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Chapter sixteen
The Dirty Thirties
In my earliest memories, I can recall a harvest time that was truly a family endeavor. Because of the hot and dry conditions that year, my father had decided to head the grain. This was a harvest process where only the heads of the grain were saved. This process was used when the grain was too short to be bound into bundles. Binding, as it was called, was used when the grain was tall and of better quality. In heading the grain, four horses were used to push the header. This machine clipped the heads off and elevated them into the header box (a large wooden box or rack mounted on a wagon) pulled by two more horses. The heading process required one man on the header to guide it up and down the field, one man in the header box to load and place the grain as it came off the header's conveyer, and one man to drive the team that pulled the wagon. When the header box was full, it was pulled to a central point in the field where the grain was pitched off the wagon onto the ground and made into stacks. In most cases, the man that stacked the grain in the header box pitched it off onto the stacks. In this case, the man who drove the header team got on the stacks and placed the grain in such a way that the stack would be able to stand the winds and shed the fall rains. Since this was a poor year and the crop was not going to produce much return, my father, to save money, made this a family adventure. My older brother, who would have been fourteen at the time, drove the header. My older sister, who was thirteen, drove the header box team. My father, because it required the most physical strength, placed the grain in the box and then forked it off onto the stacks. I, on special occasions, got to ride in the header box by my sister's side. My other sister, eleven at the time, helped my mother prepare meals and did odd jobs around the farm. I mention this recollection only because it would be five years before I would see another harvest of any importance. The next year was 1933, the first of the three dust storm years that took place in the 1930's. Although it was a dry spring, the young grains that were planted did manage to appear. But now, because man had mismanaged the virgin soil of the prairies for so many years, it was time for nature to rebel. Year after year of turning the crop residue under with a plow, farming ever larger fields, and breaking virgin prairie grass that should have never been farmed was asking for disaster. Nature would have its revenge. For many years, the farmers knew that if there were a number of windy days in the spring, top soil would rise from the ground, form into clouds, and blow away. Some years this erosion became so bad that some fields were ruined and had to be replanted. Replanting, along with the poor soil conservation methods that were available to the farmers at that time, had always managed to keep their losses low. This year the wind just seemed to keep on blowing. The normal spring and summer rains did not come. The erosion became so bad that the soil blew away even, down to the roots of the young seedlings, exposing them to the hot summer sun. Finally, the roots themselves blew away. Still the winds blew and the rains did not come. With the fields now devoid of vegetation, the dust had nowhere to stop. It blew across the bare fields and began to fill the ditches. It stopped in the fence lines around machinery left in the fields. It even invaded the farmer's yard and building sites. But most of all, it just kept on moving. Bad as it was, nature still had something more in store. Up until now, farmers had never seen anything but local dust. Now they were to see a new phenomenon--dust from miles away riding in on storm fronts. In the Dakotas the warm and cold fronts usually travel from west to east producing the general rains and thunderstorms that supply the moisture for our crops. Now they had a different purpose. They carried the dust from Oklahoma into the Dakotas from the west. On quiet summer afternoons, dark clouds would develop in the west, and there would be lightning along the top. It would get dark, and people would think that at last, they would get the rain they so desperately needed. Indeed, the leading edge of the storm dropped several large drops of rain, but after that, only wind and dust. The storms would last for at least two hours, the longest ,I can remember lasted almost three days. Dust was everywhere. Day literally turned into night. The best way to describe it would be to call it a “summer blizzard of dust”. It invaded the farmers' homes, covered the furniture, the beds, even the tables and dinnerware. My mother had to resort to turning the plates and cups upside down when she set the table. Sometimes, when we came to eat our noon meal, the lamps would be lit. We would turn our dinnerware over and find circles of white table where the plates had kept the dust away. If you were to go up in the attic of these old houses today, those that have not been cleaned, you would find inches of dust of the thirties. These terrible times produced other problems. Horse and cattle feed also blew away. There was no corn for the hogs. One of the most vivid memories I have of this time was of finding an old sow in the fence line with a nice new litter of piglets. Proudly, I went to tell my father, only to have him tell me that there was no feed for these pigs. Nobody would buy them because they didn't have feed, either. My father said the reason he did not sell the sow before she farrowed, was that, he knew no one would buy her because of the feed shortage. But, he could get a few dollars for her after she had farrowed, by selling her for slaughter. Tearfully, I begged him to let me have the pigs since he did not