THE BLACK BLIZZARD
Perhaps the title is a bit misleading. Perhaps you the readers are a bit puzzled. Who ever heard of a black blizzard? And, perhaps more to the point; what is it? I graduated from grade school in 1933. Grade schools out here had an eight month term. They started near September 1 and ended the last week in April. I received my diploma a few days before my fourteenth birthday. The summer of 1933 was a dry year. The depression, which started with the stock market crash in 1929, was four years old. Prices were cheap. Sorghum grain sold for ten cents a bushel, corn and wheat for a little more. It had been fifteen years since the Yanks came marching home from France and the First World War. During that war prices for food stuff had risen to unbelievable levels. Farmers planted all the wheat they could, hoping for the day when it would bring three dollars per bushel. Alas, it did not happen. Never the less, the plow uprooted thousands of acres of native grass. Even the sandhills of Nebraska felt the farmer's plow. Settlers flocked to homestead areas that were still open. Families flocked to the west. It was, they were led to believe, a land of promise. The railroads and local newspapers together with the promotions in large eastern newspapers helped spread the idea that anyone willing to work could make a fortune in the new land. The decade of the twenties was a period of adjustment. Prices dropped. Interest on borrowed money increased to a point where many farmers were finding the situation hopeless. Most hung on somehow. Many just picked up what they could take and left. They could not sell the land for enough to pay the mortgage. Eventually much of this land was sold at a sheriffs sale for taxes. This situation certainly left many in financial ruin but it also created an opportunity for some who could arrange financing. This was probably the beginning of consolidation of land into larger holdings and the trend is still continuing. Thus the stage was set for change. The plowed land in much of the Nebraska sandhills was slowly being turned back to grass. It was a slow process. The sandhills without cover could become a place of sandstorms in dry years. The bare dry ground in western Kansas could become a barren land when the rains failed to come. In the early years of the thirties we reaped the results of the disaster that was sown in the post world war days. We were hard pressed just to have food and shelter. Then came the dry years, grasshoppers and the everlasting wind. For some reason that I do not pretend to understand these three go together. Our farming practices were not designed to cope with the problem of wind erosion. Our farm was small and the source of income was crops and livestock. In the summer of 1933 we cut Russian thistles for hay and made silage of corn that suffered from the drought. Feed for livestock was simply not available. The overgrazed grass provided little forage. Livestock were sold for a few dollars per head. There was no choice. The federal government had a program that provided a market of sorts for some farmers who were almost penniless. I can remember eating pork that did not have enough fat to fry it properly. This was the way it was in 1933. Then! Enter Franklin D. Roosevelt. Retook charge in a dramatic way. The bank holiday was first. It was designed to help banks that were in trouble. I don't know much about its effect. The W.P.A. and the C.C.C. followed. (They were referred to in an earlier article.) They certainly helped many hard pressed families. A farm program followed. Summer fallow was promoted. It was supposed to store moisture one year for the crop produced the year following. This practice is still in
^^ use today. It was not a perfect solution to the drought problem. In fact if the fall planted wheat did not cover the ground it was sure to blow the following winter. That is exactly what happened in '34, '35 and '36. I have seen fields that had been planted with a lister. All the loose soil was blown away and the little marks made by the subsoiler were plainly visible. The blown soil ended up in fences or in any sheltered place. Some of it was in piles in the field where a weed held it. These piles could be seen for many years. The everlasting wind would pick up the soil into clouds high in the air. When one of these fronts came through it was an awe inspiring sight. The prudent would take cover because there was nothing that could be done. A team of horses might find their way but a person in a car could only stop until it cleared a bit. I remember one such front. It rolled in from the northwest about four o'clock in the afternoon. It obscured the sun and became so dark that I literally felt of landmarks to reach the house which was less than one hundred yards away. How many bad ones occurred? I don't know. They were quite frequent during those dry years. Nineteen thirty seven was the year that the drought was broken but alas, that was the year our family was forced to leave the farm. It was turned over to the Federal Land Bank by my widowed mother. Bill Brown, a neighbor, bought the three hundred and twenty acres in 1940 for $2200.00.
*In those days much of the spring crop was planted with a lister. This machine had a moldboard that turned soil both ways and made a trench about two inches deep but appeared to be much deeper because it made a ridge between the furrows that were 42" apart. A subsoiler made a small trench in the bottom of the furrow where seed was placed.