Volume 18 , Issue 12

1935, April - If It Rains ... Echo In Dust Bowl

It was these three little words: "If It Rains" that was echoing in the Dust Bowl, April, 1935. In a news report written by Robert Geiger, Associated Press Staff writer, this story appeared in the Miami Daily News-Record, Miami, Oklahoma, 15 April 1935, Monday, page 1, via of Guthrie, Oklahoma.

Found on Newspapers.com

Three little words, achingly familiar on a western farmer's tongue, ruled life in the dust bowl of the continent: "If it rains." The next three weeks would tell the story. Black and saffron clouds of dust, spectacular, menacing, intensely irritating to man and beast alike, choking, blowing out tender crops, and lasting without mercy for days, had darkened everything but hope and a sense of humor in the dust sector of the Southwest.

The southwest was big and the dust area was only a small chunk of it. Roughly, it took in the western third of Kansas, Southeastern Colorado, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the northern two-thirds of the texan Panhandle, and northeastern New Mexico. It always had been a region of sparse rainfall. The World war, with its high wheat prices and urgent demands, sent the plow into the sod and turned this into what country. Before then it was range land, and the crop was native buffalo grass, which held the soil from against insistent winds.

The last three years had been years of drouth, with this spring's field eroding dust storms their stifling climax. But dust storms were nothing new in the southwest. Forty years before, decades before the wheat farmers came with their combines, a dust storm of such violence swept western Kansas that it stopped trains, just as they were stopped a week before April 15, 1935.

Dusters approach the prairie country in two ways. Sometimes they start when a gigantic yellow and red cloud floats across the country, high in the air, blotting out the sun. The wind was gentle, growing in velocity very slowly. This type of storm carried a fine, powdery still that seemed soft and hazy, until you start breathing it.

The other type starts with a blast, and a huge black cloud approaching across the plains at tremendous speed. It strikes all at once along a well defined front. It carried sand and on hands and face, felt like the blast of a chaff from a threshing machine.

When at it height, bright lights in towns were invisible across the street, visibility was zero and within buildings lights must be turned on as at night. Motorists continuously crawled along at 5 and 10 miles an hour, unable to peer ahead for more than 10 or 15 feet. Busses were stopped, sometimes trains. The fine silt penetrated motor blocks, and, if motorists were unwary, grids out bearings.

These were the storms which left drifts of dust along the highways and fences, sometimes dust drifts up tot he eaves of farm buildings. It could not be kept out of a house, and dishes had to be washed not three times, but six times daily before and after every meal. Housewives didn't like them, but the dust belt grins and bears it.

Merchants do business as usual, unless the storm gets too severe. Then they hunt a fourth hand at bridge, lock the front door and retire to the back room to play it out.

It got in your hair. It got in your clothes, literally in your hair, and sometimes it seemed in your very soul. Certainly it got under the skin.

But despite the hardship, and a general encouraging prospect, not a single one of more than 100 farmers interviewed by your correspondent was leaving the country. Each one had hope of getting a crop.

Charles Hitch, an elderly rancher farmer, living south of Guymon, who came there in 1886, "For the first time since I have been on Goldwater creek, and I was the first settler, we are thinking of shipping cattle to greener pastures."

In April, 1935, Hitch went on to say, "Recent dust storms are not much more severe than others in former years, but the drouth is worse. My ranges have supported as many as 10,000 head, but I have only 800 head now and they cannot find sufficient feed. We have to feed them cottonseed cake."

A. L. Thorson lived over the line in Texas, and was a big wheat producer. He raised 90,000 bushels in 1931, got only 25 cents a bushel for it. The best he could hope for, he thought, was a half crop.

Thoreson said in 1935, "But we are not suffering acutely. The government is paying better than a dollar an acre to us in wheat benefit payments, and in addition we can sell what wheat is raised. That will keep the farmers going. The federal wheat program is OK, and if it wasn't for that the farmers would be in an awful hole. They can hold on indefinitely with what payments."

There was I. R. Bryan, farmer northwest of Guymon, who could have left 10 years before after 30 years of farming in the Panhandle with $35,000 in his pockets. He made it in row crops and lost it in wheat. He could have left here wealthy, and he would be damned if he was going to walk out of here broke back the in 1935.
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