The Worst Hard Time Part 10

His father died in 1934, a year when Nebraska got just fourteen inches of rain, the lowest amount since 1864. The old man had raised hogs and cattle on a piece of land he claimed near the town of Inavale, Nebraska, not far from Willa Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, where the Republican River drains a broad table of the prairie, several hundred miles northeast of No Man's Land. The town flourished during the wheat boom, with a lumberyard, a meat market, two general stores, a bank, a pool hall, a school, a post office, and a small music hall. Its decline started with the crash in farm prices, and it was further staggered by the Depression and drought. The bank closed in 1932, never to open again, and took the farmers' deposits down with it. Hartwell worked his little family farm outside of Inavale, in the sliver of Nebraska that was identified by the government as being a part of the larger Dust Bowl. He earned spare change playing piano at dances and lodges along the Republican River, and his wife brought in extra income making dresses for people in town. They had no children. Hartwell wrote every day. A selection of his thoughts shows his drift in the worst years.

Jan 6 Did you ever see a middle aged man working for his board on a farm? Did you ever see a middle aged man working for his board on a farm?Feb 8Last night was one of the worse nights I have seen in this country in many years, a terrific gale of blowing snow and 15 below zero. We moved our bed out in the dining room beside the stove, the first time we ever did that. The horses in the N. pasture seem to be alright today, although we have no barns for them anymore.Feb 14I have often thought of sending valentines (as who hasn't) but I never have.Feb 21I haven't much ambition anymore. When one sees all he has slipping away, his ambition seems to gradually go along with the rest.Feb 29Well, ordinarily today would be Mar. 1, but this year gives us one more day to hold to the place which has meant so much to me in life and tradition in the last 35 years, from the scent of the wild plum bush and the violets and the blue gra.s.s in April, to the little dry thunder showers in June which break away late in the afternoon, with the meadow larks singing and the wild roses which seem to be brighter and smell sweeter when wet with rain than any other time.Mar 7A horse sale was held at the stock yard in the afternoon. I sold one of ours. There are six left now, I don't know how long I can keep them. When one has to buy all the grain he feeds and has very little to buy with, it is uncertain. The 'stock yard' at the R.R. is a bare, deserted looking place.Mar 15 Mostly cloudy, cold, heavy dusty looking clouds and rather chilly s.w. wind. Very dry everywhere. The alfalfa sowed in the field w. of the feed yard is about all dead. Mostly cloudy, cold, heavy dusty looking clouds and rather chilly s.w. wind. Very dry everywhere. The alfalfa sowed in the field w. of the feed yard is about all dead.Mar 17This is St. Patrick's day so every one is supposed to wear something green or act that way. It was pleasant in the afternoon, but cold, dusty s.w. wind in the afternoon.Mar 20Spring began today at 12:58 pm we heard it announced over the radio. Spring's coming was an important event to me years ago. Spring and summer was when I really lived, especially in May and June when the flowers were in bloom, the fruit trees, the gra.s.s getting green along the creeks, the frogs singing in the evening, and there was the possibility of a 'big rain' which seldom comes. Fair today, dry dusty NW wind.Mar 21Very dusty, windy, mean.Mar 22Very dusty, warm strong s.w. wind at times dead still at 4 pm the air and sky filled with dust, the sun only faintly visible all day.April 8These dust storms are getting serious in this country, fences in some places almost entirely covered. Further W. and S. much land is entirely ruined. And no rain in sight.April 15The air is filled with dust ... The whole country is rapidly becoming an area of shifting dust and sand, blowing South one day and North the next. Fences, in some places, are covered with drifting, blowing dirt.April 20 At 2 p.m. a terrific wind and dirt storm from the No. Impossible to see much or do anything, a few clouds, but so much dirt and wind you can't see them. At 2 p.m. a terrific wind and dirt storm from the No. Impossible to see much or do anything, a few clouds, but so much dirt and wind you can't see them.April 28I got the piano Davis used to have in the pool hall in the afternoon. I don't know how long we will keep it-how long we can.May 2115 years ago the whole Republican R. bottom was a vast expanse of alfalfa and corn fields. Now it is practically a desert of wasted, shifting sand, washed out ditches, c.o.c.kle burrs and devastation. I doubt if very much of it can ever be reclaimed.June 2I wish I knew where we will be a year from now.June 15Vic C., Artie and the kids left for California this morning. They say they are coming back, but I don't know. Many are leaving the country. Drouth, hard times are driving many out.June 27I took a thermometer out in the W. corn field today, at the ground surface it registered 142!July 4Today is one of the worst storms I ever saw, even here. It is 100 degrees and a S.W. wind and dust of gale proportions at times. Red Cloud 'celebrated' today but it was such a terrible day we didn't go anywhere.July 14I have cultivated corn every summer since 1908 but I wonder sometimes if I will ever cultivate any corn on this place again.July 15 102 degrees. Corn and every thing is mostly destroyed ... It is really too hot, dry, discouraging and devilish to do anything. Over 2500 have died in this 'great middle west' of the effects of this h.e.l.lish weather and country since July 1st. 102 degrees. Corn and every thing is mostly destroyed ... It is really too hot, dry, discouraging and devilish to do anything. Over 2500 have died in this 'great middle west' of the effects of this h.e.l.lish weather and country since July 1st.July 21I have seen a good many bad years in this country, more, in fact than any other. But I never saw any worse than this one. Corn is practically all destroyed now, pastures are as bare as January.July 30Charlotte Lambrecht was in this afternoon. Charlotte is quite the stickler for morals and temperance, nearly all of us go through that stage at some time in our life. Too many times life slips apart and we find that is all we have left to us.July 31July was the worst month (so far) of the worst year ever known.Sept 1Well, another summer is about gone, and I wonder, some times what we will be doing a year from now. I always dread to see summer go, no matter how bad it is. Winter with its sickness seems to last so long.Sept 10I took down 3 pigs to the sale in the afternoon they sold for $12.05 or about $4 each. These sales are remarkable. An old can and kittens sold for .05. Ducks sold for .30 each. One horse sold for $11 another for $7.Sept 19I finished mowing the Russian Thistles on the place W. of Stick-neys. I would like to be some place or see the time when something would grow besides Russian Thistles.Oct 2 I listened to the 'World Series' baseball game over the radio. The N.Y. 'Yankees' beat the N.Y. 'Giants' 18 to 4. One can hear the ball game in N.Y. City from the radio (wireless transmission) in his own home. You can hear the crack of the bat and the ball hit the catcher's glove. Who would have thought it possible 25 years ago! I listened to the 'World Series' baseball game over the radio. The N.Y. 'Yankees' beat the N.Y. 'Giants' 18 to 4. One can hear the ball game in N.Y. City from the radio (wireless transmission) in his own home. You can hear the crack of the bat and the ball hit the catcher's glove. Who would have thought it possible 25 years ago!Dec 3Verna & I went to R. Cloud today and took down another shoal to the sale. She brought $9 and weighed 120 pounds. Mrs. Vance & John (her son) rode back with us. John was returning from jail from one of his periodic 'drunks.' But drinking is about the only recreation left around here & you have to do that by yourself.Dec 25I believe today is the warmest Christmas morning I have ever seen ... We swept & dusted & made some candy in the forenoon. We had dinner by ourselves at home.

