Dust Bowl: Illustrated History by Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns - Chronicle

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an i l l ust r a t e d h i s t o r y

dayton duncan and ken burns

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It was a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions–

when the skies refused their rains; when plagues of grasshoppers and swarms of rabbits descended on parched fields; when bewildered families huddled in darkened rooms while angry winds shook their homes, pillars of dust choked out the mid-day sun, and the land itself— the soil they had depended upon for their survival and counted on for their prosperity—turned against them with a lethal vengeance.

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it was the worst man-made ecological disaster in american history— when the irresistible promise of easy money and the heedless actions of thousands of individuals, encouraged by their government, resulted in a collective tragedy that nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in american history— when the irresistible promise of easy money and the heedless actions of thousands of individuals, encouraged by their government, resulted in a collective tragedy that nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

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Contents

Listening to the Land by Ken Burns, xx Chapter 1:

The Great Plow Up, x x Chapter 2:

Midnight w ith No Stars, x x Chapter 3:

The Crucible, x x Chapter 4:

Dust to Eat, x x Chapter 5:

The End of the World, x x Chapter 6:

Reaping the Whirlw ind, x x Chapter 7:

Gr ab a Root and Growl, x x Chapter 8:

Cana an Land, x x Chapter 9:

Thou Shalt Not Bear False W itness, x x Chapter 10:

Okies, x x Chapter 11:

The Cruel Crisis, x x Chapter 12:

The Western Gate, x x Survivor Biographies, xx Acknowledgments, xx Selected Bibliography, xx Illustration Credits TK, xx Film Credits, xx Index TK, xx

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preface 1 Chapter

Listening to the Land

That country was so flat, you know. You could see for just miles. And they used to say that there wasn’t a fence between there and the North Pole.

The grass was buffalo grass, and it was so good—it was unbelievable, it was so thick. God, it was good grass country. Man, it was perfect.

—Robert “Boots” McCoy Texas County, Oklahoma US 385/287 through the flat relentless expanses of first Prowers and then Baca County, Colorado, in the southeastern corner of that state, heading toward Oklahoma and the geographical heart of the ten-year disaster known as the Dust Bowl, it is impossible not to notice the relative stability and even peace of the landscape. Part of it is irrigation, of course, the modern wells and the giant-wheeled watering machines that suck up and distribute the scarcest commodity on the southern Plains.

Passing through Campo, the last town in Colorado, that landscape of immense farms and pasturage changes. One is near the center of the Comanche National Grassland, part of an immense federal effort starting in the 1930s to save the land that was once blowing away, convincing farmers to abandon the questionable agriculture practices that had for decades compelled the frantic human effort—and suffering—there, and return it to its natural state. The cottonwoods, willows, and locusts seem forlorn and sometimes bent, on guard, it almost seems, against the memory of forces once unleashed there, perhaps to come again.

A constant breeze stirs everything. Every green thing, the grasses, the thistles, the sagebrush (the “fag-end of vegetable creation,” Mark Twain once called it) are all in perpetual frantic animation, like the jerky, spastic motion of an old silent movie. Periodic crosses in the ditches just off the highway memorialize momentary mistakes at 75 miles per hour.

For a tr aveler driving south down

Photo description. A few relevant facts. Credit or date.Omni sum eum quam fugit, abori r.

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It was going to come in your house; it was going to come in any place that it could get in. You were not in control. You were caught up in the middle of this, and there was no way you could get out.

in a variety of familiar ways for us—a third-person narration that provides facts and a running chronology, the commentary of historians, live modern cinematography gathered in every season and from every time of day and night, rare archival photographs and footage culled from dozens and dozens of sources around the country, and period and contemporary music. But this film, and now this book, benefit most from our witnesses.

These survivors, most of them now in their eighties and some in their nineties, lived through this horror, and their memories are as vivid as if it had all happened a moment ago. They made the film different from nearly all others we have worked on, and their words have enriched the narrative of this book. They are a remarkable cast of characters who as children lived through unbelievable hardship. This was the last chance for many of them to record their stories in their own words.

