Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains - Hardcover

Sheflin, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803285531 ISBN 13: 9780803285538

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Synopsis

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
2020 Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW) Award for Outstanding Western Book Finalist
 
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was the worst ecological disaster in American history. When the rains stopped and the land dried up, farmers and agricultural laborers on the southeastern Colorado plains were forced to adapt to new realities. The severity of the drought coupled with the economic devastation of the Great Depression compelled farmers and government officials to combine their efforts to achieve one primary goal: keep farmers farming on the Colorado plains.

In Legacies of Dust Douglas Sheflin offers an innovative and provocative look at how a natural disaster can dramatically influence every facet of human life. Focusing on the period from 1929 to 1962, Sheflin presents the disaster in a new light by evaluating its impact on both agricultural production and the people who fueled it, demonstrating how the Dust Bowl fractured Colorado’s established system of agricultural labor. Federal support, combined with local initiative, instituted a broad conservation regime that facilitated production and helped thousands of farmers sustain themselves during the difficult 1930s and again during the drought of the 1950s. Drawing from western, environmental, transnational, and labor history, Sheflin investigates how the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl and its complex consequences transformed the southeastern Colorado agricultural economy.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Sheflin is an instructor of history at Colorado State University.



 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Legacies of Dust

Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains

By Douglas Sheflin

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-8553-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Dust and Everything After, 
1. Early Lessons from the Land of Opportunity, 
2. The County Agents Take Root, 
3. Dirt, 
4. Claiming the Arkansas, 
5. On the Move, 
6. Food for Victory, 
7. An Unquenchable Thirst, 
8. Back to Work, 
Conclusion: There and Back Again?, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Early Lessons from the Land of Opportunity

Writing in 1929, Baca County, Colorado, resident J. L. Farrand expressed concern over the state of agriculture in southeastern Colorado, which he believed to be dangerously untenable. Farrand cited a dire need in Baca County to "acquaint farmers with all phases of cooperative marketing" so that they could work toward stabilizing prices and become more adept at "analyzing the farm business." Farmers looked for safeguards against continued economic strain, and in most cases this meant that they prioritized production as the best and only path to economic prosperity. Farrand believed that such focus led farmers to sacrifice their land's long-term fertility and therefore its potential for sustained production. He thought they gave short shrift to soil fertility and conservation. For example, he noted that they dismissed the importance of crop rotation in trying to reinvigorate soil's productive capacity by temporarily retiring parts of their acreage. He took it upon himself to offer several demonstrations of suitable soil conservation techniques "to show the efficacy of proper cultural and tillage methods in the prevention of soil blowing and the conservation of soil moisture." Farrand understood that farmers remained most concerned for their economic well-being, and he seemed sympathetic in most respects. But he also knew that productive farming meant protecting soil fertility. Thriving in agriculture meant more than planting, killing weeds, and waiting for rain. To ensure a successful farm, family security, and economicprosperity, farmers needed to value the soil. Convincing agriculturalists of that need often proved a Sisyphean task, however. Farrand clearly appreciated the peril that would result from wanton degradation of the soil, but the intensive agricultural practices that accompanied the "wheat boom" and that made the land vulnerable had become commonplace in the region by the 1920s, and their hold over farmers made Farrand's task incredibly difficult. To promote a shift in land use, Farrand and others who shared his dismay over exploitive farming had to help farmers admit that their survival required them to reconsider their relationship with the land in southeastern Colorado. At its core, this meant recognizing the importance of protecting the soil before farmers could achieve a prosperous and sustainable agricultural economy.

This might not have meant much then or now had Farrand just been jotting this down in a journal or his memoirs. But Farrand was not a passive observer. He served as the Baca County Extension Service county agent in 1929, and his position allowed him to develop an intimate perspective on the process and prospects of farming while requiring him to share his views with county farmers. His Extension training prepared him for his post by instructing him on how to assess land use, to work with local communities, and to extend his knowledge and resources to improve the agricultural economy. He visited local farms, published bulletins, responded to letters and inquiries, and conducted informational demonstration meetings on issues ranging from food preservation to improving the family diet to proper crop rotation. These factors afforded Farrand a unique point of view regarding land use in southeastern Colorado; his pronounced anxiety over the agricultural economy's stability and his distress over exploitative land use proved remarkably prescient. When he extolled the need to adapt land use, he did so with a firm understanding of the region's history and an idea of its rather grim future.

Farrand was certainly not alone in identifying the need to reconsider the fundamental approach of American farmers throughout the country and in the West more specifically. By 1929, concern over the farm economy had already gained steam across the Great Plains as farmers tried to recover from the downward spiral beginning after the Great War, continuing through the 1920s, and becoming even more serious in the 1930s. He found that this economic situation only made the destruction of the landscape more problematic, which gave him a sense of urgency to facilitate a change in land use practices in the region. Little evidence of this shift existed in southeastern Colorado during Farrand's brief tenure, most likely because farmers had not yet faced a crisis severe enough to dispel the myth of abundance that boosters attached to the region in the late nineteenth century.