While Don Hartwell was scribbling descriptions of daily life on a dusted-over piece of ground, others were trying to record similar details with cameras. It was a son of Kansas, Roy Emerson Stryker, who came up with the idea of creating a record of American decay for the files of the Farm Security Administration. The motives were not journalistic: Roosevelt was running for a second term, facing an increasingly hostile Supreme Court, and having doc.u.mentary support for conditions that called for programs deemed radical and un-American by critics could be invaluable. But as it turned out, perhaps by accident or perhaps because of the talent that Roy Stryker hired, the government photo unit proved to be one of the lasting and most popular contributions of the New Deal, far outliving its propaganda purposes. The wire services had moved pictures of Black Sunday and other big storms, but their lenses had been aimed at the sky. It was rare to see the lines in a sandblasted face, or look into the eyes of a broken nester, or see a woman nursing her child slumped next to a jalopy loaded with all her worldly goods. Stryker sent his photographers out to the heart of the Dust Bowl to get the faces of the desperate. He told his shooters that they should do more than drive by and hustle back to the city. They should taste the dirt, get to know the people, live with the dusters. A kid from New York City, Arthur Rothstein, was just out of college, twenty-one years old, when Stryker sent him to Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma in the spring of 1936. It was like sending George Catlin on one of the first explorations of the West, for Rothstein returned with images that most of America had never seen.

Outside Dalhart, he shot a picture of a lone car running just ahead of a black blizzard on an open road; the car is dwarfed by the dark cloud on its tail. In Boise City, Rothstein found a town slouching away from the sand pummeling, its buildings unpainted, the windows brown, so much dirt floating around that it was impossible to tell a street or front lawn or sidewalk from the drifting prairie. All that was visible in a picture he took of one abandoned house was a rooftop and stovepipe poking through the sand, like the scope of a submarine rising above the sea. Roaming through No Man's Land, Rothstein stopped his car outside the shack of Arthur Coble's family. Coble was digging out fence posts and hauling water to a couple of starving cattle. When a sudden wind carried a wave of soil up from the south, Coble and his sons fled for shelter. One of the boys, Darrel, had been a student of Hazel Lucas Shaw's when she taught for grocery scrip in Boise City. Rothstein's picture caught father and son, face into the wind, running for cover to a ramshackle, half-buried outbuilding; it looks as if the very earth is swallowing them. Just the tops of fence posts are visible in the foreground, and the background is shapeless beige. It became one of the most significant images of the time.

