, Simon Herzstein kept up with the well-told jokes and the optimism, never letting on that he had his own troubles. As businesses folded in Dalhart, Clayton, and Boise City, the triangle of towns at the center of the High Plains, the Herzsteins fell further behind. The town of Dalhart went after Simon Herzstein, claiming in foreclosure papers that he had not paid his taxes in more than a year. d.i.c.k c.o.o.n owned the property, and he now consulted his lawyer about what to do about the only man on the High Plains trying to keep people dressed to match their lost dignity.

Failed bank, Kansas, 1936

As Dalhart collapsed, people in other parts of the Panhandle kept their faith, looking to the upcoming harvest of 1931 to rescue them. Sure, the First National was gone, all that money vaporized in the prairie heat, but these folks had something more lasting: they had land, and from this land came food. People were were starving now in parts of the United States, despite what Hoover had said and despite the song that played in the background, Rudy Vallee's "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries." American families were reduced to eating dandelions and foraging for blackberries in Arkansas, where the drought was going on two years. And over in the mountains of the Carolinas and West Virginia, a boy told the papers his family members took turns eating, each kid getting a shot at dinner every fourth night. In New York, nearly half a million people were on city relief, getting up to eight dollars a month to live on. starving now in parts of the United States, despite what Hoover had said and despite the song that played in the background, Rudy Vallee's "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries." American families were reduced to eating dandelions and foraging for blackberries in Arkansas, where the drought was going on two years. And over in the mountains of the Carolinas and West Virginia, a boy told the papers his family members took turns eating, each kid getting a shot at dinner every fourth night. In New York, nearly half a million people were on city relief, getting up to eight dollars a month to live on.

But here on the High Plains-look at this wheat in the early summer of 1931: it was pouring out of threshers, piling high once again, gold and fat, and so much of it that it formed hillocks bigger than any tuft of land in Dallam County, Texas. On the Texas Panhandle, two million acres of sod had been turned now-a 300 percent increase over ten years ago. Up in Baca County, two hundred thousand acres. In Cimarron County, Oklahoma, another quarter million acres. The wheat came in just as the government had predicted-a record, in excess of 250 million bushels nationwide. The greatest agricultural accomplishment in the history of tilling the land, some called it. The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie gra.s.s, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land-thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.

And what came from that transformed land-the biggest crop of all time-was shunned, met with the lowest price ever. The market held at nearly 50 percent below the amount it cost farmers to grow the grain. By the measure of money-which was how most people viewed success or failure on the land-the whole experiment of trying to trick a part of the country into being something it was never meant to be was a colossal failure. Every five bushels of wheat brought in from the fields was another dollar taken out of a farmer's pocket.

The grain toasted under the hot sun. With the winds, the heat gathered strength; it chased people into their cellars all day, and it made them mean. Their throats hurt. Their skin cracked. Their eyes itched. The blast furnace was a fact of summer life, as the Great Plains historian Walter Prescott Webb said, causing rail lines to expand and warp. "A more common effect is that these hot winds render people irritable and incite nervousness," he wrote. The land hardened. Rivers that had been full in spring trickled down to a string line of water and then disappeared. That September was the warmest yet in the still-young century. Bam White scanned the sky for a "sun dog," his term for a halo that foretold of rain; he saw nothing through the heat of July, August, and September. He noticed how the horses were lethargic, trying to conserve energy. Usually, when the animals bucked or stirred, it meant a storm on the way. They had been pa.s.sive for some time now, in a summer when the rains left and did not come back for nearly eight years.

7. A Darkening WINTER CAME WITH a fly-by snowstorm, here and gone, and the northern winds finding the cracks of every dugout and aboveground shack holding to the hard top of No Man's Land. It came without snow up north, two years into a drought so severe that less rain fell in eastern Montana than normally fell in the desert of southern Arizona. Farmers needed the snow for insulation, the blanket that covered nubs of wheat during their dormancy in the dark months. They needed it for the first moisture of spring, a taste of water to get the wheat started again. But they got nothing from the sky. The soil turned to fine particles and started to roll, stir, and take flight. The wheat from the last two harvests on the High Plains rotted. In elevators, field mice and jackrabbits gorged themselves on it. Life was gray, flat, rudderless. There was no work in the cities. And the harder people worked in the country, the poorer they got. Wheat hit nineteen cents a bushel in some markets-an all-time low. It perplexed farmers in No Man's Land as much as it baffled the policymakers in Was.h.i.+ngton. a fly-by snowstorm, here and gone, and the northern winds finding the cracks of every dugout and aboveground shack holding to the hard top of No Man's Land. It came without snow up north, two years into a drought so severe that less rain fell in eastern Montana than normally fell in the desert of southern Arizona. Farmers needed the snow for insulation, the blanket that covered nubs of wheat during their dormancy in the dark months. They needed it for the first moisture of spring, a taste of water to get the wheat started again. But they got nothing from the sky. The soil turned to fine particles and started to roll, stir, and take flight. The wheat from the last two harvests on the High Plains rotted. In elevators, field mice and jackrabbits gorged themselves on it. Life was gray, flat, rudderless. There was no work in the cities. And the harder people worked in the country, the poorer they got. Wheat hit nineteen cents a bushel in some markets-an all-time low. It perplexed farmers in No Man's Land as much as it baffled the policymakers in Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Tens of thousands of farm families have had their savings swept away and even their subsistence endangered," the Agriculture Secretary, Arthur M. Hyde, wrote the president on November 14, 1931. "Usually when weather conditions reduce production, prices rise. No such partial compensation came to the drought-stricken areas because demand and prices declined under the impact of world depression." Again, farmers begged Was.h.i.+ngton for relief. Herbert Hoover knew about toying with the market; as the U.S. Food Administrator during the Great War, he had helped establish the first price guarantee for wheat, at two dollars a bushel, setting off a stampede of planting that would transform the gra.s.slands. But now that all this surplus grain was rotting, he was not about to interfere with the market. Let the system cull out the losers.

Many farmers refused to surrender. The National Farmers Holiday a.s.sociation urged its members to "stay at home-buy nothing and sell nothing," as a way to force Hoover to set a minimum price for grain. But people were already buying and selling nothing, farmers and city folk alike. It was as if all of American capitalism were held by ice in a deep winter freeze. "I feel the capitalistic system is doomed," said the head of one farmers' group.