want them. He then tenderly pointed out that I didn't have any feed either. He killed the baby pigs. This was a hard lesson for a boy of nine or ten, but somehow, he made me understand. I am sure he did not mean for me to find the pigs. I think it was because of lessons like this, along with the deep concern I saw in my father's and his neighbors' faces, that have etched those days so deeply in my memory. I can recall those events as clearly as if they were happening today. Nature is a stern taskmaster but she did provide some help. Russian thistles, easy to control in normal years, became impossible to control in dry years. If you let them grow to maturity, they develop thousands of prickly seeds on each plant. When they are ripe, they take the shape of large round balls. I have seen some three feet in diameter. They break off and roll before the winds scattering their seeds wherever they go. They thrive in dry weather. So somehow, between the dust storms, they did take root and grow. Someone discovered that if they were cut and stacked before full maturity, they would make feed for the cows. It was poor feed but enough for them to survive on. Horses, however, because of their different stomach system, could not utilize them. If fed only thistles they would die. So it was that fall I watched my father turn all his horses, except his chore team, out to open range. At that time, there was still some native grass land, too short to cut for hay. Also, there were some straw piles, large stacks of straw, chaff, and some grain. These piles were left over from the harvest of the year before. They were what was left after the grain was separated from the straw. The grass land and straw piles provided two sources of food where horses could paw through the snow and survive. Because the devastation covered such a wide area, the Dust Bowl as it was later called, covered many states. Almost all of the central part of the country, which has been called the Bread Basket of the World, was affected. Congress came to the stricken farmers’ aid. Many new programs were enacted. Feed and seed loans were made in order that the farmers could buy some feed for their cows and seed for the next spring. These were government loans, and the farmers were expected to pay them back. Although it took many years, and many times the interest came to more than the original loan, almost all of them were paid back. There were also programs that gave food and clothing to the needy. There were work programs started that would give a few dollars to the farmers that were willing and able to work. These programs had grand sounding names, but they became known by their initials. Works Progress Administration, W.P.A., Public Works Administration, P.W.A., Civilian Conservation Corps, C.C.C., just to name a few. These programs dealt mainly with local public projects. The building and graveling of roads was a popular project. My father, off and on in those hard years, worked at building roads. Almost all of these roads have been abandoned or improved today. There is almost no trace of what they did in those years. One project that still survives is Fort Sisseton. Many people spent many days restoring that old fort. Of course, much more has been done to it since then. The Civilian Conservation Corps was mainly for younger men. I think one had to be at least eighteen to qualify. It was based mainly in the Black Hills. Camps were set up so that men could live there. Young men came from all over to work in the forests and on the roads. This experience was most likely good training for these men, as many found themselves in army camps just a few years later. The fall and winter of 1933-34 offered little hope for these drought stricken farmers. The fall rains had been sparse, and although the winter was on the cold side, little snow had fallen. The farmers, with their eternal optimism, took to their dry and dusty fields early in the spring of 1934. They knew the conditions were not good but they had planted dry fields before. In Dakota, rain can come at anytime and in any amount, quickly turning dry fields into abundantly wet ones. But in 1934, this was not to be. My father often told, in later life, that this was the only time that when he put his seed grain in the drill, it was the last he saw of it. It soon became apparent that this year was also going to be a failure. The dry fields did not have any cover from the year before. Normally, the stubble of last year’s crop is mixed with the top soil through plowing or disking. Without this mixture, the soil had no resistance to the wind. Soon it was sifting and blowing. Many farmers, including my father, did not plant all of their land that spring. They thought that later on it would rain and they could plant some late season crops. This was not to be. The planted grain did not come up, and those that did try later crops did not have any success. The year 1934 was to be the worst of the three dust storm years. There was not even an attempt to harvest. With no work to be done in the fields, many farmers went to work taking advantage of the government program, building roads. There wasn't much pay but they took what there was, hoping to survive. In the summer of 1934, a problem was building--one that no longer could be ignored. The cattle, for a year now, had had little and very poor feed and were starting to starve. The hay that could be bought through the government programs was of very poor quality. Because of the very large area of this drought, the hay had to be shipped long distances. This added to the price, and it became very apparent, it would not be feasible to feed this high priced feed to these cattle that were already in poor condition. The next home grown feed was almost a year away, if then. The government also saw the hopelessness