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Drought Reignites Dust Bowl Fears

March 21, 2009
R. Scott Rappold
The Gazette, Colorado Springs, CO

ELKHART, Kan.• This empty stretch of prairie, broken only by the stony ruins of a long-demolished basement, is where Floyd Coen learned that you can eat tumbleweeds if you have to.

Photo: Joe Hartman, District Ranger with the Cimarron National Grassland in Kansas, sifts through sand on the side of Highway 56 . “It’s as fine as flour,” he said. (Bryan Oller, The Gazette)

The basement, today just a ring of rocks around a pool of sand, was where his family lived in the 1930s, on a farm his father chiseled out of the arid grassland.

It’s where the family took shelter when “dusters” swept through — “Let’s all go in the house and die together,” they would say.

It’s where seven older brothers watched helplessly as their 2-year-old sister succumbed to dust pneumonia.

This was the epicenter of one of the worst ecological disasters in American history, the Dust Bowl. Drought and unsustainable farming methods left 83 percent of Morton County, home to Elkhart, in extreme southwestern Kansas, barren, and fierce prairie winds blew much of the land away. No other county in the six Dust Bowl states had a greater portion of its land devastated.

Seventy-five years later, the land is blowing again.

The past two years have been among the driest since the Dust Bowl days. This winter, nearly 10 percent of the Cimarron National Grassland, a swath of former farmland bought by the government in the 1930s, has been stripped bare, federal officials say. Dunes cover many fences. Tumbleweeds pile up higher than houses.

The “drouth” — that’s how they say it in southwestern Kansas — is the topic of conversation in restaurants and on the street. And if you ask an old-timer such as Coen, he’ll tell you he’s seen it all before.

“Anybody that has been here very long knows it, with the wind all the time, and it sure looks a lot now like it did in the early ’30s,” Coen said.

But in a place where folks always look to the sky with optimism, waiting for the next rain, they aren’t yet battening down the hatches.

RUSSIAN THISTLE BLOOMS

Five inches of rain fell in October, the wettest month here since June 2004.

There has been 0.65 inches of moisture since.

The fall precipitation caused a bloom in Russian thistle, a plant brought to the region when German Mennonites fleeing czarist Russia settled here in the early 20th century. The soil dried, and the fierce prairie winds blew the thistle away, which is why they call it tumbleweed.

“People today, this winter, it’s been a daily chore to go out and move the tumbleweed from their homes so they’re not a fire hazard and dispose of them,” said Joe Hartman, U.S. Forest Service district ranger of the national grassland. The tumbleweeds choke fishing ponds and blocks roads. Road crews have plowed more tumbleweeds than snow this winter.

Equally disconcerting are the patches of bare earth spreading across the landscape. Hartman estimates that at least 10,000 acres of the national grassland have lost their cover, places where the hardy sagebrush and yucca have died.

“It’s hard to kill a yucca. That tells you how severe this drouth is,” Hartman said.

In 2007, Elkhart received a little more than half its average precipitation, 11.68 inches. Last year saw 14.81 inches. In an average year, 19.33 inches of precipitation falls.

Farmers without irrigation have lost their winter wheat, and without any rain, some have decided not to plant milo this spring, Hartman said.

“Some people are saying they dig down 7 feet and can’t find any moisture,” Hartman said.

The lack of crops makes the fields blow like the barren prairie. On windy days, the air in Elkhart tastes granular and leaves a film of dust on cars and windows. Last spring, the Forest Service had to replace 27 miles of fence line buried by dust.

This has always been an arid region. Before settlers arrived, the section of the Oklahoma Panhandle just to the south of Elkhart was known as “No Man’s Land,” for its lack of water and trees. It was a hardy ecosystem of tall prairie grasses and massive buffalo herds, all adapted to survive in the arid climate. The land had supported American Indians for 12,000 years.

White settlers nearly destroyed it in fewer than 10.

PARENTS HOMESTEADED

At 84, Coen is among the dwindling number of people who can say they remember the Dust Bowl.

His parents moved to the empty southwestern Kansas prairie from Garden City in 1913, lured by cheap land where they could raise cattle, encouraged by federal policies that favored settlement of the last big empty spot on the American map. They lived in a dugout, a primitive underground bunker the settlers carved out of the prairie.

“When they homesteaded here, they couldn’t see any farms from the place. The next year, they could count six,” Coen said.

The same year, the town of Elkhart was founded, and within seven years, its population numbered 3,177. A series of wet years, combined with high prices for farm commodities, soon transformed the southern plains into an American get-rich-quick scheme, and farmers swarmed the region.

Coen’s parents began building a new house in 1929. They never finished it.

That year, the stock market crashed. Food prices plummeted, and farmers couldn’t even make up the cost of planting. So they plowed under more land.

One of Coen’s earliest memories of the coming trouble was when the family went to Elkhart to sell what eggs and cream they could and buy groceries. On the way back, his mother cried because she couldn’t afford a stamp to send her mother a letter.
At the time, the price of a stamp was 2 cents.

DUST TURNED DAY TO NIGHT

When the first “dusters” hit, nobody knew quite what to make of them.

A dark cloud appeared on the horizon. Sometimes, the sky would get so dark that the chickens laid down, thinking it was night. For those unlucky enough to get caught in a storm, dust choked the lungs, blinded the eyes and burned the skin. The storms could generate enough static electricity to kill crops and stall cars.

“You had a feeling a freight train was going to run you over,” Coen said. “Everything you could see was coming right at you.”
“You thought the end times had come. It’s an awesome sight,” said Twylah Gore Fisher, 77, who grew up in Elkhart and still lives there.

Still, the first storms in 1932 were a curiosity.