No Man's Land, photographed by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration Another doc.u.mentarian, Pare Lorentz, wanted to tell a larger story, not just take snapshots of those trapped by the dead land. His idea was to film a narrative: how and why the Great Plains had been settled and then brought to ruination. Like a fable. Lorentz had never made a

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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentaries ever made, the only peacetime production by the American government of a film intended for broad commercial release. To a.s.suage 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 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. 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 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. "Gra.s.slands," 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 gra.s.s 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 Hitchc.o.c.k thriller, when the land raged against the people.

The Plow That Broke the Plains showed alongside showed alongside It Happened One Night 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, 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. 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. 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.

20. The Saddest Land AT 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. 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 gra.s.s had been stripped away, now the schools, churches, homes, and main streets that had been anch.o.r.ed 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 n.o.body 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.sland, 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-gra.s.sing 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 gra.s.s; 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 sc.r.a.p, 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 gra.s.s, 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 b.u.mped 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 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. 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 acc.u.mulations 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 sc.r.a.p. 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.

"It is just a place to stand on," she said of her farm.

For Hazel Shaw, the only plan she had for the next year was to bring a new life into the world to replace the one taken from her by the dusters. She went north to Elkhart, Kansas, for this birth. The memory of the drive to Clayton for Ruth Nell's delivery, and of her husband's battle with sand-vexed roads, was fresh. In Elkhart, the baby was born without trouble, a black-eyed boy. When he came into the world, his first cry-forceful and loud-sounded to Hazel like the most l.u.s.ty cheer of life she had heard in five years. They named the baby Charles, for his father. He seemed robust, with good color, good size. At his baptism three months later, the baby grabbed the silver cup that the minister was holding and refused to let go. They all laughed: the boy had strength. Now, where to live? Most of Hazel's family, her mother, Dee, a network of siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, young and old, were staying put in No Man's Land. Cimarron County was Lucas country, but in the last year it had killed Grandma Lou and baby Ruth Nell, and that made it impossible for Hazel to feel the same way about the land. Many of her relatives were scared; they had no idea what was going on or when it would end. They looked around and a.s.sumed that the far corner of Oklahoma was becoming a desert.

Summer temperatures were brutal. For two days in July and two days in August, the mercury reached 118 degrees, the highest ever recorded at that time in No Man's Land. August went down as the hottest of the century in Oklahoma. It was 117 degrees in Dalhart, 120 in Shattuck. There had been some rain but it came in bursts, big dumps from the sky that spilled over the hard ground and inflamed ditches into flash floods, and then it was all gone, and they went back to drought and temperatures above the century mark.

Throughout the heat wave, Hazel was desperate for a little cross-breeze in the apartment-some clean, moving air-so they could sleep at night, but she could not risk the dust getting to her new baby. Hazel kept the place so sealed up it was like living in a can. She would not take the baby outside except on the clearest of days. She draped a wet sheet over the crib, about two feet above the head of the baby. He was never in the crib without a dampened cloth overhead. Later, when Charles grew to a young man, he was claustrophobic and thought it had to be a product of his early months spent looking up at a dusted, wet sheet from a crib in a sealed apartment.

At the end of the year, she said goodbye to No Man's Land. Hazel put on her white gloves and brushed back tears but said tomorrow would bring good things to the young family, so it was not worth a long cry. She planned to leave with her dignity intact, like a lady. In 1914 at the age of ten, she had first seen the gra.s.sland, rising on her toes on the driver's seat of her daddy's covered wagon to get a look at this country. She would hold to the good memories. She and Charles and the baby moved to Vici, closer to the center of Oklahoma, near her husband's family. There would be a place, always, in Hazel's memory of the blackest days in No Man's Land. But it would shrink, because Hazel would force it down to size to allow her to live.

A hundred miles to the east, the Volga Germans tried to keep their community around Shattuck from crumbling. Strong men still wept, hiding their lapses like alcoholics sipping in secret. The men cried because they had never seen anything like this and had never before been without a plan of action. Always, they had been able to hammer at something, to dig and sc.r.a.pe and cut and build and plant and harvest and kill-something forceful to tip the balance, using their hands to make even the slightest dent during the bleakest times. Families spoke furtively of a mother or young bride who had gone crazy, walking away from her house only to be found days or weeks later stumbling around a town, lost. Just as they had fled the Rhine in 1765 and the Volga 120 years later, the Russlanddeutschen now talked of moving again.