By 1932, nearly a third of all farmers on the plains faced foreclosure for back taxes or debt; nationwide, one in twenty were losing their land. And since more Americans still worked on a farm than any other place, it meant every state was swimming in the same drowning pool. Farmers charged a courtroom in Le Mars, Iowa, demanding that a judge not sign any more foreclosure notices. He was dragged from the courthouse and taken to the empty county fairgrounds. There, a rope was strung around his neck and tied to a tree. The judge's life was spared by cooler heads. The farmers were rounded up by the Iowa National Guard and detained behind a makes.h.i.+ft, barbed-wire outdoor prison.

"Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months," Edward O'Neal of the American Farm Bureau told Congress at the beginning of 1932. It wasn't just wheat that had sunk below the cost of producing it; milk, cattle, and hogs were all in the same depressed situation. Farmers continued to block and spill milk on the streets. If the American farmer went down, they warned in angry protests, they would take the rest of the country with them.

"The greatest emergency that ever faced this country in time of peace is confronting it now," said Congressman Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma.

In No Man's Land, the Folkers family learned to use their wheat for something in every meal. They ground it for harsh breakfast cereal, sifted it to make flour for bread, blended it in a porridge with rabbit meat at dinner. Fred Folkers's life's work had become worthless, and the despair drove him to his jars of corn whiskey. He could not control the weather. And he could no longer plow any additional land; every bushel of wheat harvested led him deeper into poverty. His homestead was a quicksand of debt. The new house he had built by hand, the Model-T, the new kerosene cook stove, the piano that he and Katherine had purchased for their daughter Faye-he might lose it all. He would need two years, maybe three, of prices back up in the high range, a dollar or more a bushel, just to pay his debts, just to get even. Katherine was homesick and wanted to go back to Missouri again. She cried at night, dreaming of green valleys and land with trees. But Folkers said it wasn't any better in the Midwest. They had to hold on and hope that next year would be better. During the boom years, Folkers had been wise enough to put some money away. But now his savings were gone, wiped out in the banking collapse. He withdrew into a paralysis, blank-faced, skulking around the homestead and talking to his fruit orchard, the one thing that still gave him hope. At night, he sat in a chair, his fingers tapping away, going over the figures in his head. Faye never saw her father so broken.

Outside, the wind blew with a callous edge. It would come in hard from the southwest, and then s.h.i.+ft, pick up in intensity, and barrel in from the north. The wind was always there in No Man's Land, even when it was just lying low, between breaths. It seemed different now, in the early stages of a dry spell, hotter and harsher, as if it sucked the life out of anything it touched. The spring of 1932 was too dry to plant and with no ground cover, some of Folkers's land began to peel away. It takes a wind of thirty miles an hour to move dirt; at forty or fifty, it's a dust storm. Folkers tried to keep his orchard alive through the spring and summer of that first dry year. In the evenings, he hauled water by milk pail from the tank to the orchard. But the heat bore down on the trees, pests swarmed on the leaves, and what little fruit came after the bud quickly browned and shriveled like raisins. One thing that did grow was the Russian thistle, as Doc Dawson found on his land just to the south in Dalhart. The tumbleweeds blew against Folkers's barbed-wire fences, forming a barrier that trapped blowing dust. The children hauled the tumbleweeds away from the fence and stacked them in the cow lot for winter feed. We might need it, he said. Feeding tumbleweeds to cattle-it was a frontier in American agriculture, but not the one prophesied by the government.

Folkers complained about stomachache. Deep in his gut, something cried for relief, like an ulcer, growing sharper as the winter wore on. He did not think much of doctors, and it was always trouble to find one. Like most prairie nesters, the Folkers had their own remedies. When a tooth hurt, they sucked on a clove. When the heat of summer became unbearable, they drank sa.s.safras tea to thin the blood. For a severe cold or cough, there was a chest plaster of turpentine and kerosene. And so now when Fred Folkers's gut started to whine, he drank more corn whiskey. Katherine begged him to see a doctor. There was somebody new in town, a woman doc who had just shown up in Boise City. When Folkers went to see her, she diagnosed him with stomach cancer. Cancer? That meant death, surely. No, the doc a.s.sured Folkers. She had developed a cure for cancer, salve and bandage, the special ointment drawing out the disease. Folkers would have to spend several weeks in the woman's small hospital, while she applied fresh salve every day. But how? He was broke. Sell something, she suggested. Folkers had some cattle, a few dairy cows, and he could give up the Model-T. But he needed both of them to stay alive. If he sold his cattle and his car, he would have only the fallow ground. At home was one small stash, the money he never put in a bank. He gave it to the cancer doctor in Boise City and agreed to her treatment. After a few weeks, he returned home with a scar on his stomach where the salve had been applied. It worked, Folkers told his family. He was cured. But not long after he finished his treatment, the cancer doctor left town, never to be seen again, and Folkers's gut burst. Turned out, he never had cancer; it was appendicitis. A doctor in Texhoma saved his life.

Folkers's neighbor, the fat man Will Crawford, who had met his wife, Sadie, after finding a note in his bib overalls, had taken another mortgage out on his half-section as a way to stay alive at the start of the Depression. The money dwindled; their old car up and died. Will was ashamed to look at other people now, hiding in his hole, and neighbors said it was because he could not be the "real man" that Sadie had been seeking when she left her note in his overalls. They did not go to church and seldom went to town. Will looked like he had stopped caring about life, his clothes tattered, his hair mashed, his eyes hollow. Sadie was in rags as well. She planted a garden, using a row of tin cans lined end to end, the openings cut out and half-buried as a primitive irrigation system. To keep the wind from knocking down her plants, she put up a fence of sticks and canvas. From this little patch of ground next to their dugout, Will and Sadie grew enough to stay alive: cabbage and potatoes, onions and corn. But as a winter without rain dragged on, the blue northers wore them down and left them hungry, s.h.i.+vering in their dugout.