“The fine earth jots sifted through windows and doors and the colored design of the rug was dimmed into a leaden gray,” reported The Tri-State News, Elkhart’s newspaper, on Aug. 10, 1933. “The spirit of the housewife was broken.”

Just 13 inches of rain fell in Elkhart in 1933. Only 9 inches fell a year from 1934 to 1937. Farmers couldn’t grow anything, and even if they could, there was no market for it, so the land was left bare.

And it blew away.

“For more than an hour the light of the sun was completely shut out by the blanket of dust and the day ended without a slight decrease in the intensity of the dust,” reported Tri-State News after “Black Sunday,” on April 14, 1935, considered the worst dust storm.

The paper’s optimism, though, continued.

“Some time it will rain again and bumper crops will be raised. And no place can stage a quicker recovery and forge the hard times faster than the Southwest.”

In May 1937, a dust storm delayed Elkhart’s high school graduation. In January 1938, a storm left Elkhart without train service from the east or west, a first for the young town. An April 1938 “snuster” — a dust storm mixed with snow, buried Elkhart in falling mud.

“Youngsters had the time of their lives snatching handfuls of mud out of the air and making mud pies,” reported the newspaper. “Truly, a variety of paradoxical weather may be had in this country.”

POPULATION DWINDLED

Most people didn’t share the hubris.

Fisher’s class at school dwindled from 24 students to nine in the span of a few years. Her father took odd jobs such as shoveling coal from trains to get by.

“Most families that stayed had various ways of making a little bit of money. You had to have a little bit of money, and you weren’t going to make it on the farm,” Fisher said.

The population of Morton County dropped by half, from 4,092 to 2,186.

Coen’s family stayed, even when they had to stop building the house because money ran out and they lived in the basement.

Even when they had to wear gauze masks to school.

Even when Coen had to learn how to find his way by landmarks, in case he couldn’t see through the dust.

Even when there was nothing to eat but pickled tumbleweeds, which his mother tried to make palatable with mustard.

Even when little sister Rena Marie developed dust pneumonia, which killed perhaps thousands of babies and the elderly in the 1930s, their lungs clogged with grit that blew in the air and was impossible to keep out of houses.

He remembers how the doctor came to see her, how he heard, from the next room, the doctor ask his father for a board. They got the leaf from the dining table.

“When they came out of the bedroom, Rena Marie was tied to that table leaf,” he said. She was dead.”

Coen’s voice choked with pain that seven decades has not dulled.

“I’m the only one of the brothers who can even talk about that.”

Still, they stayed. His father refused to leave.

“He would say, ‘Why would I leave here? Everything I’ve got is here,’” Coen said.

“We never had much, but we had each other.”

To this day, Coen doesn’t like mustard.

DEBT LEADS TO LOSS OF LAND

Overwhelmed by debt, Coen’s father signed away the 320-acre homestead to a creditor in 1939. He cried that day.

Today, it’s part of the Cimarron National Grassland. In the 1930s and ’40s, the government bought hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland on the plains, part of a grand experiment to hold down the soil and give destitute farmers some cash to survive. In some places, that land has not fully recovered.

Coen’s family settled on another farm. His father eventually climbed out of debt. Coen never left Elkhart and kept farming. Rains eventually came. He raised a family and still lives on the farm he bought in 1950.

Morton County’s population is around 3,000 today, down 1,000 from 1920. It lost 460 people between 2000 and 2007.

In the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, experts debated whether people should even remain in the region. These days, that debate could resume if the rain doesn’t begin to fall and farms go under. “We’re expecting even more drouth situations, more people having to sell their farms,” said Hartman, the district ranger.

Last year, the national grassland prohibited cattle grazing, so dry were the conditions in a region that usually grazes 5,000 cattle. The Forest Service probably won’t allow grazing this year, either.

Beneath the talk of drought is a deeper concern, that perhaps the region is seeing a long-term trend, a symptom of global warming.

And, locals wonder, could several more years mean a return of the “Dirty Thirties”?

Not yet, local officials say.

For one thing, farming methods have changed. Farmers no longer plow up the land and leave it as dirt, exposed to the wind. They leave shoots and stalks to hold the soil in place. They leave parts of a pasture unplowed. They cooperate with other farmers in soil-conservation plans. Much of the county is not plowed, as part of the national grasslands or conservation easements.

But, Hartman pointed out, even fields with stalks are blowing this spring. And just 38,203 acres of the 92,163 in crop production in the county are irrigated.

On the national grassland, the shifting dunes and dying yucca are alarming, and it is getting worse with each rainless day this spring. But officials say it is a relatively small area, compared with what occurred here 75 years ago.

“The fact we only have 10,000 acres that are in danger is refreshing. We’re doing something right,” Hartman said.

He was standing at a place called Point of Rocks, a rare bluff in the otherwise flat landscape. The Santa Fe Trail passed by here, and it is said the Spanish explorer Coronado carved his name into a rock.

On clear days, you can see to Colorado and Oklahoma. Federal officials in the 1930s came here to survey the blighted landscape.
“We look around here and say, ‘We’ve done something right. We’ve made a difference,’” Hartman said. “I imagine they looked around and said, ‘Can we make a difference?’”

OPTIMISM NEVER DIES

Bill Barnes is one of the last cowboys.

His father grazed cattle on the national grassland, as did he for 41 years, until last year. When grazing was banned, he sold his stock, one of the hardest things he’s ever done.

But this cowboy without cows, standing with Coen and Hartman at the old Coen family homestead, expressed the hope of generations that have tried to carve a living out of this unforgiving land.

Prosperity is only a thunderstorm away.

“If it would rain, it would change,” Barnes said. “A 2-inch rain, it would make all this look a lot better than it does.”
Said Coen, “It’s a next-year country. It’s going to be better next year.”

http://www.gazette.com/articles/reignites_50389___article.html/bowl_drought.html