Most days, George Ehrlich sounded like he believed he would live through this, but it could have been the brave, forced words of one who had seen it all. A German family could live on bread, beer, and wurst, the Ehrlichs told their Anglo neighbors. They got some money from the government, about seven dollars a head for cattle, which gave them enough to buy flour and sugar-something was always coming out of the oven. A cousin would bring out the violin that had survived the immigrants' trip through the hurricane in 1890, and there was music and warm bread and memories of the Volga at its best. But the drought was in its fifth year, and it was taking its toll.

The Borth children were felled by dirt. The doctor came to Gustav Borth's three-room house and examined them. Two of the kids had fever, chest pains from coughing, sore ribs. Dust pneumonia was his diagnosis. He said they had to get out of the High Plains or get to a medical shelter. But the nearest hospital was full and the Red Cross never made it to the German community with a triage facility. Gustav moved Rosa's bed to the kitchen next to a cook stove heated by cow chips. With enough cow manure as fuel, the Borths could keep her warm. There was no room for another bed. Her brother was put in the room with his parents. For three weeks, the kids hacked and spit up dust, waiting out their illness. A girl of fifteen, Rosa fixed her stare on the brown land outside the window; she never saw a bird or a flower or a bee. If she could just find a single green weed, she decided, it would be enough to make her happy.

With his children facing a mortal illness, his land dead and dusted, Gustav thought of the Russian steppe often, and it was always better in his mind than this place in America. He still went to church, half a mile away, and the family tried to sing "Gott is de liebe" along with the rest of the congregation, but they were nearly empty inside. Many times they were too embarra.s.sed to be seen in public, for Rosa was clothed in dresses made of chicken feed sacks.

"Es ist hoffnungsloss," Gustav Borth said. It is hopeless. It is hopeless. Usually, he tried to keep the overt p.r.o.nunciations of failure from his family. Like the tears. Usually, he tried to keep the overt p.r.o.nunciations of failure from his family. Like the tears.

"Es ist hoffnungsloss."

Then the bank took his combine. During the glory years, the combine had allowed Borth to pile high his grain, his stacks of fibrous gold. He moved the children hundreds of miles south to live with cousins in Texas. Gustav was left with his homesickness for the Old World, his sense of failure.

That spring, with The Plow That Broke the Plains The Plow That Broke the Plains playing in theaters, Dalhart found itself in the spotlight. There on the big screen was Bam White cutting up the best gra.s.sland in the world, the cause of this nightmare. John McCarty was livid. He denounced the film as a tool of the government, designed to drive people off the land. It went to the very character of the Panhandle pioneer that the editor of the playing in theaters, Dalhart found itself in the spotlight. There on the big screen was Bam White cutting up the best gra.s.sland in the world, the cause of this nightmare. John McCarty was livid. He denounced the film as a tool of the government, designed to drive people off the land. It went to the very character of the Panhandle pioneer that the editor of the Texan Texan had long praised as the epitome of courage and foresight. If this kept up, Dalhart would die. had long praised as the epitome of courage and foresight. If this kept up, Dalhart would die.

"It is purely a propaganda film," McCarty said. "It is bound to do more damage to our credit and our agriculture that it can possibly do good." McCarty urged people in neighboring towns to come take a look at Dalhart for themselves: see the defiance, feel the fighting spirit. Politicians in Texas joined McCarty in their outrage. Eugene Worley, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1936, demanded that the government withdraw the film from theaters. "It's a libel on the great Texas panhandle," said Worley. Melt White went back to see the film again, staring up at his daddy moving along the horizon of the windblown land, with the stirring music, as a narrator said, "Forty million acres of the plains totally ruined by the plow."

The filmmaker, Pare Lorentz, was hardly the first person to blame misguided agriculture for the wreck of the plains. Seasoned XIT ranch hands and soil scientists such as Hugh Bennett had made the same case, in their way. The New York Times New York Times correspondent in the Midwest, Harlan Miller, saw the run-up and frenzy of the wheat boom, the town building and the suitcase farmers, the debt loads and the technological revolution, and he watched it all fall apart-the whole arc. correspondent in the Midwest, Harlan Miller, saw the run-up and frenzy of the wheat boom, the town building and the suitcase farmers, the debt loads and the technological revolution, and he watched it all fall apart-the whole arc.

"Plowed recklessly during the World War and since, denuded of the vegetation which knits the earth against the onslaught of the winds, powdered by drought for years, these arid lands have taken wing," he wrote in a long piece for the Times Times on March 31, 1935, two weeks before Black Sunday. A similar story from a year earlier carried the headline: " on March 31, 1935, two weeks before Black Sunday. A similar story from a year earlier carried the headline: "PLOW SPELLED ITS DOOM."

