Blowin’ in the Wind: High Plains Dust Storms

     It is easy to imagine the reactions of witnesses as the world turned black-brown and a choking cloud enveloped everything. Dust poured through open windows and sifted around closed ones as wind gusts rocked light buildings. No one could see anything through the flying dirt and transportation ground to a halt. It was too dangerous to move and all people could do was wait for the dust storm to pass. No doubt the residents of Texhoma breathed a sigh of relief and train passengers rejoiced when the blow finished and things could move again, that May afternoon in 1904.

     Homeowners in the Panhandles probably felt the same as did residents of Tascosa after the 1890 storm reported by the Tascosa Pioneer. Strong overnight winds picked up the sand from the dry Canadian riverbed and blended it with dust from south of the hamlet, blowing the mixture under doors and through window frames and leaving a mess the next morning. Everything had to be swept, washed, polished and shaken out, and any food that had been uncovered was ruined. Water buckets needed cleaning as well. Another typical High Plains “drouth” produced another typical dust storm and Tascosa’s residents probably grumbled and prayed for rain to come and freshen the grass and settle the dust.

     As Anglo-Americans moved west of the Missouri River, they reported a new phenomenon: dust storms. Newspapers in Leavenworth, KS, then Salina, Wichita, Manhattan, Hutchinson and other settlements recorded dusty days and windy weeks starting in the 1820s. Somewhere beyond the edge of civilization the wind picked up topsoil in order to deposit it on townsfolk, usually in spring. Ash mixed in with the dust from time to time, a sign of grassfires out on the prairies. No one had yet plowed the High Plains of Texas, Indian Territory, or the New Mexico Territory yet. The newspaper editors and letter writers did not like the dust but they accepted that it was part of life on the plains, at least for the moment.

     Although 19th century reporters could not have known it, the soil of the Great Plains had been blowing back and forth since before the end of the last Ice Age. The steep bluffs along the Missouri River in northwestern Iowa owed their creation to dust swirled up from glaciers in the Dakotas. Farther west, the sandhills north of the Canadian River in Hartley County, Texas and Union County, New Mexico came from sand that blew out of the Canadian River’s bed. Light, loosely packed soils rich in sand and loam blew more easily than clay soils like those found at the bottom of playa lakes. When the sun baked away enough moisture from the top of the ground, wind began moving the bits of powdered rock and dead plants. Each bit of soil knocked another bit loose unless stopped by an obstacle such as a rock or grass clump. But when drought killed off enough grasses and other plants, or a prairie fire devoured the dry groundcover and left bare soil behind, the dust flew.

     Written records do not tell us if years of dust or walls of flying soil like those during the Dust Bowl occurred before the 1920s. The reports from Kansas in the 1850s and early 1860s suggest that there were periods of multiple storms in succession. The severe drought that gripped the Rio Grande and Canadian River basins during the mid-1800s certainly could have produced dust storms, but the Comanches, Kiowas and other Native Americans living in the area left no written record of what they saw. Dust in eastern and central Kansas may have come from Texas and New Mexico, or it could have been real estate from western Kansas that sifted onto editors’ desks and irritated housekeepers.

     The black rollers of the 1930s usually came about when a dry cold front charged down onto the Plains, generating static electricity that attracted more dust as well as stirring the sediment gathered by the wind. Such static also wreaked havoc with cars’ ignition systems when people tried to drive in dust storms. Although the walls of darkness charging down the plains became dismally familiar to area residents during the 1930s, people still recalled earlier memorable dusters. The editor of the Panhandle Herald of Panhandle Texas mused in April, 1935 that the previous day’s dust storm “was not as resplendent in color effects” as a roller of March 17, 1923 and just didn’t match the earlier storm’s aesthetic quality.

     Dust storms remained an unwelcome presence into the 1950s. Oral history accounts and recollections of High Plains residents tell of students being dismissed from class ahead of dust storms and of children picking their way home in the dusty twilight. Depending on the wind direction, black soil from Oklahoma or reddish dirt from Texas darkened the skies and drove women to distraction as they fought to keep their houses clean. Just as in the 1930s, food left out uncovered became gritty and the dirt sifted through any gap in walls and windows to get into bedding, towels and clothes. Better soil conservation practices helped reduce the amount or moving real estate and cut the number of storms, but drought still brought misery beyond crop failures and dead pastures.

     Blowing soil still causes problems in the High Plains and beyond. It is a fact of existence in arid and semi-arid places with friable, loose and light, soil. Better farming techniques and the recognition that some lands are not worth trying to cultivate, whether because of wind or water erosion, now help limit the loss of topsoil, but the High Plains have always and will always be “blowin’ in the wind.”

Sources:

James C. Malin “Dust Storms” Parts I, II and III in Kansas Historical Quarterly 14, Nos. 2, 3, 4 (May, August and November 1946)

Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt and Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979).

Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005).

Tascosa Pioneer March 29, 1890.

Ranch Manager Daily accounts, Alamositas Division, Matador Ranch, Folder 5 Box 1, Matador Ranch Records – Alamositas Division, Southwest Collection of the Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University.

Paul Sears, Deserts on the March Revised Edition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).

Lasley, Bob and Holt Sallie, compliers. Dust Storms and Half Dug-Outs: Tales from the Good Old Days in the Texas Panhandle. Hickory, NC: Hometown Memories Publishing Company, 2009.