To their unforgettable recountings, we have also added first-person quotes from a handful of memorable historical characters, whose letters and journals add yet another dimension to this epic human tragedy, a tragedy as relevant today as when those sand and dust storms blasted the hopes of thousands of our fellow citizens. The backbone of our narrative, in fact, is the story of Caroline Boa Henderson, who arrived in No Man’s Land as a hopeful homesteader and then eloquently chronicled the unrelenting difficulties she and her husband, Will, experienced on the plot of ground they called home. Our account of this extraordinary and important moment in American history begins and ends with Caroline’s voice speaking to us across the years. “To prepare the ground as well as we may, to sow our seeds, to cultivate and care for, that is our part,” she reminds us.

“Yet how difficult it is for some of us to learn that the results we must leave to the great silent unseen forces of Nature, whether the crop be corn or character.”

Back in the wide open, horizon-stretching infiniteness of things in No Man’s Land, the human overlay of roads and fields, power lines and silos, oil and gas wells, windmills and homes is impressive, evidence of decades of striving, of trying to ignore the fact that this still agricultural region still has near desert level precipitation. A small farm road, High Lonesome Lane of all names, leads the traveler back to the highway, and then north, back into Boise City—Ground Zero for the stories and lessons of the Dust Bowl.

In the northeast corner of the busy, long haul truck–filled, diesel-fumed traffic circle posing as a town square, the crude Cimarron County Events sign, angled arbitrarily on a sidewalk in front of a closed business, lists three things. The first alerts citizens to the blood drive at the Christian Church. The next advertises that athletic physicals for the Wildcats will take place at the health clinic. The last message is the enduring one for this town and area: Pray For Rain.

We tried to tell our story

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There’s no way you can control it. It’s comin’ and there’s nothing you can do about it. I guess it would be kind of a hopeless feeling, because you knew there was no way that you were going to control that wind and that dirt.

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vital as any history we have ever undertaken.

“Listen to the land,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Timothy Egan told us. “Don’t try to put things in place there that don’t belong there. The Dust Bowl wasn’t a natural disaster—it was a human disaster. We didn’t set out and say, ‘Let’s ruin the second greatest ecosystem in North America.’ It was a result of a whole bunch of things that are just innate to human beings. It’s a classic tale of human beings pushing too hard against nature, and nature pushing back.” He was describing events that took place three quarters of a century ago; he could just as easily have been talking about yesterday. Or tomorrow.

As an outgrowth of our documentary project, this book is a way to expand or include stories shortened or cut out altogether by the often merciless necessities of filmmaking.

As we finished our film and wrote this book, we couldn’t help but notice that the southern Plains were again in the midst of a devastating drought, that the story we were telling about personal dramas played out decades ago was perhaps being relived again.

But the story we are trying to tell documents a full decade of human pain and environmental degradation, a time when dust from No Man’s Land coated the desk of the President of the United States in Washington. If the current economic recession also suggests comparisons to the Great Depression, the cataclysm that cruelly superimposed itself over the Dust Bowl, they are also only superficial; no animals in our zoos are being shot now and their meat distributed to the poor, as they were during the time of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

There are other misconceptions. Say “Dust Bowl” and most people think of John Steinbeck’s powerful story of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. They may have been “Okies,” the derogatory name given to all those who abandoned the Plains for California and elsewhere for a second chance, but the Joads were actually tenant farmers from Sallisaw, in far eastern Oklahoma near the border with Arkansas, forced from the land they worked on for others by drought, to be sure, but also the Depression.

Out in the far western reaches of the state, those most affected by the ravages of the Dust Bowl were landowners, forced to confront agonizing realities of foreclosure and forfeiture as well as eviction, forced to confront a disease that capriciously killed their loved ones as well as the crushing poverty of hard economic times, and finally forced to confront the fact that their very presence on the land had helped create the disaster in the first place.

—Ken Burns

Walpole, New Hampshire

—Dorothy Sturdivan Kleffman Texas County, Oklahoma

18 L ISTENING TO THE L AND

Listening to the Land 19

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Chapter 1

The Great Plow Up 21

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April 28, 1908 Here I am, away out in that narrow strip of Oklahoma between Kansas and the Panhandle of Texas, “ holding down” one of the prettiest claims . . .