A son of the Texas Panhandle reached the same conclusion. Doc Dawson's youngest boy, John, had left Dalhart in 1929 to start a law career in Houston. He returned in the mid-1930s to help his struggling father and to see if anything could be salvaged from the land the Doc had hoped would bring him a comfortable retirement. John was startled and angered by what he saw. A letter from his mother just after Black Sunday had described "the blackest dark you ever looked into," but her words did not prepare him for his reaction. The land had become a moonscape, empty and hideous. During dusters, the earth had a sickly smell. He found no wildlife, no gra.s.s, no trees growing outside of the few hardy locusts planted in Dalhart. The Last Man Club and Lorentz's film were getting a lot of attention, creating an impression of a town engaged in a big struggle over the forces remaking the land. But Dawson found that most of his neighbors were just plain numb, worn down by the struggle to get through another day. There was no economy, no buyers for goods in town. His mother tried to keep up appearances and talked still of books and cooking a Sunday meal and G.o.d. But she was distressed by the dust that showered down her walls, by the filthy streaks on the windows, the puckered faces she saw at Doc's soup kitchen, people in pain from hunger. Five years now they had put up with it. Five years, with no end in sight.

Still, the Doc told his son he had a feeling a little rain might finally be coming their way. Six years earlier, when the boy first came home from college, the Doc had taken him out to his land and scooped up the earth. As he held it in his hands, he p.r.o.nounced it the finest dirt on the planet, capable of producing d.a.m.n near anything. Now he said he was exhausted, out of money and nearly out of time. His health was shot. The Panhandle had to get one normal year of precipitation. But what, exactly, was normal? Dalhart had been a town for only thirty-five years, and weather records had been kept barely longer than that. John Dawson was upset because he felt people had done this to themselves. All of them-the nesters who had chased away the cowboys, the real estate promoters, the people who subdivided the XIT, and Dawson's own father, who carved up his own little piece of the Panhandle only to have it become a collection point for tumbleweeds-shared some of the blame.

Government kept the town alive. Hugh Bennett came to Dalhart in August 1936 to look over the biggest soil conservation project on the plains, called "Operation Dust Bowl." The plan was to slow the drifts by contour plowing, which created furrows and made it less likely for the earth to lift off in great sheets, and then plant it over with gra.s.s seed from Africa. The goal was to build a living thing from scratch, to create a place of interdependence, not a crop. Only G.o.d on the third day of creation might know the feeling. Bennett was also struggling to put the fledgling conservation districts together. The nesters had usually worked alone, one man against the land, and sometimes one man against another, each with his section. Bennett was trying to create what amounted to neighborhood civil defense committees of the soil. But people had to take the initiative. A soil conservation district would fail if only a few people went along with it. It was all theory, of course. But neighbors b.i.t.c.hed about other neighbors not wanting to do their share, or shucking duties, or being sloppy or lazy or drunk or too religious or just plain onerous. Big Hugh got an earful.

At the same time, Bennett, as part of the team appointed by Roosevelt, was working on the investigation into the cause of the Dust Bowl. The administration had started a number of big initiatives but most of them were tentative, pending the conclusions of the Dust Bowl jury. The president wanted the report by summer's end.

McCarty went out of his way to impress Bennett, to show the president's man that Dalhart deserved its shot at redemption. See here: Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n and his properties and that C-note in his pocket-hoo, boy, he's got big plans. And just look what a break they nearly got from Tex Thornton last year, after he busted up the sky with his TNT and nitro. All they needed were a couple of steady soakers, and the land would spring back, green and frisky. His town was a fighter. It was full of Spartans. It would lead the way for others in the High Plains. When a group of people from Guymon, which was nearly as smothered and gasping as Boise City and Dalhart, came for a visit, McCarty arranged for a handful of musicians to meet them. See here, he told Big Hugh: look how the town opens its arms. The musicians got up on a flatbed truck just as the boys from Guymon rolled in to see what one dusted town could learn from another. The wind had been blowing sand all day, making it hard to see, and then it shifted, bringing in a reddish dust from New Mexico. McCarty got on the flatbed and invited the Guymon visitors to come on up with him, join hands, and sing. They started singing "Old Faithful." The dust fell red and heavy, and when a weak rain was squeezed from the sky, it was liquid gunk.

"...Old Faithful, we rode the range together ..."

People fled for cover. But McCarty continued to sing from the back of the flatbed truck, holding hands with a bankrupt merchant from Guymon, showing everyone the spirit of Dalhart while clay drops fell and splattered his face, making it look as if he were crying tears of red mud.