Cash was scarce in Boise City. It was a hard-sh.e.l.led, stiff little town that clung to a sense of destiny despite all evidence to the contrary. A visitor from Denver, getting off the train, said rusted cans scattered over the dusty plain would be an improvement. People swapped a hen-live and clucking-for a year's subscription to the Boise City News. Boise City News. They bartered a bushel of wheat for an oven stove wick. They brought in fifteen dozen eggs and got back a pair of overalls. They traded turnips for two cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Or they took the quarter they had been staring at for five days and went down to the little cafe run by Mrs. Skaggs, where two bits could buy a hamburger, a piece of pie, and a gla.s.s of milk. The Palace Theater closed, cutting off the one source of reliable fantasy, and then reopened after considerable pleadings, with ten-cent picture shows. The joy had gone out of living. Subsistence was a trial. But even though people were hurting, the town refused to slouch or cower. Boise City did not need help from anybody. The town was too proud to take anyone's charity. Pain was submerged until it screamed to the surface, as with one local businessman who had lost his life savings. He shot his wife first, then put the gun to his head and blew his own brains out. They bartered a bushel of wheat for an oven stove wick. They brought in fifteen dozen eggs and got back a pair of overalls. They traded turnips for two cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Or they took the quarter they had been staring at for five days and went down to the little cafe run by Mrs. Skaggs, where two bits could buy a hamburger, a piece of pie, and a gla.s.s of milk. The Palace Theater closed, cutting off the one source of reliable fantasy, and then reopened after considerable pleadings, with ten-cent picture shows. The joy had gone out of living. Subsistence was a trial. But even though people were hurting, the town refused to slouch or cower. Boise City did not need help from anybody. The town was too proud to take anyone's charity. Pain was submerged until it screamed to the surface, as with one local businessman who had lost his life savings. He shot his wife first, then put the gun to his head and blew his own brains out.

The Cimarron County sheriff, Hi Barrick, was a former doughboy who had come back from the Great War intending to get rich like everyone else in the wheat bonanza, but he never got a big enough crop. One day then farmer Barrick saw the sheriff drunk on duty, and he reported it. h.e.l.l, then why don't you run for sheriff? He did. Sheriff Barrick moved to Boise City and took up residence in the courthouse, next to the jail. Barrick chased a regular cast of bootleggers around No Man's Land, brought them in for jail time, released them after a few days, then chased them again. Both sides of the law laughed about it. It was a game that kept everybody in business. Sheriff Barrick knew his moons.h.i.+ners better than he knew some members of his family. And busting up a still was a good way to spread a commodity around town. Stills required a lot of sugar. After a bust, Barrick would bring the sugar into town and give it away in front of the courthouse. There was always a line, waiting on the sheriff. It was better than taking someone's property at the weekly foreclosure auction held by John Johnson's bank. The banker had caught on to the conspiracy of low bidding among farmers-the ten-cent sales, with people offering no more than a dime for a tractor or car-and he brought in his own bidders. But then a hangman's noose appeared outside the auction site. The implication was clear to anybody thinking of picking up a neighbor's homestead in a bankruptcy sale.

The new governor of Oklahoma gave people hope, but he also tried to get them to hate. William Henry David Murray had been elected in 1930 after scandal drove the last two governors from office, both of them impeached. With a campaign slogan that railed against what he called "The Three C's-Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and c.o.o.ns," Murray won by a huge margin, 301,921 votes to 208,575. He was known as "Alfalfa Bill" for his ceaseless advocacy of agriculture as the cornerstone of society. Alfalfa Bill said anything could grow in Oklahoma. His daddy, David, had made wine not long after grabbing a piece of dirt in the 1889 Sooner land rush; his Murray Mosel was so well-known that President Teddy Roosevelt had declared it "the bulliest wine of the land." Alfalfa Bill was himself a bully, but these times needed such a man, he said. Born in Toadsuck, Texas, in 1869, Murray ran away from home at the age of twelve, worked on a series of farms, and then got involved in populist politics. He bought a newspaper, educated himself so well he pa.s.sed the bar, and made a name as president of the Oklahoma statehood convention in 1906. Oklahoma, he said at the time, could be a great state only if blacks were separated from whites and kept in the proper jobs-in the fields or factories. Next door, in Texas, lawmakers had inst.i.tutionalized that sentiment forty years earlier with Reconstruction laws that said blacks could work only as field hands. Blacks were inferior to whites in all ways, Murray said, and must be fenced from society like quarantined hogs. At the start of the twentieth century, many people felt otherwise, but Alfalfa Bill tried to set his view into the proposed const.i.tution. At the same time, he welcomed even black support, if done properly.

"I appreciate the old darkie who comes to me talking softly in that humble spirit which should characterize their actions and dealings with the white man," he said to wide applause at the const.i.tutional convention. Murray hated Jews as well. Blacks had some virtues, but Jews had none, in his view. Nor did he like the handful of Italians who had come to the High Plains. The "low grade races" of southern Europe, he said, were a threat to civilization. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state only after President Theodore Roosevelt forced Murray to remove the segregationist planks of the const.i.tution. Murray was furious; he never let go of his grudge against the Roosevelt family.

At the start of the Depression, Alfalfa Bill was a mustachioed, haunt-eyed, big-eared man of sixty who could talk for hours without interruption, fueled by caffeine and nicotine. He drank two pots of black coffee a day and was never without a cigar-his method of ingesting "the great civilizer," as he called tobacco. Storming around Oklahoma in 1931, he said he could not make the sun less oppressive, but he promised to use muscle to fix the broken land. His muscle was the National Guard. As governor, Murray ruled by martial law, calling out the guard twenty-seven times in his first two years in office. When oil prices fell to a new low in 1931, the governor sent his troops to the oil fields to force a shutdown of three thousand wells as a way to drive up prices. When Texas backed a toll bridge across the Red River on the border with Oklahoma, Murray sent the guard to the bridge, nearly provoking a shooting war between the two states. In the midst of the standoff he showed up with an antique revolver, waving it in the faces of Texas Rangers. And when blacks tried to hold an Emanc.i.p.ation Day parade in a park in Oklahoma City, the governor imposed martial law on the city and ordered his guard troops to shut them down. Blacks were supposed to be invisible in his state, quietly working the land or manning a factory station. All told, the governor issued thirty-four declarations of martial law during his four years in office.