The first step on the path to identifying the need to adapt their land use patterns, a step that in large part originated because of and reflected the sense of urgency caused by the Dust Bowl, required farmers to combat the generations-old belief that the area, which boosters had labeled the "Valley of Content," was destined to inevitably become an agricultural juggernaut. Not surprisingly, periods of heavy migration into the area coincided with years of unusually wet weather that encouraged farmers to dismiss the area's very real climatic challenges to agricultural production. This willful dismissal, based in their stubborn refusal to acknowledge the historic frequency of droughts across the region and the fact that many migrants moved west during the wet years of the 1880s, left most southeastern Colorado farmers without a healthy and necessary appreciation for the region's environmental constraints. The disinclination to admit such constraints existed became increasingly entrenched during good rain years and when market demand encouraged farmers to maximize production to capitalize on high prices. These two factors emerged simultaneously during the 1910s and resulted in the "wheat boom" that accompanied World War I and that invited farmers to push production at all costs. By 1920 populations in Baca and Prowers Counties had peaked, evidence of the enthusiasm spurred by the wheat boom and more general faith in the future of agriculture in the region. Within the decade, however, much of that fervor had abated. The temporary run on wheat stalled in the early 1920s, the wet years appeared only intermittently, and the brief optimism faded by the late 1920s. Despite some out-migration, most agriculturalists remained committed to farming in that area and hoped that another break might come their way. Even as the Great Depression set in across the country, residents of southeastern Colorado occupied an unusual sort of stasis as they continued to produce sugar beets, wheat, and alfalfa and tried to sustain themselves. It was against this backdrop that Farrand attempted to convince farmers to buy into his idea of conservation and to change their ways. Their stubborn refusal to embrace his advice reflected what had by then become a common obstinacy among southeastern Coloradans who remained devoted to the idea that the next good year stood just around the corner.

The causes of the Great Depression are many and varied; the economic collapse that ushered in more than a decade of depression affected all Americans. While it is easy to assume that the Great Crash of 1929 signaled the beginning of the decline, in truth the crisis proved more complex and more gradual. The extensive depression in the agricultural economy following World War I started the decline for most Colorado farmers, so they had been facing tough times for several years before 1929 and paid little attention to the Crash. As longtime Baca County resident Ike Osteen noted, "Few people in Baca County even knew what the stock market was, and I don't know of a single person in Baca County who killed themselves because of what happened on Wall Street." Indeed, of the two major newspapers in the area, only the Lamar Daily News recognized the event, giving it front-page coverage with the title "Billions Lost on Stock Exchange." Even then, the paper contained no evidence of vocal support for or rejection of President Herbert Hoover's reaction to the Crash, and instead both the Lamar Daily News and the Springfield Democrat Herald emphasized the local and the familiar. In a parochial way, the newspaper coverage of the Depression's first years suggested that national issues mattered little to area residents, most of whom seemed more concerned with their own economic trials.

Despite this localized sense of identity and regardless of whether residents ever realized it, southeastern Coloradans were very much a part of the larger narrative of American history since the early nineteenth century. In the case of geography, for example, the western Great Plains became a very important part of national politics and the development of the West beginning with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. American explorers began traversing the Great Plains with some frequency once the United States purchased much of the region from France at an incredible bargain. Travel through the area meant early efforts at mapping the region, cataloging the flora and fauna, making contact with the Indians, and probing the boundaries that the United States shared with Spain in the Southwest — all of which represented American attempts to determine exactly what it had purchased and whether it had value. Many of these early explorers, beginning with Zebulon Pike in 1807 and continuing with Stephen H. Long in the 1820s, traveled through present-day Colorado while performing reconnaissance throughout the Great Plains and toward the Rocky Mountains. They conducted these explorations with the notion of settlement on their minds, as Americans started to think seriously about expanding the country's domain across the continent, an inkling that eventually became associated with Manifest Destiny. In other words, southeastern Colorado became part of this larger objective to establish American hegemony.

These borderlands, like many others of this period, proved prone to cultural exchange as well as conflict, and records from each of the major explorations offer insight into the complex social, economic, and cultural systems in place. Pike, Long, and John C. Frémont noted these elements, but each considered the place more than the people who lived there, since each thought most about the possibility of potential settlement. By prioritizing development of the Colorado frontier, they focused especially on the region's characteristics, including the flora and fauna, elevation, and climate and emphasizing the human populations in relation to their potential to stand in the way of Americans who wanted to settle the area. Although their reasons varied, none of these early voyagers expressed optimism for Americansettlement in the western Great Plains. The "great American desert" label that became prominent during the 1820s because of its climate and limitations for agriculture did much to dissuade migrants who had considered a trek into the region, and the nation turned its attention elsewhere.

