In the late 1990s, I was casting about for a new career track. “Why don’t you write a book about the Dust Bowl,” said my aunt, Ardith Rieke, who had grown up in the 1930s on a farm in northeastern Colorado.
“Aunt Ardith,” I protested, “at least eight books have been written about the Dust Bowl. What’s left to say?”
Plenty, as it turns out. In 2006, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan came out with “The Worst Hard Time.” In it he assembled facts into a novel-like read, later winning the National Book Award. At Tattered Cover’s LoDo store, he told me one of his best and previously untapped sources was the historical society in Springfield, located in Colorado’s southeast corner, in the core area of distress.
Tonight, PBS will begin broadcasting “The Dust Bowl,” a two-part documentary (the second part airs Monday) by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. They have also co-authored a new book — “The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History” (Chronicle Books, October 2012) — that is heavy on photographs but rich in elegant, accessible prose.
The Dust Bowl still matters today. Those dark, dirty and desperate times were not just something that crept into comments at my family’s dinner table, a regional subtext to the broader story of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl stands as a story alone. It was the worst human-caused ecological disaster in U.S. history and arguably among the worst in the world. The lessons should be applied to problems today, like the unsustainable mining of the Ogallala and other aquifers and, more daunting yet, the challenges of global warming.
Victims, not villains, populate the Dust Bowl story. As Duncan pointed out when he spoke recently at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Lubbock, Texas, it was primarily a consequence of many people trying to better themselves and their families. And for awhile, their gamble in this region that the explorer Stephen Long and other had described as desert paid off. The thatch of buffalo grass, when upended, delivered bountiful crops of wheat when blessed with good or even moderate precipitation.
During World War I, farmers were called upon to produce more and more. Wheat will win the war, they were told. Plowing was patriotic and profitable and, with the aid of the new technology called tractors, prodigious. Wheat production in Colorado, mostly on dryland, unirrigated farms, tripled between 1913 and 1919, according to James F. Wickens in “Colorado in the Great Depression.” Population boomed. Prowers County, where Lamar is located, grew 1,400 percent between 1900 and 1930. Other counties in the dryland country of Colorado were close behind.
When demand drooped and prices flagged, the new dryland farmers plowed yet more to compensate for reduced revenue. Compounding the problem were the so-called suitcase farmers, from Denver and elsewhere, absentee landowners who plowed massive swathes of prairie sod. In these ways, millions and millions of acres of soil were rendered naked.
Drought then came, lasting most of the 1930s. After receiving 331 inches of moisture in the 1920s, southeast Colorado got only 126 inches the next decade. Heat was scorching, at places hotter than in 2012. Wind and dust have always been a part of prairie life, but what happened next convinced the religious of a Biblical apocalypse.
Historian Ed Quillen, the late Denver Post columnist, used to joke that one good word is worth a thousand pictures, but the photos in Duncan’s book make for a compelling counterargument. Billowing clouds of dust approach houses, towns and sometimes people like a giant carpet being unfurled. A photo taken on April 14, 1935, in Dodge City, Kan., at 3 p.m., looks like the darkest of mid-winter nights. Just a car and store lights poke from the black.
Drifted soil blocked trains. Steamboat Springs has its three-wire winters, when settled snow tops barbed-wire fences. For the Dust Bowl region, the ’30s were a three-wire decade. At times, dust even blanketed Boston, Savannah, Ga., and New York City. On an otherwise clear, sparking day in 1934, Central Park could not be seen from the Empire State Building.
Shortly after graduating from Colorado College, Dorothy Christenson Williamson landed a job as a social worker in Prowers County during the Dust Bowl. Now 99 and living in Denver, she offers riveting personal experience in both the film and book. “There’s nowhere you can run,” she says. “You can try to get out of it, but it’s as if it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can’t escape.”
Then she struggles for just the right word. “That dust was something that at least in our country we had never encountered before. And I think it carried with it a feeling of — I don’t know the word exactly — of almost being … evil.”