The land dried up in the spring of 1932. Month after month, going into the height of the growing season, there was no rain. The sky was white and hot, and it took until well after midnight for the heat to dissipate. Alfalfa Bill urged people to fight nature with force. The unemployment rate in his state was 29 percent. To show them what could be done, he plowed up the gra.s.s on the grounds of the capitol and let people plant vegetable gardens. And to demonstrate how water could be taken from the ground, Murray went on a building binge, trying to create lakes and ponds in places that had neither. The ground could be mined at the deepest levels for water, using new and powerful centrifugal pumps, to create the garden state of Oklahoma. They could grab onto that underground lake, the Ogallala Aquifer, like the Sooners had grabbed the old Cherokee lands, and so what if the water was nearly seven hundred feet deep and had taken at least a hundred centuries to build up-it was there to be grubstaked.

In Boise City, Alfalfa Bill's plans sounded like a tonic. G.o.d knows they needed water. It wasn't trickling out of the distant Rockies. The Cimarron, once a roaring river, was now a tear trail. And it wasn't coming from overhead. It rained barely ten inches in all of 1932. The sun glared down at nesters in No Man's Land, every dawn a new punishment. It was time for man to stand up to the puckered face of the elements.

"Human progress has now reached the stage where it can master these mighty forces of nature," wrote the Boise City News, Boise City News, in support of a proposed dam in No Man's Land. in support of a proposed dam in No Man's Land.

In the spring of 1932, Alfalfa Bill decided to run for president. He would follow the model that got him elected governor. In running for the statehouse, he had campaigned on the Three C's. Now he ran on a platform of promising people the "Four B's: Bread, b.u.t.ter, Bacon, and Beans." That a governor could run for the highest office of the land with a campaign that offered people calories said something about 1932.

By late winter, the suitcase farmers who had flooded into the southern plains during the biggest wheat-growing boom in the nation's history had completely disappeared. They had scalped the sod in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, had followed the new rail lines into day-old towns in Nebraska, southwestern Kansas, and Baca County, Colorado. For a few years, they hit the crop just as antic.i.p.ated, but if they hit a crop in the early 1930s, it was worthless. When they walked away, they left behind torn-up land, abandoned like a played-out strip mine. Other people, some with homesteads or mortgages, started to leave as well, just disappearing, not even locking the door behind them. But most drylanders had no plans to go anywhere. They saw the newsreels in the Mission Theater in Dalhart and the Palace in Boise City, showing those breadlines in the big cities, the apple vendors on every street corner, the millions crying for relief. At least here, in a cashless economy, people could squeeze a dozen eggs every day from a house of hens, or get a pail of milk from an old cow, or spread water from the windmill onto the ground to grow vegetables, or fatten up a pig, then smoke a winter's supply of bacon. They also thought, in the first year of the epic drought, that things had to change because they always did. Wet years followed dry years. You hung on, as Hazel Lucas Shaw did, even though she worked for nothing at the one-room schoolhouse. They hung on because this was still the only place they could call theirs. Going to the city, or to California, was a journey to the unknown.

Subsistence farming may have kept people alive, but it did nothing for the land, which was going fallow section by section. At the end of 1931, the Agriculture College of Oklahoma did a survey of all the land that had been torn up in their state during the wheat bonanza. They were astonished by what they found: of sixteen million acres in cultivation in the state, thirteen million were seriously eroded. And this was before the drought had calcified most of the ground. The erosion was due to a pair of perennial weather conditions on the plains: wind and brief, powerful rain or hailstorms. But it was a third element-something new to the prairie ecosystem-that was really to blame, the college agriculture experts reported: neglect. Farmers had taken their machines to the fields and produced the biggest wheat crops in history, transforming the great gra.s.slands into a vast medium for turning out a global commodity. And then they ditched it.

"The area seems doomed to become in dreary reality the Great American Desert shown on early maps," wrote Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer who kept a journal of his slow decline. Svobida had started to see the wheat game as an elaborate fraud if not a tragic mistake. He had come to the plains in 1929, a young man whose motto was "Never defeated." He p.r.o.nounced his first crop "breathtaking." He never made money afterward. When the land started to blow, he was not even sure if he would live to tell his cautionary tale. The sky, choked with topsoil, frightened him. And the heat-n.o.body alive had ever seen the sky like this, day after day, the white bowl overhead.

"This was something new and different from anything I had ever experienced before-a destroying force beyond my wildest imagination," he wrote.

When the native sod of the Great Plains was in place, it did not matter if people looked twice at a piece of ground. Wind blew twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour, as always. Droughts came and went. Prairie fires, many of them started deliberately by Indians or cowboys trying to scare nesters off, took a great gulp of gra.s.s in a few days. Hailstorms pounded the land. Blue northers froze it so hard it was like broken gla.s.s to walk on. Through all of the seasonal tempests, man was inconsequential. As long as the weave of gra.s.s was st.i.tched to the land, the prairie would flourish in dry years and wet. The gra.s.s could look brown and dead, but beneath the surface, the roots held the soil in place; it was alive and dormant. The short gra.s.s, buffalo and blue grama, had evolved as the perfect fit for the sandy loam of the arid zone. It could hold moisture a foot or more below ground level even during summer droughts, when hot winds robbed the surface of all water-bearing life. In turn, the gra.s.s nurtured pin-tailed grouse, prairie chickens, cranes, jackrabbits, snakes, and other creatures that got their water from foraging on the native turf. Through the driest years, the web of life held. When a farmer tore out the sod and then walked away, leaving the land naked, however, that barren patch posed a threat to neighbors. It could not revert to gra.s.s, because the roots were gone. It was empty, dead, and transient. But this was not something farmers argued about in meetings where they clamored for price support from the government. Nor was it the topic of scientists or government specialists, at least not early on. People were frantically trying to find a way out of the hole of an economy without light. They were struggling to stay alive, to find enough money to buy shoes, fuel, goods that could not be made by hand at home. What was happening to the land in the early 1930s was nearly unnoticed at first. Still, it was a different world, off balance, and ill. So when the winds blew in the winter of 1932, they picked up the soil with little resistance and sent it skyward.

Around noon on January 21, 1932, a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo. The winds had been fierce all day, clocked at sixty miles an hour when the curtain dropped over the Panhandle. The sky lost its customary white, and it turned brownish then gray as the thing lumbered around the edge of Amarillo, a city of 43,000 people. n.o.body knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like coa.r.s.e animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard-a black blizzard, they called it-with an edge like steel wool. The weather bureau people in Amarillo were fascinated by the cloud precisely because it defied explanation. They wrote in their logs that it was "most spectacular." As sunlight came through the lighter edge of the big cloud, it appeared greenish. After hovering near Amarillo, the cloud moved north up the Texas Panhandle, toward Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.