I wish you could see this wide, free, western country, with its real stretches of almost level prairie, covered with the thick, short buffalo grass, the marvelous glory of its sunrises nd sunsets, the brilliancy of its star lit sky at night. . . .Out here in this wilderness has come to me the very greatest and sweetest and most hopeful happiness of all my life.

— Caroline Henderson

From the time she was a young

girl, Caroline Boa Henderson had dreamed of having a piece of land she could call her own. The intelligent and adventurous eldest child of a prosperous Iowa farm family, she had gone east to study languages and literature at Mount Holyoke College, where her senior class prophecy predicted that her future would be found “somewhere on a western ranch.” In 1907, the year of Oklahoma’s statehood, she followed that dream to a narrow strip of Oklahoma that bordered four other states—Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado—which had only recently been opened for settlement, a formerly lawless and ungovernable place called No Man’s Land. There she took a job teaching school near the settlement of Eva, staked out a homestead claim on 160 acres, and moved into a one-room shack, 14 feet by 16, which she dubbed her “castle.”

A year later, she married Will Henderson, a lanky Kansas cowboy she had met when he showed up with the crew she hired to dig her well. They soon had a daughter, Eleanor, and Will built an addition to their home. Their work brought them closer to fulfilling the requirements of the Homestead Act and gaining title to the farm, where they raised broomcorn, millet, and maize, turkeys, chickens, and a few cattle.

They put what little cash they earned into 22 THE D U ST B O W L

improvements, particularly a new windmill to draw up water for their animals, house, and half-acre garden. To bring in extra money, Caroline began submitting articles about life on the Plains to magazines: the Practical Farmer, where a two-dollar fee for a short piece describing their broomcorn crop earned the Hendersons more money than the crop itself; Ladies’ World, where her monthly column, “Homestead Lady,” became its most popular feature; and the Atlantic Monthly, the nation’s most prestigious publication.

She wrote mostly about the everyday occurrences on her farm: nurturing a small grove of locust trees to provide shade or raising a flock of turkeys for a modest profit, preparing an entirely homegrown Thanksgiving dinner or attending to the birth of a calf, the simple joys of reading books aloud with Will in the evening or taking Sunday morning walks with him “through our fields, noticing the growth of each separate planting, our hearts full of thankfulness for the hope of it and for everything.” She also wrote with surprising honesty about her own struggles against depression, her critiques of churchgoers whose religion focused only on a belief in heaven, her nagging fears of failing at her self-appointed mission as a woman homesteader, or how much the weather and the

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natural world influenced her outlook on life.

And she constantly infused her articles with lyrical descriptions of the sweeping, starkly beautiful land that was steadily exerting a powerful hold on her: “the whiteness of our Monday’s washing against . . . the blue of the summer sky, the drifting of cloudshadows over a field of ripening wheat . . . [and] the hush of early morning broken by the first bird’s song.”

Although she harbored great ambitions of doing as well on her Oklahoma homestead as her father had on his Iowa farm, Caroline understood that wresting a living from the land was a risky undertaking on the southern Plains, a region of infrequent rains, few trees, and constant winds. “Our farming here,” she wrote a college classmate back East, “often reminds me of the man who, when asked to embark upon some rather doubtful business venture, replied that if he wanted to gamble he would prefer roulette, I believe, where the chances were only 32 to 1 against him.”

In that joking assessment of her odds, Caroline Henderson was much more optimistic than the first white Americans to explore the area. In 1806, on a western

expedition dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike reported seeing “not a stick of timber,” and predicted that the Plains “may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa.” More than a decade later, the leader of another U.S. Army exploration, Major Stephen Long, wrote “Great Desert” across his official map of the region and ominously described it as “almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for subsistence.”

But the Plains Indians considered it home. The short grasses that covered the treeless expanse sent tangled roots five feet below the ground, forming a dense sod that could withstand the region’s unfailingly recurrent droughts and violent weather extremes—nourishing deer, antelope, jackrabbits, and the vast herds of buffalo that grazed in numbers beyond counting.

It was an evolutionary adaptation, worked out over millions of years, which environmental historian Donald Worster has called “nature’s winning design.” The Native Americans, in turn, survived and prospered by adapting too. Whether they The Great Plow Up 23