of the situation. A program was enacted in which cattle would be bought for slaughter shot and buried. I can clearly recall the day that this happened. We sorted off the cattle that were young and in the best shape, and Joining the drive, we went on into Conde. those that my father thought he could feed. Then we waited for the cattle drive. My uncle and some of his neighbors got their cattle together and started to drive them to Conde, some eleven miles away. The route they chose took them by many other farms. As they went along, the farms they passed would put their cattle in the group and join the drive. Some had saddle horses and some just came on foot. We lived only three miles from town. So when they got to our place, a very large herd of cattle and men had been assembled. Conde, at that time, had large wooden pens called stock yards built along the rail roads. In more normal times, cattle were gathered in these pens, loaded onto rail stock cars and shipped to market. As we neared the stock yards, we saw other herds coming from all directions for this was the day this event was to happen. These cattle were in all shapes, sizes and of many different breeds. Some were pitifully thin and others, surprisingly, had quite a good coat of flesh. One and all, they were driven into the wooden pens but these cattle would not be shipped. Government men were there and they helped sort and tally the cattle to their original owners. Payment allotment was based on the shape the cows were in, more was paid for a large cow in good shape than was paid for a small thin one. Top price for a good cow was twenty dollars. My father told me, later, that he averaged about twelve dollars. Large ditches had already been dug along the tracks. Cattle were herded into them and government men with high powered rifles stood on box cars and shot them. Then they were buried. My father made me stand back where I was not able to witness this scene, but I still remember the noise of the cattle and the shots ringing out. The similarity between this scene and the death camps in Germany during World War II were striking. At least, these were animals and it was either this or starve. We had joined this drive before our noon meal and this killing process was long and drawn out. Later that afternoon, my brother, his two cousins and a neighbor boy pooled their small resources and had enough money for some cold wieners and a few candy bars. I don't know who thought up the menu, but I still remember it as one of the best meals I ever ate. At the end of that dreadful day, one can only imagine how those farmers who drove their cows to town that day felt. Surely, they must have wondered if survival was possible. There was, yet, another problem brewing that these despairing farmers could not possibly have known about. Hundreds of miles to the south in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas there was also a terrible and devastating drought. Even in the midst of this drought, they had more than their normal share of grasshoppers. A grasshopper is a very ungainly insect. Normally he will fly only a few hundred feet at a time, usually dying a short distance from where he is hatched. But that year, because of the drought, they had nothing to eat in their home environment. Every living thing is endowed with the desire to live and reproduce. So it was with these insects. The winds in this part of the country are generally from the south blowing to the north. So these hungry insects rose hundreds of feet in the air, riding the winds to the north in search of food. With this means of locomotion, they were able to travel many miles at a time. They stopped only when the winds died down or when they became tired. If they found nothing to eat where they landed, they would rise again on the next available wind and travel on. It was very hot, very dry, and we had a very strong southerly wind that Memorial Day in 1934. After the program that the local legionnaires always put on, I noticed people standing in the shade of buildings looking skyward. They were talking about grasshoppers. If you stood in the shade and looked close to the sun, you could see the sun reflecting off the wings of thousands of grasshoppers. I don't know why they decided to land, as there was little vegetation for them to eat. Maybe the wind was dying or maybe they were tiring, but land they did. I guess you would call it more like crashing than landing. These clumsy insects would hit the ground, bounce a few feet, and roll to a stop. Some would lose a leg or two in the process, but that did not stop them from getting up look for something to eat. They did not find much to destroy that year, as everything was already about gone, but they would be a plague that would last for years to come. In the spring of 1935 some farmers had already quit and moved to larger cities, trying to find work. But most had stayed. Spring found them in the fields, again, with borrowed feed for their horses and borrowed seed for their fields. The government had devised a plan to help control the erosion. Through a pay incentive plan, they encouraged the farmers to plant their fields cross wind, planting in an east west direction. Also, wheat fields should be no larger than twenty acres wide. In between these twenty acre strips, corn or other forage crops were to be planted. With this practice, the wind did not get such an open sweep at the fields. With more rain and less wind, these practices did produce some success. In the beginning, 1935 looked like it was going to be a good year. But just before harvest, trouble came again. There were some late season rains and with the rains came a blight, known as rust. Spores of rust-like particles settled on the stems of the wheat just below the heads. These spores, eventually, eat