The Worst Hard Time (36 page)

Abandoned farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma

film before, but he was sure of his vision. Hollywood was not. He was turned down by every major studio. But in 1935, after Stryker set up a documentary division, Lorentz found a backer for his film—the United States government. Now Hollywood took notice and did everything it could to stop him. The studio heads did not want government competing on their turf, for Lorentz planned to make a documentary that would play commercially in theaters across the country. Opponents said it was a dangerous thing for the Roosevelt Administration to be getting into the business of telling stories through pictures. They feared it would be propaganda. Lorentz said he wanted only to tell a story that needed to be told: as one arm of the government tried to save the plains, another arm would try to show how people had created the problem. After much debate, the film was given
the green light. It would be one of the most influential documentaries ever made, the only peacetime production by the American government of a film intended for broad commercial release. To assuage critics, Lorentz said he would accept nothing but his salary of eighteen dollars a day. He ended up paying for some of the production out of his own pocket.

Hugh Bennett talking to farmers in Springfield, Colorado

Lorentz and his crew moved to the High Plains, catching dusters as they tumbled across the land, getting chased off the road, living with the grit, hearing the same story told over and over, in varying forms: the boom, the bust, the dust. They filmed in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. When he arrived in Dalhart, Lorentz found monstrous dunes and a town trying to rally itself even as it was swallowed by dirt. The most horrific footage of dusters came from the Texas Panhandle. Lorentz had been filming without a script, which angered his cinematographers, who complained of his peripatetic direction. He wanted
everything
in the frame. But as he filmed around Dalhart, a central image began to take shape: that of the iconic plainsman who first tore at the prairie earth. He asked around town if there was an old cowboy in these parts, somebody who still kept a wagon or a horse-drawn plow. People gave him the name of a couple of XIT hands. Those old boys had plenty of stories to tell but no horse-drawn plows. Then somebody tossed out the name of a little man with a handlebar mustache who lived in a two-room shack with his family at the edge of town—fellow by the name of Bam White.

White was everything Lorentz was looking for. He had a pair of tired-looking horses that he kept around to pull his wagon. He had an old plow, which was covered by drifts. He had a face with the hard years, heat, and gusts etched into it. Lorentz hired Bam White to hitch a horse to his plow and pull it in the fields. White was puzzled: that's all you want? Lorentz paid him twenty-five dollars for his effort. To White, it was two months' pay for two hours' work—more money than he ever earned in so little time. Bam White, silhouetted against blowing soil, became the lasting image of the film that Lorentz made:
The Plow That Broke the Plains.

The film treated the Great Plains as a mythic place in a lost world.
It opened with a map showing the immensity of the flatlands. This land had been paradise for bison and cattle. "Grasslands," the narrator says in poetic idiom, "a country of high winds and sun, high winds and sun." This Eden was never meant to be farmed as intensely as it was. "Settler, plow at your peril," the sodbusters were warned. They tore at the land with industrial-age armies of tractors and threshers, consuming the grass like locusts. When the rains stopped, the land blew, the sky filled with dirt. The score, composed by Virgil Thomson, who grew up in Missouri, was as powerful as the pictures. The music swelled with the first wondrous images of the prairie and turned dark and menacing, like the soundtrack of a Hitchcock thriller, when the land raged against the people.

The Plow That Broke the Plains
showed alongside
It Happened One Night
at the Rialto Theater in New York. In Dalhart, it opened at the Mission Theater, where just a few years earlier a son of the southern plains, Gene Autry, had appeared in his first picture,
In Old Santa Fe.
Now the story on the screen was about a real cowboy. Bam White took his family; it was the first time young Melt had ever seen a movie. The boy kept staring up at the screen and then back at the little man sitting next to him—his daddy, bigger than life, bigger than Gene Autry in the movie posters still hanging in the lobby. The film moved Bam to tears. He always thought there was a reason why his horse had died in Dalhart, marooning the family on this wedge of desolate ground. Now he saw the answer, there for all the world. In March 1936, the film played at the White House and the president of the United States looked into the hard, sun-seared, dust-chipped face of Bam White, the wanderer, the Indian half-breed who was thereafter the visage of the High Plains at its lowest point.

A
T THE START OF
1936, Hazel Lucas Shaw was five months pregnant, with a fighting chance to bring another child into the world. But whether there would be a world—a home in No Man's Land—was a bigger question. The government men held a summit in Pueblo, Colorado, moving the debate from the marbled comfort of Washington, D.C., to the war zone itself. They heard grim numbers about the enormity of the disaster. More than 850 million tons of topsoil had blown off the southern plains in the last year, nearly 8 tons of dirt for every resident of the United States. In the Dust Bowl, farmers lost 480 tons per acre. Where it had gone—to the heavens, to the sea, to the mountainous edge of the plains—was anyone's guess. And what did it mean to lose 850 million tons of dirt in a single year? It meant 5 million acres in a coma, with little chance of being cultivated. It meant 100 million acres might never be productive farmland; no matter how much it rained in future years, the ground was too bare, sterile, or weighted with dunes. It meant that dust pneumonia was going to stalk schoolyards and sidewalks until the land was stabilized. It meant that some towns that were dying would not come back and were not even worth the effort of resuscitation. This had become evident with every fresh announcement. At year's end, the state of Kansas made plans to close four hundred schools.

