Tag: The Great Depression

Gullywasher But No End to Drought

No end to drought

August 31, 1935

Well, that gullywasher and the flood that followed it wasn’t the end of the drought. A couple of months later, Pop found me in the orchard sawing off another dead limb from the Macintosh apple tree.

“Nora, take it easy,” He grabbed my arm. “You’re gonna saw off your fingers.”

I looked over my shoulder. My tears were still streaming. “Our trees are all dying!”

Pop sighed. “I know, Nora, but maiming yourself won’t save them.”

“But, Pop, it all seems so hopeless. We can’t grow a crop. We can’t feed a steer. I can’t go dancing.” I buried my face in my hands.

“And Mom can’t stop coughing.”

“You know what the doctor said.” He gathered me into his arms. “Coughing out all that dust is good.”

I relaxed a bit.

“And at night, she takes that concoction your Aunt Mag mixed up from Grandma’s recipe. It helps her sleep.”

“I know, Pop. Her coughing doesn’t wake me up so much anymore.”

“See. Sometimes I think the old midwives and herbalists like your grandmother know a lot more than the doctors.”

“If the storms would just stop. If I could just see something green—once in a while.”

“You will, Nora. This drought is gonna stop sometime. Your grandparents used to talk about a drought in the 1870s that couldn’t seem to stop, either. And they had locusts. I guess it was pretty bad then, too.”

“You think it will stop?”

“In time, yes. Then you’ll see all the green you want. Wheat and oats and corn and lettuce and green beans. Carrots. What I wouldn’t give for a nice crisp carrot.”

“Or a tomato. Imagine a sweet, ripe tomato, meat filling your mouth, juice running down your chin. I wouldn’t even mind staining my shirt.” I leaned against his shoulder. “Pop, what do you suppose Connor’s eating these days?”

“Remember the letter we got last week. He’s in the Civilian Conservation Corps now. Said they’re sending him to Tahoe National Forest. I imagine they’ll feed those boys very well.”

“I’ll bet it’s pretty and green there. Think about when we took Uncle Lawrence to California—back when it rained here, and we could get away.”

“Sure do. We camped one night at Tahoe.”

“I remember the pine trees rustling in the breeze and the warm pine smell. We could see the stars peeking among the branches.”

“And the air felt so cool.” Pop released me, held my shoulders and pushed me away, looking into my eyes. “Maybe we can go there again when it starts to rain. It’ll take a few years to catch up, but maybe . . .”

“Maybe so, Pop, but you know, I really envy Connor. He’s in that beautiful country. In the woods. Up in the mountains. He probably isn’t even sweating himself dry.”

“Prob’ly not, Nora, but those boys are there to work. And if they’re still out there this winter, it’s gonna be pretty dang chilly.”

“Well, we’re working here, too, and I wouldn’t mind the cold and some snow crunching under my feet. Oh, Pop, I’m so tired of grit in my hair. Grit in my teeth and grit under my fingernails. I can’t ever feel clean. I’m afraid I’ll get stuck here and never see anything else. Never get to see what goes on in other places. Never do anything but what I’m doing right now.”

Pop looked a little startled. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Timbuktu. Cairo. London. Paris.”

“Really?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m just so tired of dust.”

“I know, Sweetheart, it really wears you down, doesn’t it?”

“To the nubbins.” I looked at my toes. They were beginning to show through my shoes. “What I wouldn’t do for a whole pair of shoes.” I looked at Pop. “Or the material to make a new dress. I haven’t even had a new dress in years. Neither has Mom—or you, Pop.”

Pop grinned. “I’m not too interested in a new dress,” he said.

I chuckled. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. It does get depressing sometimes. “But,” he glanced toward the house, “we’d probably better get inside before the beans get cold.”

“Ugh,” I said, grabbing the saw I had dropped when Pop grabbed me. I swung it by my side as we walked to the house.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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It Rained! The End of the Drought?

The end of the Dust Storms?

June 15, 1935

The day after we returned from Red Cloud, I stormed around the house, stripping beds and pulling down curtains.

“Whoa Nora,” Mom said. “I can’t wash this stuff as fast as you drag it out here, and the bedding has to dry before night.”