through the stems and the grain will either die or shrink to grain of poor quality. Therefore, the crop only yielded seven or eight bushels. Small as this crop was, it was of great value to these embattled farmers. They had some feed again, and they had the straw piles. We had a field of oats just south of the barn that year. This field was of good quality and yielded fairly well. When harvest came, my father had them place the threshing machine in such a way that the straw could be blown directly into our barn. When they were done, he had his feed bin full of oats and his barn full of good oat straw. The barn full of straw was a good decision, it was the last feed he would raise for over a year. The winter of 1935-36 was bitterly cold and there was quite a lot of snow. Even though the farmers had a small crop, they were still short of the money it would take to live and put in a crop. Most of them went back to building roads on government programs. My father would rise early in the morning, milk the six or eight cows that he still had, harness a team of horses, and then drive seven miles to the gravel pit. There, he and men who did not have horses, would load his wagon by hand. He would then drive the six miles to where they were graveling a road, unload his wagon, and other men would then spread the gravel on the road. He ate a cold, or probably frozen lunch, and would then make the same trip again. After two trips, he was done for the day. If he started his day early enough so he could leave before sunrise, he would be home by four-thirty. He still had his chores to do. There were many days that winter that were thirty degrees below zero. The spring of 1936 looked promising, most of the farmers had seed from the year before. They had feed for their horses and there had been some fall rain. The winter had produced a goodly amount of snow. Heartened by these facts, the spring found the farmers eagerly in the fields. The crops they planted came up and looked good. But, again, it was not to be. The rains quit and the winds and the dust took over. Memorial Day 1936 dawned hot and clear. At that time I was 10 years old and remember it well. We journeyed to town to take in the day’s celebration. The Conde city band and the local legion club marched to both cemeteries in those years. They started this march promptly at noon. The temperature that day was already over 100 degrees at twelve o-clock. When these hot and exhausted men returned from their march, they were discussing how hard this hot day was on their dry and stressed crops. This became known, for years afterwards, as the Memorial Day we lost our crop. As we drove home that evening there was an odor in the air. It reminded me somewhat of the scent new-mown hay gives off. What we smelled that evening was the odor of thousands of acres of cropland that had burned up, completely destroyed, in one single day. The all-day dust storms were as bad as ever. I remember one Sunday afternoon that was particularly bad. My father must have been disheartened by it. He sat at the kitchen table playing solitaire. He sat there from after dinner until almost four o'clock. Around four, I heard him say, "By golly I can see it." He had been sitting by the window and when we asked him what he could see, he said, "The wash house. We had a small wash house they had used in earlier times that stood only twenty feet from the kitchen window. It had been three hours since he last had seen it. I think this was as close to being defeated as my father ever felt during those discouraging years. I heard him tell my mother that he had kept hoping, but now even the prairie was blowing. It is always darkest just before the dawn. From that time on, it seemed to get better. I think here it should be mentioned that it was not only hard on the men, the women, too, took a beating. Imagine trying to keep house in those trying times. The dust invaded the houses, the food, the newly washed clothes, even the bedding and it blew day after day. Together, side-by-side, many couples rode it out. Some were forced to quit; some quit because it just looked hopeless. Some had to stay because they just simply didn't have enough money to leave. But many stayed through it all because they were determined to farm this land. Most of them, that were farmers, did make it and were rewarded by the better times and prices of the Forties. My father had a habit of taking a nap on the floor at noontime when he was working horses. He did this to refresh himself but it had another purpose. It gave the horses time to eat and rest. Because of the feed shortage, he rested his horses longer than he normally would. One day, it must have been sometime in May 1934, he slept much longer than usual. When he did go to the barn, instead of going to work, he un harnessed his horses and turned them out to pasture. The next morning, we took the horses to another pasture farther away from the barn. I asked him why we were doing this and he said “There is no use going to the fields anymore as everything is dead or dying.” He never went back to the field with his horses that year. That summer and fall he worked on the W.P.A. project and used the money to hire a neighbor who had a tractor do some fall plowing for him. He later told me that the horses were too thin and poorly to do any field work that fall. The dust blew constantly in 1934, and the summer days were very hot. Many heat records were set that year and many still stand today. Some days our family was held prisoner in our old rock-lined damp basement. It was not a pleasant place to be but it was a little cooler than the rest of the house and did offer some protection from the dust. Best of all, it had no windows so you couldn’t see the blowing dust. Dad and I spent many hours in that cellar sleeping on a large