Bam White saw this black monstrosity approaching from the south, and he thought at first he was looking at a range of mountains on the move, nearly two miles high. But the Llano Estacado was one of the flattest places on earth, and there was no mountain of ten thousand feet, moving or stationary, anywhere on the horizon. He told his boys to run for protection and hide deep under their little house. The cloud pa.s.sed over Dalhart quickly, briefly blocking the sun so that it looked like dusk outside. It dumped its load and disappeared, its departure as swift as its arrival, the sun's rays lighting the dust.

Some sandstorm, they said down at the DeSoto.

No, sir, that was no sandstorm, others said.

Did you see the color of that monster? Black as the inside of a dog.

The storm left the streets full of coal-colored dust and covered the tops of cars and the sidewalks on Denrock. The dust found the insides, too, coating the dining table and wood floor of Doc Dawson's place, and the fine furniture inside the DeSoto lobby, and the pool tables at Dinwiddie's, and the baseball stands at the edge of town. Folks had it in their hair, their eyes, down their throat. You blew your nose and there it was-black snot. You hacked up the same thing. It burned in the eyes and made people cough. It was the d.a.m.nedest thing, and a mystery.

What is it? Melt White asked his daddy.

It's the earth itself, Bam said. The earth is on the move.

Why?

Look what they done to the gra.s.s, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.

8. In a Dry Land LIFE WITHOUT WATER did strange things to the land. It was typical in the spring to find a tarantula in the bathtub, centipedes on the ceiling, or spiders freshly hatched from winter nests. But as the drought on the southern plains entered its second year, a profusion of bugs appeared. Insects bred and hatched through months that normally would have killed a generation in colder, wetter years. They emerged in huge numbers. Gra.s.shoppers swarmed over wheat fields, chewing down the tender shoots left in the abandoned grounds, and ma.s.sed over gardens, consuming in a few minutes food that could provide a nester with a winter's worth of canned goods. Centipedes crawled up drapes, over floors-buckets of them. They had to be swept outside with the dust. In Dalhart, Willie Dawson awoke one morning to a black tarantula with two-inch-long legs and a body the size of an apple prowling around her kitchen. She shrieked for the Doc. Later in the week, two more tarantulas appeared. It was the big dust cloud of January that had carried them to Dalhart, people in town said. In No Man's Land, black widows crawled out of woodsheds and corn stacks, over dugout floors and up the walls of frame houses. An elderly man died of a bite. A boy screamed for half a day from the pain of a similar bite. He pa.s.sed out and was rushed south to the new hospital run by the Catholic nuns. The child in Boise City was lucky to live; a boy in Rolla, Kansas, died from his black widow bite. did strange things to the land. It was typical in the spring to find a tarantula in the bathtub, centipedes on the ceiling, or spiders freshly hatched from winter nests. But as the drought on the southern plains entered its second year, a profusion of bugs appeared. Insects bred and hatched through months that normally would have killed a generation in colder, wetter years. They emerged in huge numbers. Gra.s.shoppers swarmed over wheat fields, chewing down the tender shoots left in the abandoned grounds, and ma.s.sed over gardens, consuming in a few minutes food that could provide a nester with a winter's worth of canned goods. Centipedes crawled up drapes, over floors-buckets of them. They had to be swept outside with the dust. In Dalhart, Willie Dawson awoke one morning to a black tarantula with two-inch-long legs and a body the size of an apple prowling around her kitchen. She shrieked for the Doc. Later in the week, two more tarantulas appeared. It was the big dust cloud of January that had carried them to Dalhart, people in town said. In No Man's Land, black widows crawled out of woodsheds and corn stacks, over dugout floors and up the walls of frame houses. An elderly man died of a bite. A boy screamed for half a day from the pain of a similar bite. He pa.s.sed out and was rushed south to the new hospital run by the Catholic nuns. The child in Boise City was lucky to live; a boy in Rolla, Kansas, died from his black widow bite.

Rabbits had the run of the land, crowding fields, yards, streets. They were an easy source of food, but they also took away food, gnawing en ma.s.se in places where some farmers still hoped to raise a crop. People saw the rabbits as a scourge, a perpetual motion of mastication, indifferent to the human alterations that were blowing away.

" "BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY-BRING CLUBS"

In the pages of the Texan, Texan, John McCarty thought it was time to get rid of the big-eared menaces. People gathered in a fenced field at the edge of Dalhart, about two thousand folks armed with baseball bats and clubs. The atmosphere was festive, many people drinking corn whiskey from jugs. At last, they were about to do John McCarty thought it was time to get rid of the big-eared menaces. People gathered in a fenced field at the edge of Dalhart, about two thousand folks armed with baseball bats and clubs. The atmosphere was festive, many people drinking corn whiskey from jugs. At last, they were about to do something, something, striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure. As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed. It took most of an afternoon to crush several thousand rabbits. Their bodies were left in a bloodied heap at the center of the field. Somebody strung up a few hundred of them and took a picture. striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure. As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed. It took most of an afternoon to crush several thousand rabbits. Their bodies were left in a bloodied heap at the center of the field. Somebody strung up a few hundred of them and took a picture.

Melt White had disobeyed his daddy and gone to the rabbit drive. He did not take part, but he watched at the edge of the slaughter. As citizens of Dalhart closed in, the boy cringed at the sounds: swinging clubs, whoops and hollers, and the anguished howls-he told his mama he heard the rabbits cry-as they died. He ran to his house with the tarpaper roof and carried with him nightmares that never left.

The rabbit drives caught on and became a weekly event in some places. In a single square mile section, people could kill up to six thousand rabbits in an afternoon. It seemed a shame to let all those dead rabbits go to waste when so many people were hungry in the cities. After one drive, in Hooker, Oklahoma, people s.h.i.+pped off two thousand rabbits as surplus meat. But it was hard to keep the meat from spoiling, and the logistics of butchering them proved too much. The rabbits were left to buzzards and insects or shoveled into pits and buried.