“I’m just so excited to feel clean for a change.”

Mom coughed a bit then said, “I understand. I’m thrilled too, but we can’t do everything at once.”

“Okay,” I agreed, “I’ll dust and sweep. How’s that?”

“Just take it easy. Don’t stir it up so we can’t breathe.”

Chastened, I grabbed a bunch of dust rags and started shoving piles of dust off the furniture onto the floor. I used the dustmop to pick it up, had to take it outside and shake it out over and over. As I worked, I sang Woodie Guthrie’s song, “You get a line and I’ll get a pole, Honey; You get a line and I’ll get a pole, Babe; You get a line and I’ll get a pole; We’ll go fishin’ in the crawdad hole; Honey, Baby mine . . .”

Pop stepped in from milking and grinned. “I haven’t seen such cheer in months. Hard to believe what a little bit of rain can do.”

“Well, the dust storms are over, and we can live again.”

“Maybe. One gully-washer doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the drought.”

“Don’t be a spoil sport, Pop.”

He chuckled. “I’m actually happy, too. I do hope it lasts. Since it’s too wet to get into the field yet, I’ll help you gals out in here.”

While I worked on shining up the house, Pop helped Mom. He wrung the bedding and moved it into the rinse tub. He had to empty and fill both tubs three times. And he hung everything on the line for Mom. Even though she wasn’t coughing so much now, she hadn’t regained her strength, and Pop always looked out for Mom.

By supper time, we had all collapsed around the table. We ate slowly and lightly. As soon as we finished, I announced that I would go outside and use the remaining daylight to write a letter to Connor. Mom and Pop went to bed.

I sat on the west side of the house looking out at the straggly remains of the orchard.

Dear Connor,

It rained! It rained! It rained! You can come home now. The drought’s over.

We didn’t get just a little drizzle like we’ve been having for the past year and a half. We got a gully-washer. The yard was so muddy, our boots kept getting stuck in it. The bridge washed out at the bottom of the hill, so we’ll need you to help build it back.

We took the horses down to Red Cloud to see the flood on the Republican. It was awful! There were houses and barns floating downstream. I saw a gigantic tree with its whole root system lying on its side. I saw cows and pigs and chickens—and a man. He was floating face down, swirling around in the eddies. Connor, it was awful. Mom said we couldn’t rescue him because anybody who went into that torrent would drown too.

But imagine, Connor. They may never find him. What about his family? They’ll never know what happened to him. They won’t be able to bury him. It’s so awful. I wanted to be sick, but I wasn’t.

Remember when I told you about what we were doing for Mom’s cough? She still coughs some, but not nearly like before you left. The glass cloth keeps a lot of the dust out, but it still seeps in some. She never goes outside when the wind blows, and you know how often that is. BUT it’s over! We don’t need to worry about dust anymore. It can blow all it wants.

I ran out of light about then, so I lit a kerosene lantern and went upstairs to my bedroom. I cleared my comb, brush, and lotion jars off the dressing table that Pop and I had made with orange crates and a board left from some other project. Then I went on with my letter.

I spent the day dusting and sweeping. It will probably take a couple of times to really get it clean, but it’s a start. Pop helped Mom wash the sheets and quilts. They all dried by bedtime in the nice little breeze we had.

I’m so bored here. The rain made everything better, but I’m lonesome and I envy you out there in that Civilian Conservation Corps camp—in Tahoe National Forest. You’re meeting a lot more people. Why don’t they have a program for women too? I could work hard like you do. I already work hard here on the farm, but nobody believes we women can do much. Sometimes I get so mad.

Well, I guess that’s all. Take good care of yourself, and we’ll probably see you when your hitch is up with the CCC.

Nora

I slipped my letter into an envelope, licked it, and set it up on the dresser to mail in the morning. I looked out the window at a full moon that was distorted by the glass cloth, then stripped out of my clothes, slipped a clean nightgown over my head and crawled between clean sheets.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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The Great 1935 Republican River Flood

We thought the drought was over

May 31, 1935

Did you ever hear that you’ve got to be careful what you wish for? It has always seemed a weird thing to say—until it rained.