21. Verdict IN AN AGE when people who ran the country thought the great rivers of America could be plugged to create a green promised land in the Pacific Northwest and electrify the Tennessee Valley, Hugh Bennett was encouraged to think big and think epic. When he returned to Washington after the Dust Bowl summit and a tour of his conservation projects, Bennett believed that the Great Plains could be saved; it did not have to blow away and lose its people. But all the marvels of concrete and rebar used elsewhere could not put back what the winds and a swarm of one-way plows had done on the prairie. There would be no magical engineered solution. Some believed so, of course. Congress authorized a plan to reverse the flow of water under the Continental Divide, an attempt to create a hydraulic savior, moving west to east through a tunnel. In Oklahoma, politicians were still insistent on choking off the little flow of the Cimarron River to create an impound of water near Guymon. Others thought the solution was to go deep, dig far below the surface, and mine the great underground reservoir of ancient water, the Ogallala Aquifer. Deep wells, drilled for oil or gas, had found a ready source of water five hundred feet or below. Bring it up, many county leaders told Bennett during his tour of the Dust Bowl. If rain would not come from the sky, it could come from the ground. The Ogallala was there for the taking, just like the gra.s.sland itself thirty years earlier. Bring it up. when people who ran the country thought the great rivers of America could be plugged to create a green promised land in the Pacific Northwest and electrify the Tennessee Valley, Hugh Bennett was encouraged to think big and think epic. When he returned to Washington after the Dust Bowl summit and a tour of his conservation projects, Bennett believed that the Great Plains could be saved; it did not have to blow away and lose its people. But all the marvels of concrete and rebar used elsewhere could not put back what the winds and a swarm of one-way plows had done on the prairie. There would be no magical engineered solution. Some believed so, of course. Congress authorized a plan to reverse the flow of water under the Continental Divide, an attempt to create a hydraulic savior, moving west to east through a tunnel. In Oklahoma, politicians were still insistent on choking off the little flow of the Cimarron River to create an impound of water near Guymon. Others thought the solution was to go deep, dig far below the surface, and mine the great underground reservoir of ancient water, the Ogallala Aquifer. Deep wells, drilled for oil or gas, had found a ready source of water five hundred feet or below. Bring it up, many county leaders told Bennett during his tour of the Dust Bowl. If rain would not come from the sky, it could come from the ground. The Ogallala was there for the taking, just like the gra.s.sland itself thirty years earlier. Bring it up.

Four million acres of farmland were empty, abandoned, with no takers, not even Resettlement-whose mission was to buy back land. From the start, Bennett thought the answer was getting people to treat the prairie soil on its own terms, a great plowup in reverse. Conserve what farmland could be saved through new methods of contour plowing, crop rotation, and soil conservation districts. For other lands, the ground could be seeded, and in time the southern plains would have its gra.s.slands back. Perhaps. Bennett, whose graduate degree was in chemistry, was not given to policy speculation. He was a man of science: look at the facts, draw the right conclusions. But he was in new territory. They all were. There were no historic models.

Roosevelt had asked for an honest verdict: why had the Great Plains blown away? What made this land die? The crisis of the transient prairie had already cost Depression-strapped taxpayers an enormous sum-five hundred million dollars since 1933-on remedial land projects, grants, loans, and relief. Before spending any more money, the president wanted to know if the plains could be saved, and if so, how. Roosevelt had also asked whether the arid flatlands should have been settled. Had it been a colossal mistake to allow homesteading on the land? Was the Jeffersonian small farmer, small town, agri-citizen model a horrible fit for the gra.s.slands? Had this environmental catastrophe-the worst in American history-been aided by government?

The report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president on August 27, 1936. It was labeled "personal and confidential," signed first by Bennett, and then seven agency heads. An extended memo, The Future of the Great Plains, The Future of the Great Plains, was due at the end of the year. But this shorter report showed where the committee was going. The conclusions were stark. was due at the end of the year. But this shorter report showed where the committee was going. The conclusions were stark.

The climate had not changed. This refuted a theory Roosevelt had been mulling for some time: that the plains were in the first years of a hundred-year cycle of change. The plains had suffered a severe drought-no argument there-but dry times were part of prairie life, dating back eons. An accompanying map showed the president what was obvious to any student of American geography: the nation's midsection west of the ninety-eighth meridian, from the Canadian border to Mexico, received only twenty inches of yearly rainfall or less. This was simply not enough rain to raise crops, no matter how much "dust-mulching" or other dry farming gimmicks were promoted, and it was why banks for so long had refused to lend money in this arid zone. During the drought, the dry states had received anywhere from five to twelve inches annually.

"There is no reason to believe that the primary factors of climate, temperature, precipitation and winds in the Great Plains region have undergone any fundamental change," the report stated. "The problem of the Great Plains is not the product of a single act of nature, of a single year or even a series of exceptionally bad years."