Colorado became more central to the development of the West in 1858 when William Green Russell's discovery of gold in the mouth of Dry Creek, just outside of present-day Denver, ushered in the Colorado gold rush. The region grabbed headlines because of its seemingly untapped potential, as the possibility to strike it rich invited intense migration. Gold has "unsurpassed power to set people in motion," as nearly 100,000 people crossed the Great Plains during the first year of the rush. Roughly half were discouraged by the surroundings, lack of success, or competition and decided to turn back. The others, devoted to striking it rich, stayed around the foothills of the Rockies, moving from place to place in search of their fortunes. Regardless of the low rate of success, the rush transformed the Great Plains as well as the Rocky Mountains, bringing an incredible number of people to a region that had never felt such population pressure and in the process changing the Great Plains from "a place to get across" to "an essential part of one national vision" that relied on white expansion to the Rockies and beyond.

To that end, town builders like William H. Larimer who understood the temporary nature of the gold rush appreciated the profit potential in catering to miners as well as opening the area for white settlement. With this goal in mind, Larimer led the charge to establish Denver City in 1859, named after Kansas governor James W. Denver, just as Russell returned to his home in Georgia to recruit more help for his planned return the following year. Enough people converged on the Colorado Front Range in the first two years after the discovery that Washington DCdesignated the Colorado Territory in 1861. William Gilpin acted as the first territorial governor; much of his job revolved around continuing the steady flow of migrants and immigrants by enticing folks willing to rough it on the frontier in hopes of economic success in gold, farming, or ranching. Only by citing the possibility of the latter two trades could Gilpin hope to revitalize the territory's economy, which had been sagging after the streams of gold dried up. By emphasizing the supposedly limitless possibilities of productive and prosperous long-term settlement alongside the celebration of striking gold, Gilpin and other promoters set in motion impressive migration, developed the railroad, and embarked on the path to statehood. A major component of realizing that growth, instead of just hinting at its possibility, required a similarly impressive influx of agriculturalists who, unlike most of their gold-seeking contemporaries, traveled west with ideas of permanent settlement.

While the two groups differed in many ways, hopeful agriculturalists who trekked across the plains resembled the gold seekers who had already followed the same trails west. Perhaps most important, members of both groups traveled to Colorado Territory with the same mind-set, one that reflected their firm belief that the West constituted a place for new opportunities, one able to provide a chance at wealth or at least some level of economic success. Miners sought a valuable mineral they could not find in the East, and farmers migrated with the idea that open land and productive soil represented the promise of prosperity. Natural resources were the key — mineral or soil — and each group hoped to extract as much value as it could from the source. Unfortunately, both groups tended to exhaust their respective resources without much consideration for future production. For many eastern and Midwestern farmers, this meant that, in spite of some early calls for soil conservation and responsible stewardship, the predilection for mining the soil in hopes of economic payoff led to rampant erosion and degradation of soils. Many southern and some northern farmers had long made a habit of exhausting soil when maximizing production before moving on to another site. The pattern repeated until they ran out of available lands — at which point they turned further west and rambled onto the plains. In this respect, the farmers faced no significant repercussions; the federal government proved willing to abet them in that process and therefore offered its tacit approval.

Boosterism and railroad expansion worked in tandem to make Colorado look more appealing to potential migrants who came to the area in significant numbers by the end of the nineteenth century, and their success afforded Colorado a national, even an international, presence. Demographic evidence shows that new arrivals to Baca and Prowers Counties, which came into existence in 1889 after enough people had moved to the region to warrant their creation, hailed from a considerable variety of places. Many farmers had either immigrated to the United States or were first-generation Americans. Germans and English predominated among that population in what would become Baca County, while German, Russian, Irish, Dane, Swiss, and even Canadians registered in the 1910 census for Prowers County. Mexicans also represented a significant segment. Heavy migration streams entered the state from Missouri, Texas, Kansas, and states in the Midwest and East. The census of 1890 reflects the initial growth in both places, with Baca County home to 1,479 and Prowers to 1,969 residents.

Despite the numbers, however, the prospect of increasing migration to the Colorado plains proved difficult at times and especially during the relatively dry years of the 1870s. Increasingly, promoters developed optimistic rhetoric designed to combat the notion that aridity precluded successful agriculture and to assuage migrants' concerns about their futures. Boosters sent pamphlets to places like Germany and Great Britain, held exhibits at the World's Columbian Exposition, and plastered newspapers in the Midwest and East in hopes of luring potential residents. According to promoters, a bit of elbow grease coupled with faith in Mother Nature would make the Great Plains America's breadbasket. Boosters in the Arkansas valley reassured migrants that river water was both plentiful and available to all comers. Companies like the Arkansas Valley Sugar Beet and Irrigated Land Company and the Colorado Arkansas Valley, Inc. claimed that irrigation solved the problem of aridity and that new arrivals could tap into water provided by the river or one of the newly created canals that crisscrossed the landscape.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Legacies of Dust by Douglas Sheflin. Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803285531
• ISBN 13: 9780803285538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 426