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Plains Prone to drought dnd dust, farmland still manages to yield a good crop -- and even hardier families By Lisa Levitt Ryckman It was a perfect Sunday, as clear and warm and sweet a day as southeast Colorado had seen in a long time. The breeze gave no warning of what was to come. In Kiowa, Prowers and Baca counties, they saw it rolling in from the north, towering, twisting, boiling across the plains. Some people thought they saw faces in the clouds. Some people thought it was the end of the world.
April 14, 1935: Black Sunday. The worst dust storm in a decade full of them.
We had never seen one come in quite like this one. It was straight up and down, a straight wall. That was very different. Most of them were lower to the ground, but this one was as high as you wanted to look. You couldn't see the person standing next to you, and we were standing shoulder to shoulder. It was that dark. --Ike Osteen, 81, Springfield
The ghosts of towns past haunt the High Plains, 200 post offices come and gone. The harshness of the land stole the optimism that built them. Plains Indians used the land as a seasonal hunting ground; they did not stay. But homesteaders came as the 20th century began, like Ike Osteen's father. They claimed 320 acres of buffalo grass, endless fields that meet endless sky in a clean, flat line in every direction. They plowed and planted. The years before the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s were relatively wet ones in a region where the annual average rainfall is less than a foot. Word of wheat, plentiful and profitable, fueled the drive. Suitcase farmers, people called them. "People came in and broke up this land to plant wheat," said Grace McKinnis, who has lived in Springfield for most of her 90 years. "They broke up the land, and then we didn't have rain. And they just left it." The Great Depression, from the Wall Street crash of 1929 to the outbreak of World War II a decade later, drove wheat prices down, from $1 per bushel to 25 cents. During the '30s, Baca County lost 41 percent of its population and 71 percent of its crop value. Drought was the final blow.
We got married in 1935. It was a good year for dirt. It piled up as high as the fenceposts. In the daytime, we had to hang wet sheets in the windows. And when it come mealtime, you had to have one over the food, and reach under there and get something to eat. It was unreal. -- Helen Harris, 81, Sheridan Lake
Low prices and little rainfall still take their toll.
Agriculture has been replaced by technology and tourism as the driving economic force in Colorado, and the High Plains offers little in the way of recreation or employment. "All our young people leave," said Clarence Woelk, who came from Kansas to Sheridan Lake in 1945 and has been there ever since. "There is just one couple left who was here when we come. Only one." Woelk collects pieces of High Plains history on his land. Two old schoolhouses, the kind they used to build 10 miles apart because there were so many kids. A turn-of-the-century post office from a town that died. The rusting skeletons of ancient farm equipment, the earliest weapons in a war dictated by weather. Family farmers have become a disappearing breed. In 1974, 427 farms accounted for 48.7 percent of the value of Colorado farm products, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. In 1997, the most recent survey, just 96 farms accounted for 51.1 percent. Since 1992, the amount of Colorado land used as farms and ranches has dropped by 4 percent; the average size of each place, by 8 percent; and the number of full-time operations, by 5 percent. In Kiowa County, much of the farming is dry land, or non-irrigated. Wheat yields are typically half those of irrigated land. During Dust Bowl days, the government began paying farmers to take their land out of production. The program created two national grasslands in Colorado -- Pawnee to the north and Comanche to the south -- and made it possible for some farmers to stay on their land through the stingiest years. Floyd Coulter put his 1,000 acres in the government's conservation program 10 years ago. Now it's gone back to grass, but he can remember years he raised 72-bushel-an-acre corn. "If you get the moisture, you can raise good crops here," said Coulter, 78, who grew up south of Walsh on his family's farm and now lives with his wife Opal in Springfield. "We just keep learning new things to help us out," he said. "I don't think it'll ever be like the '30s. I really don't."
When we went to church on Sunday morning, you took your scoop shovel and your broom. No use cleaning Saturday. It would be dirty again by Sunday. Everybody's in there scooping the dirt out of the whole church. And then we'd pray for rain. And you kinda think maybe the Lord forgot you. -- Clarence Woelk, 84, Sheridan Lake
Tree rings tell stories to someone who knows how to read them, like Connie Woodhouse. And the story she's come up with is long and dry. The researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Data Center in Boulder looked to the trees, soil, seeds and historical records to determine drought patterns for the past two millennia.