All morning, we watched the clouds billowing and building, turning darker and darker. At about eleven, it began rumbling in the west as we went about our chores—abbreviated as they were by lack of livestock to tend. The sky towered above us when the flash blinded us and the giant red cedar in the yard sizzled. We watched the top of the tree blaze—and then the clouds opened up and quenched the flames.

It rained four inches in half an hour, filling the rain gauge, and it kept on raining. Pop stood in the open doorway watching the deluge as our house filled with the sweet smell of rain, of ozone, of wet soil. We all took the deepest breaths we’d taken in years.

“None of this is soaking in,” Pop said, shaking his head. “If there was any topsoil left after the windstorms, it’s headed down to the Missouri River now.”

It rained, and it kept on raining. I went outside and danced a jig in the mud, splashing myself with filth and laughing.

Our farmstead sits on a tall hill, but the creek in the bottom became a brown torrent, taking out the bridge and all the little critters that couldn’t get to high ground fast enough. At chore time, we slogged through slimy yellow clay in our four-buckle boots. The mud would grab our feet, slurping us into its grip. The boots would have pulled off if not for the buckles. When we finally managed to pull one foot loose, the mud made a loud sucking sound as if it were sad to lose its grip. Sometimes, the release of tension on one foot with the other still stuck, would send us sprawling.

Even though her hair was plastered to her head and her clothes were soaked, Mom told us how happy it made her to walk outside and breathe at the same time—without a mask. She milked the cows and fed the chickens, and she didn’t even seem to mind when she ended up face down in mud soup.

After sixteen months of dust storms and two years of drought, we thought it was over. As soon as the fields dried up, Pop would plant a crop. He’d have to buy seed corn because what he’d already planted had washed down the hills and into the creek. Maybe somewhere in the Mississippi Delta it would come up.

A couple of days after the rainstorm, we managed to get the horses across the creek, which ran inside its banks by then. Pop and Mom and I rode down to the Republican River at Red Cloud. Our little town got its supplies from the rail depot there. It was a long ride—we didn’t often ride the horses, but we’d have to rebuild the bridge before we could take the wagon.

We heard the river long before we saw it, the Republican River flooding, the roar of surging water punctuated with thumps and bumps. When we got to the south edge of town, we got our first glimpse of the carnage. Water filled the valley almost bluff to bluff. The depot, where Pop picked up his carload of fenceposts, was half under water. Whole houses and barns swirled past, smashing into trees that hadn’t given up to the flood. I saw a bloated cow and a bunch of waterlogged chickens sweeping past our vantage point where we stood among a crowd of others there to assess the damage.

Then I spotted a man in a red and white checked shirt, face down, on the crest, turning lazily—head first, then feet first.

“Get him out,” I screamed.

Mom gathered me in her arms. “We can’t, Nora. Anybody going out in that torrent would only drown. Nothing anybody can do for him.”

“Bury him,” I said.

“There’ll be a lot of burying when this is over. They won’t find everybody.”

“But Mom . . .”

“I know, Nora. We are so lucky. We’re all here and we’re all safe.”

“Not Connor.”

“I know, Nora. He’s not here and I miss him every day. But I have to believe he’s safe in that CCC camp.”

I wanted to throw up. That poor man. And what about his family? What if it were Connor and I would never see him again. What if I never knew what happened to him?

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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Atmospheric Dust Storm

Atmospheric Dust Storm

April 11, 1935

I’d carried buckets of water from the windmill to mix with the dust in the garden, turning over the resulting soil. I was going to plant those vegetables I’d planned last summer. When I began hearing geese honking, I looked toward the sound and saw geese and ducks flying in confused clusters with songbirds, all squawking and quacking and twittering. They appeared to fly in a panic. I turned to where they’d come from in the north. A black wall swept toward me in silence, stretching from east to west as far as I could see.

I stood staring. I couldn’t move. The curtain moved swiftly, rolling over hills and houses, windmills and fences. I smelled dust but heard no wind. I couldn’t understand. We’d had plenty of dust storms in the past fourteen months or so, but a roaring wind always pushed them. What I saw looked like the end of the world, but I heard nothing.