The heat of that year broke all records. One day it hit 115 degrees up in Baca County, and the Osteen dugout was unbearable. The children wanted to sleep outside, but their mother considered it dangerous, with the fields starting to fly. She had an idea: why not cool the dugout with water from the well? Using buckets, Ike and his brother got water from the windmill's holding tank and poured it over the roof. Their little home steamed like a sauna. They had just one window on either side of the dugout, which measured twenty feet by sixteen feet. And when the earth started to move, the dust covered their portholes to the outside world, making it black inside the Osteen home even at midday. One of Ike's jobs was to shovel the dust that drifted up against the dugout. He did his ch.o.r.es, but then he often skipped school. In 1932, Ike was fifteen, and the cla.s.sroom felt like prison to him. There was no longer any money to be made plowing up people's fields at a dollar an acre. n.o.body was turning over fresh ground now. Baca County was spent.

At a time when bankers were seen as thieves behind a till and government was a cold brother who would not help a family in need, an old outlaw of the High Plains came in for a second look. Black Jack Ketchum had been in the ground for more than thirty years, buried with his severed head in a little patch of dirt across the Texas line in Clayton, New Mexico. But now some people were saying maybe Black Jack wasn't such a cur after all. In these days of dust and despair, Black Jack took on new qualities. He had robbed trains, and everybody knew what b.a.s.t.a.r.ds the railroads were. He had robbed banks, and good for him. And it was a shame, folks said, that he never got a proper resting place. Here he was, perhaps the most famous outlaw of this withered prairie, having ridden with Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang in between his deeds in No Man's Land. His legend expanded as Hollywood scoured the West for stories of thugs on horseback. A group of prominent citizens decided to dig up Black Jack and move him to the new Clayton Cemetery. There Black Jack would be given his proper due. They put out a call to newspapers, hoping the outlaw's notoriety could bring a few visitor dollars to a place getting a reputation for nothing but dust and failure. And while a civic moralist like John McCarty did not approve of the disinterment, he too thought Black Jack looked better when judged by modern standards.

"There is, however, one good point in reviving his history. It shows that Black Jack did his robbing in a more or less manly manner," McCarty wrote. "He was a train robber and six-gun killer and he made no bones about it. He wasn't a dirty, rotten, sniveling, stinking polecat of a gangster ... Black Jack had his good points when you compare him with the rats modern civilization is having to deal with..."

Such words did not sit well with the Herzstein family. This manly man had robbed Levi Herzstein's store and then shot him dead after pretending to surrender. He was never charged with killing Levi. Instead, he went to the gallows on a capital robbery crime-after the railroads lobbied to set the death penalty as a punishment for certain kinds of train heists. Simon and Maude Herzstein had tried to live through these dark days by holding on to a few special things. The store in Dalhart had gone under, lost in foreclosure because the Herzsteins couldn't pay the city taxes. About once a month, though, they would host a big Friday dinner party, cooking up duck or venison with a few bottles of wine left over from buying trips in the more prosperous days. It was a way to forget about the ragged wind outside.

On Sunday afternoon, September 11, 1933, nearly three thousand people gathered around a rocky scab of land at the edge of Clayton. The grave was opened, a pine box was lifted up out of the ground, and the top removed. An ex-sheriff, brought in from Tom Green County, Texas, where Black Jack had done some robbing, was called forth to take a good look.

"Yup. That's him."

And by G.o.d, Black Jack's head did not look too bad. He'd been remarkably well-preserved, thanks to the limestone layer that covered his casket. His black suit was in mint condition. His ink-black hair and his mustache were still dark and bushy. He was taken to the new cemetery and buried at some distance from the others. Although people thought Black Jack deserved a better final resting ground, they did not want him too close to the finest corpses of Clayton. They put him deep in the ground and left the grave without a tombstone. They had done right by the Ketchum boy, it was said in the papers. But to the Herzsteins, giving Uncle Levi's killer another chance to face the sky was appalling.

In the fall of 1932, many farmers did not plant a crop of next year's wheat. What was the point? They could hope for the drought to end and bring in a good harvest next year, but if the price was anywhere close to what it had been for the last two years, it meant only another shove toward bankruptcy. The challenge was to keep a smidge of self-respect while living on what you could kill or grow in a garden. Life was on hold, suspended until the rains returned. To see land that you had brought to life turn to nothing was as sad as watching a friend die of a long illness. And then to fallow that land, because hope itself was gone, was harder still.

For the Lucas clan and the Folkers and other farmers in the High Plains, it was a daily struggle not to think that more bad times were on the way. From dawn that brought yet another cloudless day, to an evening supper of wheat porridge or rabbit hind again, there was no escape from the thorns of failure. This year fulfilled the long ago warnings of Stephen Long and John Wesley Powell-that this arid land was not fit for normal agriculture. For the land had not just failed them, it had turned against them. In all of 1932, only twelve inches of rain fell in No Man's Land-barely half of what was needed, as a rough minimum, to produce a crop. The Lucas clan had kept food from the 1931 harvest, corn, maize, and wheat, as insurance. By the fall of 1932, it was gone. Most families had a few row crops, but they were shriveled by the drought. The corrosive dust drifted thick enough to bury what little natural sod was left. With the gra.s.s under sand, there was no pasturage for animals. They had nothing to feed their animals but tumbleweed, which the Folkers were already using. If you ground up the tumbleweed and salted it, Fred Folkers told his neighbors, the animals would eat it.

Hazel Lucas Shaw was living in town, still teaching at a school that could not pay anything but scrip, and her husband was trying to start a funeral home in the rental house they had moved into. When she visited her uncle C.C. Lucas on his homestead south of Boise City, she found a man struggling to survive. Hazel clung to the beauty of years past. She remembered how the country would open to so much color, the fields of coreopsis, the purple verbena, the patches of green buffalo gra.s.s.

It had all disappeared in a wash of brown. Uncle C.C. could not get the milk he normally drew from his dairy cows, and it wasn't just because the animals were hungry, living on a ration of last year's grain and this year's tumbleweeds. He examined their udders and found they were sore and reddened from the dust. The cows would not even let their calves suckle. His remedy was one that he heard from another farmer in No Man's Land-rub a little axle grease on the cows' udders, just enough to take away the chafing from the dust. By using grease, he got some milk, even if it came with nondairy drippings.

