Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [97]
Since the blizzards and drought of the 1880s and 1890s, the farmers of the western plains had been playing a game of “Mother May I?” with nature. When the isohyet of twenty inches of rainfall maundered westward, they advanced. When it moved eastward, they retreated— some of them, anyway. Through most of the first three decades of the twentieth century, the line stayed close to the lee side of the Rockies. The teens and 1920s, in particular, were years of extraordinary and consistent rainfall. Millions and millions of acres of shortgrass prairie west of the hundredth meridian, land already depauperated by livestock overgrazing during the last century, were converted to the production of wheat, whose price had reached record levels during the war. “Everything in the country was going full blast,” wrote Paul Sears in his book Deserts on the March. “It was the most natural thing in the world for the plains farmers, whose cattle business had prospered during the war and who had been encouraged to try dry farming, to attempt the growing of wheat on a huge scale. The soil was loose and friable; the land was theirs to use as they saw fit.” Even in the wettest years of the 1920s, the high-plains wheat rarely grew taller than someone’s knee; sometimes it was ankle-high, and during a dry year it wouldn’t come up at all. Everyone knew the wet years wouldn’t last, and everyone knew that the loose soil, with the wheat stubble disked under, had nothing to hold it if drought and wind should coincide. But everyone was making money.
The first of the storms blew through South Dakota on Armistice Day, November 11, 1933. By nightfall, some farms had lost nearly all their topsoil. “Nightfall” was a relative term, because at ten o’clock the next morning the sky was still pitch-black. People were vomiting dirt. Machinery, fences, roads, shrubs, sheds—everything was covered by great hanging drifts of silt. “Wives packed every windowsill, door frame, and keyhole with oiled cloth and gummed paper,” William Manchester wrote, “yet the fine silt found its way in and lay in beach-like ripples on their floors.” As a gallon jug of desert floodwater, after settling, contains a quart and a half of solid mud, the sky seemed to be one part dust to three parts air. A naked human tethered outside would have been rendered skinless—such was the scouring power of the dirt-laden gales. Huge numbers of jackrabbits, unable to close their eyes, went blind. That was a blessing. It gave the human victims something to eat.
The storms, dozens of them, continued through the spring and summer of 1934. An old physician in southwestern Nebraska wrote in his diary, “Wind forty miles an hour and hot as hell. Two Kansas farms go by every minute.” With the temperature up to 105 degrees and the horizon lined with roiling clouds that seemed to promise ten inches of rain but delivered three feet of dirt, the plains took on a phantasmagorical dreadfulness. The ravenous storms would blow for days at a time, eating the land in their path, lifting dust and dirt high enough to catch the jet stream, which carried it to Europe. In 1934, members of Congress took time out from debating the Taylor Grazing Bill—designed to control overgrazing on the public lands—to crowd the Capitol balcony and watch the sky darken at noon. From the look of the western horizon, half the continent could have been on fire. The Taylor Act was passed in that year, despite efforts by some western members to weaken it even as their states were sailing over their heads. Between storms, when visibility sometimes increased to five or six miles, people in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, in Kiowa and Crowley counties in Colorado, in Texas’s Gaines County on the New Mexico border, in 756 counties in nineteen states that were ultimately affected, watched their world turn into the Sahara.
The Dust Bowl was