What, then, was the cause?

"Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation," the report proclaimed. Specifically, "a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of war time demands which led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous."

For Roosevelt, who believed in human initiative aided by government goodwill as a guiding force, these words were hard to take. His most trusted aide on the land and a host of experts were telling him that people people -not weather or bad luck-had caused the problem. What's more, in an additional blow to Roosevelt's humanitarian impulses, the experts said a big part of what ailed the prairie could not be fixed by man. -not weather or bad luck-had caused the problem. What's more, in an additional blow to Roosevelt's humanitarian impulses, the experts said a big part of what ailed the prairie could not be fixed by man.

"The basic cause of the present Great Plains situation is an attempt to impose upon the region a system of agriculture to which the Plains are not adapted," the report stated. "The Great Plains has climatic attributes which cannot be altered by any act of man, although they may be slowly changed, for better or worse, by natural weather cycles which we cannot yet predict."

The report moved on to how the disaster had unfolded-a chronology of collapse. One chart showed how quickly the gra.s.s was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Gra.s.s was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall. Buffalo gra.s.s, in particular, short and drought-resistant, was nature's refinement over centuries. The turf was intact for thousands of years, and then in two manic periods of exploitation-the cattle boom, followed by the wheat bubble-it was ripped apart.

"Thus there was not only a progressive breaking up of the native sod but a thinning out of the gra.s.s cover on lands not yet plowed."

But having placed the blame for the flyaway plains on the farming equivalent of a gold rush, Bennett and his colleagues did not then fault the individuals who brought the plow that broke the land.

"The settlers lacked both the knowledge and incentive necessary to avoid these mistakes. They were misled by those who should have been their natural guides. The Federal homestead policy, which kept land allotments low and required that a portion of each should be plowed, is now seen to have caused immeasurable harm. The Homestead Act of 1862, limiting an individual holding to 160 acres, was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty."

This was the most d.a.m.ning indictment: the sacred Homestead Act, almost an obligatory act of poverty! almost an obligatory act of poverty!

Technology and speculation came in for their share of blame. Wartime demand drove up prices, stimulating record production. The prices could not hold, leaving farmers to plow more ground as the only way to break even. And these bountiful years happened "at the beginning of a wet period which has apparently been terminated." Had farmers tried to settle the arid plains forty years earlier when it was more typically dry, they never would have broken ground.

"The dust storms of 1934 and 1935 have been visible evidence to nearly every American living east of the Rocky Mountains that something is seriously wrong. The extent of the erosion on the Great Plains has not yet been accurately measured. It is safe to say that 80 percent of it is now in some stage of erosion."

Roosevelt liked action plans, programs that could be carried out quickly, grandly mobilizing big forces toward a common goal.

"We are definitely in the era of building," he said in a speech, "the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and with the definite objective of building human happiness."

But the report said there was no easy solution.

"This is a situation that will not by any possibility cure itself. A series of wet years might postpone the destructive process, yet in the end, by raising false hopes and by encouraging renewal of mistaken agricultural practices, might accelerate it."

And why should a city person care about this wreckage of lives and land?

"The situation is so serious that the Nation, for its own sake, cannot afford to allow the farmer to fail," the report concluded. "We endanger our democracy if we allow the Great Plains, or any other section of the country, to become an economic desert."

It was enough to keep Roosevelt up nights. Failed homestead acts. Settlers misled. A speculative frenzy. And now the retreat: ten thousand people a month leaving the Great Plains, the greatest single exodus in American history. He took to the airwaves, sounding pained and conflicted. In a radio chat on September 6, 1936, too early in the calendar to claim to be from his "fireside," he tried to inspire people to hold on.

"No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no gra.s.shoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children, who have carried us through desperate days, and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity, and their courage."

It was an election year, and Roosevelt was extremely popular. Europe was tense, with Hitler consolidating power and fortifying his military in Germany, and the Spanish Civil War a staging ground for the larger battle to come. Consumed by its domestic crisis, the United States declared neutrality in the affairs of Europe. The Republicans ran a Kansan, Governor Alf Landon, the only GOP governor west of the Mississippi. Landon said Roosevelt had no idea how to fix the Great Plains and was taking the country in a radical direction. Most Americans felt otherwise: the election was a rout. Roosevelt carried every state but Maine and Vermont, winning the Electoral College by the largest margin ever, 523 to 8, and the popular vote by more than ten million, with 60 percent of the electorate. Late in his life, Landon was asked about the New Deal and its lasting effect on the country. He said it "saved our society."

The High Plains, like the rest of the country, had given its heart to Roosevelt. People wrote to him as if he were an uncle, the one who always had an answer.