C.C. Lucas had no prospect of making money from the land. The family would have to get by on salt pork, dried beans, and a dwindling supply of canned vegetables and fruits. The children were bothered by the bugs, so many crawling, biting critters, and insects they had never seen before. Green worms, for example, on the fence, inside the house, over the porch, in the kitchen. Where did they come from? The kids would not get into bed without scanning for black widows or tarantulas. Hazel tried to get her cousins to see beyond 1932. Hazel believed in tomorrow perhaps more than any member of her extended family. She had seen hailstorms that collapsed a dugout; she had seen lightning scatter a horse team, and prairie fire come right up to the house. This arid, tortured stretch of slow time-it was just another trial, and then the purple verbena would bloom again, and the labors of No Man's Land could mean something, surely. Look at all they had accomplished in half a generation's time: going from dirtdwellers with nothing to making a decent living. To return to subsistence was something a Lucas could put up with.

The best way around the ubiquity of despair was to think of new life. Hazel wanted to start a family, but who could bring a baby into a world without hope? That's why you had to banish the negative thoughts, she said. She could will will a positive day. The color would come back to life when the water returned. This drought could not last to 1933. a positive day. The color would come back to life when the water returned. This drought could not last to 1933.

The dust storm that blew up from Amarillo at the start of 1932 was treated as a freak of nature, a High Plains anomaly. The weather bureau studied pictures of the duster and was fascinated by its enormity, its dark color, the way it moved unlike any other phenomena of weather. It was not a normal sandstorm and not a tornado. They still had no technical term for it.

In March the wind was often at its most fierce, and when it blew in the late winter of 1932, it picked up the earth in No Man's Land and scattered it all over the High Plains. These storms were shorter and smaller than the big duster of January, but they were similar in other ways: black, rolling, sharp and cutting on the skin. The cows bawled when a duster rolled in and hit like a swipe from the edge of a big file. The dirt got in their eyes and blinded them, got in their noses and mouths, matted up their hide, and caused skin rashes and infections. The weather bureau counted half a dozen black blizzards on the Oklahoma Panhandle in late winter of 1932. At the end of March, the sky brightened, no wind for a day. Fred Folkers walked among his fruit trees, one of the few things still alive on his dead land. Little buds had started to form. But the next day, a chill, blue norther came through; it was so cold it killed the fruit crop for a second year in a row.

April came with the winds nonstop, the fields swirling up high and rolling north. A farmer could see but barely farther than the length of his section on most days. The weather bureau started to cla.s.sify dusters by visibility. A bad one, a storm in which a person could see no more than a quarter mile, was the worst. In 1932, there were fourteen of these blinding storms. The biggest one, in April, scared children at Hazel's school in No Man's Land. The sky darkened, as if the sun was blocked by an eclipse, and then-bang! bang!-like gunshot, the school windows were blown out, shattered, and the dust poured in, covering desks, the floor, faces. It was gone in a minute, leaving gla.s.s shards on the floor and the hard, tiny particles of fields that had been plowed for wheat just a few years earlier. Some of the children could not stop crying. They went home with tears turned muddy and told their parents the school had exploded that day. Afterward, some parents kept their children home. School was too dangerous.

Now the dust was no longer a curiosity but a threat; the land had become an active, malevolent force. If windblown dirt could break windows in school and make cattle go blind, what was next? Children were coughing, unable to sleep at night, hacking until their guts hurt. Something was seriously wrong with this land, but n.o.body had any experience with it. The county agriculture man in Boise City, Bill Baker, was a history buff, and living at the far edge of No Man's Land he was in a place that presented a host of discoveries to a curious mind. Baker found a cave in a corner of Cimarron County. After considerable excavation, a mummy was discovered inside the cave: a child, perfectly preserved. The mummy was thirty-eight inches long with a broad face and forehead, and a head of shoulder-length hair. Cornhusks, a bag stuffed with pumpkin seeds, and a small cord made of yucca plant fibers were buried with the child. The college archaeologists who finished the dig said the boy was from the Basket Maker period more than two thousand years ago. To Bill Baker, this meant people had farmed No Man's Land well before it was thought anyone had ever put a shoot in the ground. Baker took possession of the mummy and put it on display under gla.s.s in the courthouse in Boise City. The tiny boy with the tuft of hair who appeared to be sucking his thumb became a big draw in the town built on railroad fraud. To Baker, trying to make sense of a land that was a danger to people, this mummy held some secrets. No Man's Land was not an empty plain after all. There had had been people living on this accursed ground, dating to the time of Christ or earlier. And yet here they were in Boise City, barely a full generation into the life of the town, and everything was going to h.e.l.l, the place collapsing from within, the land lethal. The mummy's people had figured out some way to live in this place. It baffled Baker-the small cornhusks, the tools. He also knew he would not be able to find anybody who could provide answers, oral history, or a link between this mummified past and the desperation of the twentieth century. The Indians knew something, but they were gone, pushed from the plains before they could hand off a guide to living. been people living on this accursed ground, dating to the time of Christ or earlier. And yet here they were in Boise City, barely a full generation into the life of the town, and everything was going to h.e.l.l, the place collapsing from within, the land lethal. The mummy's people had figured out some way to live in this place. It baffled Baker-the small cornhusks, the tools. He also knew he would not be able to find anybody who could provide answers, oral history, or a link between this mummified past and the desperation of the twentieth century. The Indians knew something, but they were gone, pushed from the plains before they could hand off a guide to living.

Sitting Bull had predicted the land would get its revenge on whites who forced the Indians off the gra.s.slands. He saw doom from the sky. During this drought, his nephew, One Bull, tried to reverse Sitting Bull's prophecy. One Bull sent a letter from the reservation in South Dakota to a professor at the University of Oklahoma, Stanley Campbell, asking him to return the Sioux wotawe, wotawe, a medicine bag with human hair, stones, dried food, and other artifacts. The rightful owners of the a medicine bag with human hair, stones, dried food, and other artifacts. The rightful owners of the wotawe wotawe could influence the weather, One Bull explained. could influence the weather, One Bull explained.