Strangely, I felt no fear—just awe at the beautiful, terrifying sight.

As Armageddon swallowed the neighbor’s barn, I began to hear Pop’s voice. “Nora! Get in the house!” But the words were meaningless in the face of such enormous power. “Nora!” Pop yelled in my ear. He scooped an arm around my waist, propelling me to the house.

“What was that?”

Pop shook me gently. “What were you thinking?”

“What was that?”

“Pop sighed. “I don’t know. I stepped out of the barn and there it was, coming fast.”

“The wind, Pop. I didn’t hear the wind.”

“I know. It’s like the dust was falling like rain—like a gully-washer. I don’t know what it means, how it moves, where it came from.”

Mom bustled in from the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“We don’t know,” Pop told her. “We seem to be having a dust storm without the wind.”

“How . . .”

“We don’t know.”

In moments, the house went dark. We heard the tick, tick, ticking of sand and dust tinkling against the windows. Mom felt her way to a kerosene lantern, and some matches she kept on the shelf beside it. The lantern only gave enough light to see each other dimly if we stood close together. Our eyes itched and we tried to breathe carefully. Not too deeply. The air felt heavy. Mom began coughing her familiar hack.

I felt my way to the kitchen for some scissors and the cheesecloth we’d brought home after our visit with Doc O’Neill almost a year earlier. I doubled over several layers and tied it around Mom’s nose and mouth, snipping the end.

“Can you breathe through that?”

“Well enough. You’d better cover up too—and make one for your father.”

The glass cloth we’d taped over the windows breathed with us, puffing out and in with a snap. We stared at each other, or rather at the white spots covering our noses and mouths. Mom coughed. We were going to need a lot more cheesecloth if this kept up.

Winter snows the year before had amounted to nothing, and spring rains hadn’t materialized yet either. The nice, rich topsoil that had helped Pop grow bumper crops of wheat and oats was piling up around the equipment and over the fencerows. After every storm Pop had to scoop a pile of it away from the barn doors on the west. Pasture the previous summer had become crisp and then gone under layers of dust. Pop had planted winter wheat, but it never germinated. Still hoping for spring rain, he’s set aside what little corn he grew for seed, but with the dust raining down on the fields, it would take a lot of real rain to grow a crop.

Mom had suggested that we send the cattle east to Otoe County, so we sent them to her Uncle Wesley Hickok who took them on shares. We sure couldn’t feed them.

The glass cloth was relatively clear, but the grid of stitching that held it together made it rather opaque. I kept looking out anyway, hoping I could see something out there. “The birds,” I said. “Pop, did you see all the birds flying before that curtain?”

“Curtain?”

“Yeah. It didn’t look like a cloud. It looked like a curtain.”

“Huh. I heard them. That’s part of what got me out of the barn to see what was going on.”

“I suppose we’ll lose all the chickens out chasing grasshoppers.”

“Animals are smart,” Mom said. “I heard the chickens squawking and I think they were running for the chicken house.”

“I guess we’re pretty much like the chickens.” I hesitated a moment, pulling a chair out from the table and plopping down on it. “I wish I could lay an egg.”

“What?” Mom said.

“At least it would be something useful.” I leaned my elbows in the grit on the table. “I can’t see to read. I can’t go outside and finish turning over the garden. If we took a roast out of the icebox, it would be covered with grit before we could get it into a pot. It’s too early to go to bed. I’m plumb bored out of my mind.” I glanced at Mom’s and Pop’s white masks. “I wish it would rain.”

Categories: Fiction Great Plains

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Dust Storms Killed People: Please Not Mom

After the storm, Mom still coughs, so the family visits Doc O’Neill

August 16, 1934

The dust storm didn’t let up until the next morning, but Pop had the buggy hitched as soon as he finished the chores. Mom coughed and coughed, so Pop wanted me to come along. I could help her while Pop talked to the doctor.

At O’Neill’s office, Mom managed to stop coughing long enough for Doc to listen to her lungs, but I suspect she was holding her breath all the time. He checked her nose and ears. Looked at her throat. His expression never changed. I didn’t know how worried I should be.