"Please do something to help us save our country, where one time we were all so happy," a plainswoman, Mary Gallagher, wrote.

FDR went back to Bennett and others at work on the larger report of the future of the dusted land. What was next? They had more of the same coming: the past had been a failure, nature was abused, the dust storms were the consequence, don't count on rain to save it.

"Nature has established a balance in the Great Plains," an early draft of the second report concluded. "The white man has disturbed this balance; he must restore it, or devise a new one of his own." Here was an echo of Aldo Leopold's groundbreaking conservation essay of 1933; they even quoted him, citing the interdependence of people and other species, earth and technology.

Bennett's agency was ready to start planting the first sections of new sod on the stripped land. But many questions remained: how could gra.s.s ever get started during a marathon of drought? What species would survive? How long would it take for the sod to build up, resilient as in the past? Were there enough nutrients in the soil for gra.s.s to take hold? Soil science was basic; agronomists could tell the makeup of soil, its composition, but no one had ever dreamed of recreating an entire ecosystem. The new gra.s.s would have to live or die on the nutrient-poor land, after it was settled with basic erosion therapy. The nesters had removed a perennial plant, a perfect fit for flat, wind-sc.r.a.ped land, and replaced it with a weak annual. The government bought 107,000 acres in a dead corner of Kansas that drained into the Cimarron River, just over the state line from No Man's Land, and designated it as the first patch in the rebuilding of the great American gra.s.sland. They planted a mixture: weeds to hold the ground down, gra.s.s from Africa, blue grama, bluestem, buffalo gra.s.s, and other flora. It would take time: ten, twenty, maybe fifty years before a big new swath of turf was in place again.

Roosevelt still wanted something dramatic, something quicker-a Grand Coulee Dam for the soil. His "Big Idea" of planting trees down the middle of America had taken on a life of its own after the Forest Service came back with a positive report. The president had been mocked since he first talked up his vision, a belt of trees a hundred miles wide, stretching from the North Dakota border with Canada to just south of Amarillo, Texas. Trees could not stop the dust. But they could provide shelter from black blizzards, enough so people could get a crop in. He hoped the project could accomplish three things: Break up the wind. Break up the wind.

Check erosion.

Employ thousands of people.

Some also said the trees would produce more rain, though this promise was never written into the enabling law. And in pushing for government-subsidized tree-planting on the flatlands, Roosevelt was harkening back to an earlier American law, the Timber Culture Act, which allowed people to claim a significantly larger homestead if they agreed to plant and maintain trees on a portion of the land.

A tree-planting crew was dispatched to Oklahoma, east of No Man's Land. Roosevelt's Big Idea was underway.

"This will be the largest project ever undertaken in the country to modify climate and agricultural conditions," said F. A. Silc.o.x, chief of the Forest Service. He apparently had not read the warnings of the Great Plains report, the cautions against trying to remake the climate. The tree planters were CCC crews, young men hungry for work; an eleven-man team could plant six thousand trees a day. Nesters stared at these earnest New Dealers dropping saplings in the ruined soil, planting trees like crops in rows running north and south, filling the tanks of big gas-hauling trucks with water to give the trees a start. d.a.m.n fools, the nesters said. n.o.body plants a tree on the prairie facing north and south. After a time, the crews shifted and planted rows running east and west, a more effective wind barrier.

Trees would bring people together, make it easier to live, some of the experts said-social change through hardwood. "We are going to improve living conditions," said Charles Scott, who was in charge of the shelterbelt program in Kansas. "We want to make conditions livable. We want to develop a rural sociability, a rural happiness, a rural contentment which we think such plantings will bring about."

The goal was to plant 180,000 acres a year, mostly on private land, which the owner would then take responsibility for. The trees were planted in strips up to a mile apart, up to a hundred strips within the width of the shelterbelt. Farming would take place between the strips. One government scientist who had been sent to the Gobi Desert to study what could grow on sterile soil came back with several species; another returned from the Sahara with suggestions. Adjustments were made based on advice from nesters. Into the ground went cottonwoods, honey locusts, hackberries, ash, walnuts, ponderosa pines, and Chinese elms. The trees held through that first winter, and by late spring of 1937, as the dusters started up with the ferocious seasonal winds, Roosevelt sent the crews out again. The president ignored the warnings of Hugh Bennett and others who said man could not alter the basic nature of the Great Plains. Bennett could have his fledgling new gra.s.sland and soil conservation districts, but Roosevelt bulled ahead with the idea that had most captivated him from the start. He dispatched his army to half a dozen states, to the most broken counties, the most barren farms, the driest land, with a simple command: plant trees, two hundred million of them, from the top of the plains to the bottom.