Colorado has suffered major droughts once or twice a century for at least 400 years and probably beyond that, Woodhouse said. "Because they've happened in the past, it implies that it may happen in the future," she said. In the 20th century, Colorado suffered through the "Dirty '30s," a drought of almost eight years, and the "Filthy '50s," about five years. But those were drops in the dust bucket compared with droughts of 20-plus years in the 13th and 16th centuries. Many scientists believe that the earlier one forced the Ancient Pueblans to abandon their cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. The toll such a drought could take now is almost unimaginable. During the 1930s, Colorado's hardest-hit counties saw their crops cut in half; from 1933 to 1936, the federal government spent $133 million in Colorado and nine other states for general relief and work programs and $100 million on drought assistance. Peanuts compared with potential costs today. "Last summer's drought in Oklahoma and Texas cost those states in excess of $7 billion -- in just that small drought," Woodhouse said. "You can guess what would happen if that went on now." State water engineer Hal Simpson doesn't want to guess. He wants to know. "We are getting the tools to let us impose a hypothetical long-term drought on the system and see what the consequences might be," he said. "Unfortunately, because we haven't had a drought since the '50s, people don't do the planning for it. The pain of that has been forgotten."
You'd get up in the morning, and everything was covered with a layer of dirt. You'd take the vacuum, and you'd vacuum up the best it could, but it stuck. You never could get it all up. You had to wash it. You'd vacuum and dust and wash. You'd just get everything cleaned up, and next day, here came another one. In 1954 -- was it February? It blew for three days. When it quit blowing, dirt had drifted just like snow around our fenceposts. -- Hazel Woelk, 80, Sheridan Lake
A dust storm resembles an airborne avalanche: wind whips up a swirl of powdery soil that feeds on all the dirt in its path, growing to Godzilla-like proportions as it churns across the plains. It could shear off grass at the roots, dig trenches, make mountains out of molehills. Impenetrable. Unstoppable. Drought creates dust, and it created huge amounts in the '30s, due in part to farming practices that encouraged erosion. The federal government intervened, paying farmers to allow their acres to revert to grasslands and teaching them ways to retain moisture and soil. The self-propelled, center-pivot sprinkler, invented in 1950 by Strasburg farmer Frank Zybach, brought irrigation to dry lands, watering 133-acre circles that some called "wheels of fortune," turning the Dust Bowl into fields of wheat, corn and sorghum. Irrigation takes the edge off drought and helps the dust settle. On Colorado's High Plains, 700,000 acres bloom because of water sucked from the Ogallala aquifer, an underground sponge of rock and sediment created by millions of years of Rocky Mountain erosion. It covers 140,000 square miles from South Dakota to Texas, a quadrillion gallons of water. But even that can't last forever. Ten percent of Colorado's irrigated acres are expected to disappear by 2015; more will be forced out of production as the water table drops, the costs of pumping water become prohibitive and Front Range cities snap up agricultural water rights for urban use. The Ogallala covers almost the entire state of Nebraska, but in Colorado, it does not equally bless those in its path. The groundwater saturation extends deepest near Holyoke. But around Burlington, where the aquifer is at its shallowest, they joke about its longevity. How do you make sure your grandkids can farm? Move them to Nebraska. "Up by Wray, in 100 years, there will still be water," said George VanSlyke, supervising geologist with the state Division of Water Resources. "Down in Burlington, they have about 80 feet left. You're probably looking at a 50-year useful life in that area." The Ogallala is tapped by at least seven other states, and their withdrawals from the aquifer equal 30 percent of all the nation's groundwater used for irrigation. Colorado, on the aquifer's western edge, sucks up about 1.6 billion gallons a year. It is one of the lesser users. "The overdraft of groundwater on the High Plains is the greatest in the nation, in the world, in all of human history," Marc Reisner wrote in his book on western water, Cadillac Desert. In 1975, he said, users drew the Ogallala down by 14 million acre-feet, an amount equal to the entire flow of the Colorado River. The Colorado Groundwater Commission decided in 1965 that a 40 percent decline in the water table over 25 years would be acceptable, Simpson said, "But it hasn't been that drastic. It's been more like 20 percent through 1990." That's due in part to the lack of any '30s or '50s-style drought in recent years. But no one expects that to continue: science, history and the law of averages say otherwise. So far, 1999 has been a very dry year. "Unless something really changes, it seems like it's going to happen sometime in the future," Simpson said. "You can look back and see it."
It could happen again. When it dries up, it dries. I don't care what kind of a chisel tool you use, you can't stop it. Because the ground is dry. You don't ever pull up anything but dirt. They say with this new big machinery, we'll never have it. But we will have it. If it turns dry, that topsoil surface will all blow off. There's nothing holding it. And it blows. -- Clarence Woelk
March 26, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society |