wooden table. This table was used as a place to cut meat when we butchered. Mom and my sisters did what household chores they could in that dark, musty room. One thing that I remember is that they churned butter. On rare occasions we made ice-cream down there also. One day as we came up from our refuge the southeast wind had died and it was hot and sultry. I remember Dad saying “Let’s have an early supper as I think its going to storm again.” Outside after supper, you could already see the cloud, dust bank, in the west. This storm that was building was bringing dust from miles away and it was picking up dust as it went along. In normal times, this would have been a thunder storm bringing and picking up moisture. Now, it was picking up dust and taking it thousands of feet in the air. As we watched the sun turned from a brilliant yellow, to a bright orange, to a dull gray and then it disappeared. Now you could see the storm clearly and it was a solid cloud of dirt. As we stood and watched, we were now in the center of an eerie calm. There was no wind and all of nature seemed to be aware of what was about to happen. There was two large farms one mile west of us. As we watched them disappear in the dust we knew that we were next. Going into the house we didn’t have long to wait. When this storm hit, it struck with its full fury! A few drops of rain rattled against the windows and then the house went dark. By the time the folks lit the old kerosene lamp the dust was already in the house. Dust that gets in the house is very fine-more like flour, and it penetrates every thing. I don’t remember much odor but you knew you were breathing it. Winds in a dust storm are every bit as powerful as those of a thunder storm. And the lightning, if anything, is worse. I’ve heard it said that the friction of the dust causes more lightning. When it was time to go to bed the storm still held our old house in its powerful grip. Upstairs in our dark bedrooms, the house swayed and shook. I sometimes used the sheet as a dust filter by placing it over my nose. This storm raged most of the night. As a child I slept through most of it but it was a fitful sleep. I woke up many times and could hear the wind howl. By morning the front or--low--had passed by and soon the wind was picking up from the northwest. With mounds of fresh dust on the ground visibility soon returned to zero. All day the wind blew. You couldn’t see more than a few feet, sometimes not at all. Dust had now collected on everything in the house, and you could trace pictures on the tops of the furniture. We were lucky this time, The storm only lasted through the day and part of the night. Some would last for two or three days. If Mom was lucky, she and my sisters would have a couple of days to clean the dust out before it stormed again. As a person who spent much of his childhood growing up in those depressed times, I wish to add that I harbor no resentment. I have no feeling of bitterness, nor do I feel that I was deprived of a normal childhood. In fact, I feel that I fared better than many children do today. First of all, my folks were always home. I never came home from school to find them gone. We did not have fancy clothes, but we were dressed as well as anyone else. As for hunger, I never knew the meaning of it. We always had food and “good” food. Every year, my father managed to have a steer to butcher along with a couple of hogs. We had chickens to eat and eggs for the table. The cows gave us milk and cream. A few geese gave us food and feathers for our beds. We always had a turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We did not have large numbers of these animals but we had enough for our needs. Mother baked the bread, churned butter from the cream, and was able, at times, to make pies. She had plenty of lard for the crust from the hogs we butchered. Because we had milk, cream and eggs, we even managed to have ice cream once in a while. I am sure there were some lean times, but there was always enough money for a box of crackers and a can of tomatoes. Many evenings, I would drive the cows up early, someone would milk one, and we would have homemade tomato soup, made from fresh whole milk for supper. We had this soup many times, and never seemed to tire of it. I give credit to my folks for the warm memories that I have for those years. They shielded me from the bitterness, despair, and desperation that they surely must have felt. All I felt was their love, warmth, and the feeling that no matter what happened, we would always be able to get along. This was a very scary time for a youngster, and it didn’t help to see the fear and concern in the adult faces. No one had ever seen storms of this intensity and everyone wondered what the outcome was going to be. A few adults gave a Biblical slant to the happenings, things like the end of the world, the Lord’s retribution, and there was talk about repentance. Statements like these did nothing to bolster a child’s confidence. It has been 60 years since I last experienced a classic Dust Storm of the 30s. I remember the choking dust, the buried fences and the bright days that were turned suddenly into night. But this picture, most of all, depicts what I remember best. Farming is a lonely life, just families standing against nature. I can remember our family standing by the house looking west as this huge black cloud approached. First the sun would disappear, then we would watch our neighbors farms slowly fade from sight. They would disappear one by one as the storm moved nearer. All too soon it would be time for us to take up our refuge in the house. There we would sit, watch, wait and listen as the terrific winds engulfed our house. That, my friends, was a helpless and lonely feeling. |
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