There was another band of people who might have some answers. The Mexicans, like the Indians, were largely invisible. They had some history with the place, at least more than anyone in Boise City. Juan Cruz Lujan and his brother, Francisco, had a sheep ranch up north in Carrumpa Valley-the oldest home in Cimarron County. Lujan was born in Mexico in 1858, and as a little boy he ran away and worked as an ox team driver, traveling the Santa Fe Trail and Cimarron Cutoff, right through the heart of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Lujan remembered the Comanche, the Kiowa, the boundless prairie chickens and p.r.o.nghorn antelopes, the big bison herds and the sea of gra.s.s-the whole intact, full-dimensional original High Plains. He had lived it, gloried in it, bound up his future and family in it, thanked G.o.d for it. He and his brother ran sheep in No Man's Land and set up a ranch even before the cattlemen came. They built a rock house next to a spring-fed creek. His animals were fat and woolly and didn't fuss or need much, but then, it was the best sheep country in the world. Don Juan fell in love with a rich man's girl, Senorita Virginia Valdez, daughter of the Baca family, who ran sheep all over New Mexico. They were married by a Jesuit priest who encouraged them to build a chapel on the ranch in No Man's Land. The ranch became the center for Catholics and Mexicans in Cimarron County. Children were homeschooled there, learning the ways of sheep trailing and how to read the sky. Virginia Lujan had nine children, though five of them died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. The families of ranch hands had their own families, and by the start of the Depression, the Lujan ranch was a community unto itself, with three generations. One of the ranch hands, Jose Garza, was born on the banks of Carrumpa Creek in a tiny shed and grew up loving horses and running sheep, bucking broncs, and praying like everyone else that Senora Lujan would have a boy to go with her family of girls. The Lujans treated Garza like a son.

When Boise City's ag man, Bill Baker, saw Don Juan Lujan and his cowboy Joe Garza in town, he asked them about the early days. Was there ever a time when it had been this dry? Had the air ever been so hot, for so long, or had the climate itself changed? Did the dust blow like this before? Had the skies ever been so agitated? Was the gra.s.s ever so diminished? Had the Cimarron River ever run so dry? Had the Rockies ever had so little snow? And ... how did people live in those days? Lujan was a storyteller, but his brow wrinkled as his face turned sad the more he talked about what had happened to the best sheep-grazing country of all. It was hard to conceal his rage. He hated what the sodbusters had done to the gra.s.slands. He remembered the sound of a thousand bison hooves pounding over ground where Boise City now stood paralyzed and lost. He remembered buffalo gra.s.s covering every section that now lay tired and broken. d.a.m.n sure there were dry times before. He rattled off the years-18891890, 18931894, and then 1895, when only seven inches of rain fell, and 19101912. Droughts were a way of life in this country. But the gra.s.s was still around, and stayed put, through those dry years. Now it was gone, ripped out and thrown to the wind. The Lujan sheep could not find pasturage. The ocean of gra.s.s was down to a few islands of brown. As for this dust, it was killing the love of Lujan's life, his wife, Virginia. She was afflicted with the same kind of cough that rattled through every dugout, every tarpaper shack, every mud-walled hacienda. Same with Joe Garza's dad, Pablo. They both had bronchial fits, spitting up the residue of No Man's Land.

And though Lujan had lived in the far Oklahoma Panhandle longer than any Anglo, he and his ranch hands feared deportation. Lujan was American, but there were people in Boise City who suspected that the Lujan ranch was a refuge for Mexicans who took jobs away from Anglos. By 1930, there were about 1.5 million Latinos, mostly of Mexican ancestry, living in the United States. Sugar beet farms in southeastern Colorado and Kansas and cotton farms in Texas had attracted them to the southern plains. In the early years of the Depression, cities were s.h.i.+pping Hispanics out of the country. Los Angeles spent $77,000 to send 6,024 deportees to Mexico. Lujan knew everyone on his ranch, and he treated them like family. n.o.body was going to be forced out, he a.s.sured them. Most of them had been born on this land. Joe Garza's dad was from San Antonio, Texas-"old Mexico," he always called it. A bigger question for Lujan was whether he could keep the ranch alive with the gra.s.s gone.

While the first dusters of 1932 were a mystery to farmers and meteorologists, a man who had spent his life studying cultivation of the earth thought he had some answers. Hugh Hammond Bennett toured the High Plains just as the ground started to blow, and he, too, had never seen anything like the black blizzards. But to Bennett, a flap-armed, big-eared, well-spoken doctor of dirt, the diagnosis seemed obvious. It was not the fault of the weather, although this persistent drought certainly didn't help. The great unraveling seemed to be caused by man, Bennett believed. How could it be that people had farmed the same ground for centuries in other countries and not lost the soil, while Americans had been on the land barely a generation and had stripped it of its life-giving layers?

"Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance."

Hugh Bennett was a son of the soil, growing up on a 1,200-acre plantation in North Carolina that had been planted in cotton since before the Civil War. There were nine kids in the Bennett family, which was mixed Scots-Irish and English stock. As a boy, Hugh rode a mule to school using a fertilizer sack for a saddle. He spent part of every day on the family land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, helping his father on steep terrain. He learned early on that the land would not wash away as long as they kept it terraced. His father also taught him that the soil of their farm was not simply a medium through which pa.s.sed a fibrous commodity but also a living thing. His interest in the complexities of soil led him to the University of North Carolina and graduate school, where he studied and wrote about how different societies treated land. Out of school, he was part of a team hired by the government to do the first comprehensive soil survey of the United States. Big Hugh, as he was called since his teens, took to the road, camping out next to his car, taking soil surveys in every state. He knew more about the crust of the United States-from close personal inspection-than perhaps any person alive in the early twentieth century. His work also took him abroad, where he learned how old societies had grown things in the same ground for thousands of years without wasting the soil.

In the last years of the wheat boom, Bennett had become increasingly frustrated at how the government seemed to be encouraging an exploitive farming binge. He went directly after his old employer, the Department of Agriculture, for misleading people. Farmers on the Great Plains were working against nature, he thundered in speeches across the country; they were asking for trouble. Even in the late 1920s, before anyone else sounded an alarm, Bennett said people had sown the seeds of an epic disaster. The government continued to insist, through official bulletins, that soil was the one "resource that cannot be exhausted." To Bennett, it was arrogance on a grand scale.

"I didn't know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence," he said.

He cited the land college report, which stated that Oklahoma had lost 440 million tons of topsoil, and another survey out of Texas, which said 16.5 million acres had been eroded to a thin veneer. And now that people were leaving the land to blow, it looked to Bennett as if they were walking away from an accident without accepting any responsibility. What people were doing was not just a crime against nature, he said, but would ultimately starve the nation. The land would become barren; the country would not be able to feed itself.