“Well,” he said when he was done. “Claire, I’m worried about the congestion in your lungs. I’ll bet all the coughing is wearing you out.”

Mom nodded, still coughing hard.

“But it’s good for you to cough out as much of that dust as you can. We don’t want this to turn into pneumonia.”

Pop’s face was screwing up into a worried mask.

Doc turned to Pop. “You need to take this very seriously. People mostly have respiratory symptoms, but this stuff can impair the circulation, and the nerves. It messes with digestion, kidneys and liver.”

He glanced at Pop, resting a comforting hand on Mom’s shoulder.

“That’s the bad news, and it’s not to that point yet. There are some things we can do to keep it from getting there.”

“What?” Pop asked. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Have you heard of glass cloth?”

“We use it on the outside of the windows in the winter.”

“Now I want you to use it to cover the windows on the inside. Cut it larger than the window frames and tape it, don’t tack it, all the way around that frame so the dust can’t filter in. You want to seal those windows.”

I could barely hear the doctor for Mom’s coughing.

“Pop, I’m taking Mom to the car so you can get Doc’s directions.”

I partially supported Mom as we walked out through the waiting room and Mom coughed and coughed. Pop came out in a few minutes with a syrup that he measured in the lid and offered it to Mom right away.

“I’m not sure that’s the exact dosage, but maybe it’ll give you some relief on the way home,” he said.

Mom sort of panted, holding her breath when she swallowed, then burst out coughing again.

“What did he say, Pop?”

“You heard about the glass cloth?”

I nodded.

“Claire, can you stand it in the car for a little while so I can get the stuff we need?”

Mom nodded.

“We’ll go to Chicago Lumber and get some of that glass cloth. Then we’ll go to the Mercantile for some cheesecloth.”

“Cheesecloth?”

“To make masks.”

“Masks! She already can’t breathe. Now we’re gonna put something over her face!”

“Yeah. Seems a little strange to me, too. But Doc says it’s helping a lot of his patients. He says we can’t stop the dust . . .”

“Huh!” I said.

“We can’t stop the dust from blowing, but maybe we can keep it from making us sick. The masks will filter it out of the air.”

So we went over to the lumber yard and the mercantile and, by the time we started for home, Mom’s coughing had let up a little bit.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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Nora: Enduring the Great Depression

Nora and her parents endure the Great Depression

August 15, 1934 — Willow Grove, Nebraska

We were playing tic tac toe in the dust on the floor when Pop came rushing in through the screen door.

“Looks like it’s blowing up a big one,” he said, “better get the house buttoned up.”

He went out to the pitcher pump and filled a couple of buckets, then closed the inner door, tight, as he returned. Meanwhile, Mom and I rushed around slamming all the windows shut. We hurried to the the linen closet and grabbed armloads of sheets, then the three of us dropped them, one by one, into the buckets of water.  We wrung them out, and hung them over the windows, just as we began to hear the wind howling around the southwest corner.

With the house closed as tight as we could make it, we tried to find something to do besides remember the storms of the past seven months. They’d started the previous winter—caught Mom and Pop out playing cards with Aunt Edna and Uncle Carl. They didn’t get home until the next morning. Connor was still home then, and we buttoned up the house as best we could and went to bed in piles of dust.

After almost eighteen months we’d refined our methods, but we still suffered. It didn’t take long for us to feel stifled this time either. We’d blow our noses, and our handkerchiefs would be black. In minutes, we started sweating. Rivulets of sweat poured down our faces and mixed with the dirt. When we wiped it off, we just smeared our faces muddy. Pop always shaved first thing in the morning, and dirt adhered, particularly, to Pop’s whiskers. It had us all scratching frantically around our necks.

We sat around in the dark, or near dark. Coughing, Mom lit a kerosene lamp. The house smelled like dust. It tasted like dust. Everything we’d touched for weeks—months—had felt gritty. During these storms, we moved through a fog of fine silty loam. Pop said that was his cropland blowing away. “At least,” he said, “after this is over, we can scoop some of it back out of the house.” Meanwhile, it’s almost all we could see, even inside.

“I closed up the barn as tight as I could, and the chicken house,” Pop said, “Made sure the hens had water.”