Scores of people died directly. Some were caught in the storms and found later, suffocated. Others died more slowly of pneumonia. Children were given masks to take to school, should a dust storm blow in. Blinded cattle died excruciating deaths, mud caking their lungs. Some farmers tried to make light of their misery. One joke was about cleaning kettles by exposing them to the keyholes in doors.
Even along the base of the Rocky Mountains, dust was a menace. “Just before the storm hit, the air would become deathly still,” wrote Donald Nielsen some 60 years later, recalling his childhood on a farm near Cheraw, 10 miles north of La Junta. “Then a breeze would pick up and seconds later the wind would strike with gale force, and the farmstead would be enveloped in thick, choking dust. Sometimes the storms would last for two or three days. The folks would hang damp bed sheets over the west and north windows to trap some of the dust that came in around the panes.”
Later, after returning from World War II, Nielsen studied agronomy at Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University). Through his career with the Soil Conservation Service, a federal agency formed in response to the Dust Bowl, he shared the lessons learned with other farmers and applied them to his own farm at Cheraw.
Today, Donald Nielsen’s son, John, works to help forestall another ecological catastrophe, global warming. The energy program director for Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates, he sees a parallel with the Dust Bowl. “Human activities can have profound impacts on natural systems, and devastating social and economic impacts as well,” says John Nielsen.
The Dust Bowl did not end farming, but it forced farmers to change. “It was a matter of rethinking farming,” says Nielsen. “And we need to rethink how we produce energy.” Renewable energy must be at the core, not the fringes, he says, supported when necessary by the cleanest, most efficient fossil fuel technologies.
There are differences, too. In the 1920s, few people foresaw the consequences of the massive plowing up of prairie turf. Today, the science supporting the theory of global warming is cohesive and clear about the broad outcomes unless we make changes in how we produce and consume fossil fuels. “Because we know more, we have greater responsibility,” says John Nielsen.
Human suffering during the Dust Bowl is hard to image today. Nearly 50 percent of families in Baca County were on relief. Many dryland farmers left the Great Plains. If the Nielsens survived well enough on their irrigated farm, the highway through the Arkansas Valley was filled with weary, dryland refugees. There were plenty of Joads, and they weren’t all Okies.
Federal action salved the worst of the wounds. Direct aid and then jobs were offered. More controversially, the federal government bought dryland farms to create the Comanche, Pawnee and other grasslands now managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Farmers were encouraged to plant belts of trees, to deflect the winds. Then, rainfall returned.
Tree rings show that drought is never far away on the Great Plains. Black clouds returned in the mid-1950s, but this time rain was absent only two years. Still, with every spike in commodity prices, plowing resumes, begging the question of whether we really do learn from the past.
Overpumping of the Ogallala constitutes the most immediate threat. The interrelated aquifers underlying the High Plains from South Dakota to Texas are in places dropping a foot a year. In some places, such as around Lubbock, Texas, there are worries the aquifer may become too depleted in 20 to 25 years to be useful for irrigation. Only in the Nebraska Sandhills is it rising. Some look to science, to plant genetics, for new varieties of cotton that require less water, while others hope for perennial grains, with deeper roots than our wheat and corn and less need to bare the soil to erosion. Others continue to argue that the real solution lies in return of the region to its native state, a Buffalo Commons.
Global warming is a more challenging pickle. Dust clouds gathered soon after the great plowup of the prairie, and even Washington, D.C., got coated. Of the cause, there was little doubt. With accumulating greenhouse gas emissions, the fossil fuels that are at the very core of modern prosperity around the world, and no small stew of alphabet federal agencies can solve it. Furthermore, most of the damage lies in the future. In our own way, we’re in the midst of a great plowup of our own. This time it’s the sky, not the soil.
Contact longtime Colorado journalist Allen Best at http://mountaintownnews.net or at allen.best@comcast.net.
By the numbers:
6
Deaths and 100 serious illnesses due to dust pneumonia in Baca County in March 1935
138
Dirt storms recorded in 1937
2.5 million
People had left the Plains states by 1940, with 200,000 of them migrating to California. It was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time.
Sources: “The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History” by R. Douglas Hurt; “Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 1930s” by Donald Worster