"Unless something is done," the Forest Service warned in a report, "the western Plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert." But short of
veiling the sun, cuffing the winds, or creating rain from thin air, what could be done?

Just as the grass had been stripped away, now the schools, churches, homes, and main streets that had been anchored to the overturned sod were being peeled off, piece by piece. The towns died without ritual. Broken Bow, Kansas, went from three hundred people to three. Inavale, where the diary-keeper Don Hartwell and his wife, Verna, had finished a Christmas dinner alone, lost one of its two stores at year's end, and the county shed 22 percent of its population. The debate at the dust summit was the same one that had raged in Washington, with fresh urgency: whether to encourage people to cling to the land, hoping for recovery, or to let the plains empty out, a retreat of defeated Americans. If they did nothing, it looked like the trends that had accelerated in 1935 would continue. Across the entire Great Plains, nearly a million people had left their farms from 1930 to 1935. Out-migration had started slowly, driven by depressed wheat and cattle prices in the northern plains. But it was drought and dusters that chased them out of the rest of the prairie, particularly in three states: Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. McCarty's Last Man Club was no stunt: more than two thirds of the counties in the Texas Panhandle were losing people by the close of 1935.

Roosevelt was torn. "You and I know that many farmers in many states are trying to make both ends meet on land not fit for agriculture," he said in one radio chat. "But if they want to do that, I take it, it's their funeral." But he also clung to an instinctive belief that there was a way for man to fix what man had broken. Even though his aides reminded the president that nobody had ever tried to prevent the collapse of an entire region, Roosevelt believed in the big restoration dream.

The summit ended with an expansion of existing plans and some smaller new measures in social engineering that would prove historically ironic. Bennett's agency went ahead full bore on a trial-and-error search for the best grass to reseed the dusted-over lands, and it started mapping out areas that could be reseeded. The basic challenge was finding a way to hold the ground down long enough for any seeds to sprout. On farmland that the government had purchased, fences would be cleared and buildings removed so that the drifts would have
no place to pile up against. The administration agreed to buy an initial 2.25 million acres of used-up and dusted-over farmland. Despite the complaints of groups like McCarty's Last Man Club, the government men believed it was cheaper to buy people off the farm than to pay them relief to hold on to marginal land. One new idea was to give some of these lands back to the Indians. The natives had never wanted to farm on a grid; they asked only for grassland, which fed bison. Now the government decided to purchase up to one million acres for Indians who would agree to run livestock over the land after it had been rested for a few years. Some of this land was on old Cherokee ground in Oklahoma. In essence, the government would now be getting rid of cowboys to put back Indians.

Baca County became a prime target for re-grassing of the prairie. There were no forced sales, no use of eminent domain. The government paid $2.75 an acre to re-claim a homestead. That seemed a paltry amount, but there were no other offers. A person with a half-section could get $880 from the sale of their piece of dirt and start anew. This land might go back to grass; it might become a desert. It would be left to itself, after the windmills and stock tanks and fences had been dismantled, the houses torn apart and sold for scrap, the roads left buried. It was suggested that some people might want to move the dead from cemeteries in the worst areas; before long, it could be impossible to find the tombstones.

The journalist Ernie Pyle, one of the most influential writers of the day, toured the plains in the summer of 1936. He called the Dust Bowl "this withering land of misery." Driving through counties in Kansas that used to have a farm on every quarter-section, Pyle said, "I saw not a solitary thing but bare earth and a few lonely, empty farmhouses ... There was not a tree or a blade of grass, or a dog or a cow or a human being—nothing whatsoever, nothing at all but gray raw earth and a few farmhouses and barns, sticking up from the dark gray sea like white cattle skeletons on the desert." It was, he wrote, "the saddest land I have ever seen."

Pyle never bumped into the ghostly figure who traveled the dusted roads of western Kansas, a man with a white beard and long white
hair who carried a staff and called himself "Walking Will." Farmers would see him along a road, stop and ask him if he needed a ride. Sometimes he would get in; other times he kept walking. When he took a ride, it was not for long.

"Stop the car!" he shouted. "The Lord has instructed me to get out and go back."

Then he would walk over another stretch of road, repeating his pattern. In 1936 Kansas, he seemed to belong, a figure from an uncertain dream.

The
Atlantic Monthly
carried more of its "Letters from the Dust Bowl," written by the Holyoke graduate turned farmer's wife, Caroline Henderson. She lived in the northeast corner of No Man's Land.

"Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is almost hopeless, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. 'Visibility' approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor." The letter was written June 30, 1935, two and a half months after Black Sunday. By March of next year, things had not improved.

"Since I wrote you we have had several bad days of wind and dust. On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. Nothing that you see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms. Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all our plans for improvement or normal farm work, and the difficulty of making other plans, even in a tentative way."

Her pen fell silent through the torturous summer. Only 8 of the 136 homesteads in her township were still occupied. One day she saw "an unpardonable sin"—a neighbor dismantling a well, hoping to sell the pipes as scrap. Her love of the farm—a fidelity of three decades—had given way to a different emotion, raw loyalty. She would stand by the land as one stood by a dying spouse, but her heart was broken.