“It’s awful out there,” Mom said, “I feel so sorry for all the animals. Not even just our animals. Think of all the rabbits and coyotes and quail.”

“I’m still hearing that great horned owl,” I said. “I think there’s a pair of them. I think I’m hearing more than one.”

“I hope they’ve got a place to get out . . .” Mom couldn’t finish her thought because she started coughing, hard. When she recovered, she said that she’d seen a covey of quail in the brush just north of the brooder house—by the big mulberry tree. “Maybe they’ll be all right if the dust doesn’t just drift over the top of them. They’re so little.”

Pop cleared his throat and blew his nose. “Them pheasants they stocked back when seem to be doing okay in the draw down by where the creek used to be. Maybe I’ll go out when this storm is over and shoot a couple so we can have some meat with our beans.”

I sneezed a few times. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up,” I said. “Next year, can we plant something besides beans? Anything. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Anything.”

“I don’t know if anything besides beans can take the wind. It just dries everything up to shoe leather,” Pop said.

“Maybe if I bucket water to them every morning and evening?”

Mom started getting excited by the prospect, too. “Maybe some peas in March or April. Before it gets blistering hot.”

“Root crops,” I said. “Beets or carrots.”

“That’s a lot of water,” Pop said. “I wouldn’t try lettuce, though. One afternoon of wind, even with the roots saturated, would dry it to parchment.”

“But some of the other vegetables?”

“You can try, I suppose,” Mom said. “I’ve saved seeds.” She paused for a moment. “We have a good well and . . .” she started coughing again. “. . . and it doesn’t seem to ever go dry,” she said when she’d recovered.

As soon as we’d begun hearing wind, Mom had started coughing. That cough had me worried. I know it had worried Connor, too, before he took off for California. He told me he hated to leave with Mom getting along so poorly, but, if he left, there would be one less mouth to feed. He thought maybe he could find a job somewhere and send money home. I missed my brother like crazy, though. We were born only eighteen months apart, and we’d been almost like twins. We’d got a couple of letters from him when he first got to Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Emily’s place near El Cajon. He’d found some work in the hayfields there, but California was in a drought, too.

“What do you think Connor’s doing now,” I wondered aloud. “It doesn’t sound like they’re having dust storms in California.”

“Well,” Pop said, “he’s apparently left Uncle Lawrence’s place. He’s applied for that new program Roosevelt got passed. It’ll be a while before it gets started, but if he can get in, he’ll have work and a paycheck for a couple of years. Maybe this will be over by then.”

“Oh, I hope so,” Mom said.

It’s kind of hard to talk when you get dirt in your mouth every time you open it, so Mom and I tried to go back to our tic tac toe, just to distract ourselves. But it was too dark to see our grid and the dust sifting in covered it up almost as fast as we could start a game. Before long, we were all sitting on our bent-backed kitchen chairs, leaning on the table, sweating and panting, like a family of beached whales. And then Mom started coughing.

She coughed and gagged until I thought she’d strangle. The phlegm she coughed up was foamy and black. Pop wanted to take her to the doctor, but the car had already filled up with dirt during that first storm in February more than a year before. He’d had to have it towed into town to clean the engine before he could get it started again. After that, it stayed in the garage during dusters. Pop wasn’t sure Mom could take the trip to town anyway, and if the car stalled on the way, she would hardly have a chance.

So, I sat there, fidgeting, waiting for the wind to stop, listening to Mom coughing, and Pop trying to help her. Once just for something to do, I went upstairs, but it was worse up there. Our beds all looked like they’d been dragged behind the plow. My footsteps sounded like grinding sand into the once-polished yellow pine floors. The light was brighter up there, but all I could see was piles of dirt at the bottom of each window where it dropped off the sheet.

We knew the wind would probably blow all night and, even when the sun went down, we would get no relief from the heat or the dust. We sure couldn’t open a window. Sometime during the night, we went upstairs to bed. We didn’t bother to undress, we just shook some of the dust out of the blanket on top of the bed, not too vigorously, and laid on top of it, wishing we could just take a bath—even a little “spit bath.” Instead, we just endured.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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