After the Black Blizzards, Boise City Endures

Boise City, Oklahoma, is a place reached only with intention. It sits in the far western arm of the panhandle, a stretch of high plains so level that a car on a gravel road can seem to be sitting still, the earth moving only at the edges. The courthouse is the tallest thing for a long way, and its clock tower holds the town together. The streets around it are broad, swept by the same dry wind every season.

This is Cimarron County, where Oklahoma runs up against New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado in a handful of corners. The county is a rectangle of shortgrass and hardpan, feedlots and wheat fields, with a few cottonwoods leaning out of dry creek beds. Boise City is its county seat, a small town that has been flattened and replanted several times, and never quite left.

Where the Sod Broke

The land that became the Dust Bowl was not a desert. When the first homesteaders got there, they found blue grama and buffalo grass growing thick, with roots that held the soil like burlap. The sod was so matted that a team of horses could strain against a plow and have the blade bounce. Those first settlers were ranchers, mostly, cattle wandering on open range. It was the railroads, and the promise of cheap wheat during the First World War, that changed the equation.

Wheat prices climbed and the government asked for more grain. So the plows went up, across the shortgrass country in enormous straight lines, often following no plan but the easiest furrow. Millions of acres of grass were turned in the 1920s. For a decade the rain held; the wheat was heavy, and the prairie looked as though it had been waiting all along to feed the world. Then 1931 brought a summer without rain, and the next year was drier still. Without grass, the topsoil turned to powder. The wind did the rest.

The first dusters came as a surprise, but they were not yet a catastrophe. Then they came again, and again. A storm could roll in with a wall of black that ate whole sections of sky. The air filled with grit, and the grit got into everything—the flour bins, the oil lamps, the folds of a wet sheet hung at the window.

Black Sunday

The worst of it came on April 14, 1935, a Sunday. In Boise City, the day started calm enough. But by afternoon the sky to the north went black—not rain-black, but a moving wall of dirt that swallowed the sun. People who lived through it described it as night arriving in the middle of the day, with a wind that carried grit into every tooth and lung. Houses were sealed as best they could be. Wet sheets were hung over doors and windows, and still the dust sifted through, covering floors, tables, and beds with a fine brown powder.

Those years wore the country down slowly. Dusters came one after another, some lasting hours, some lasting days. A man driving a wagon could lose his way in the dark of a duster and step off the road into a field of nothing. A woman hanging laundry would bring in sheets stiff with grit. Children wore cloth masks to school, and the teacher wrote on the board, "God give us rain," because she was tired of asking for anything else.

The wind did not discriminate. It buried fences and drift fences, filled the lower halves of doors, and turned the familiar landmarks into anonymous mounds of dirt. Some families strung ropes from the house to the barn so the walk to milk a cow would not end in a lost wandering. When a duster was overhead, the lamps in the houses were lit at noon, and the light did no good.

After a big storm, the fields looked like the floor of a shallow sea, ridged and dark, with the tops of fence posts showing just above the drifts. Families dug out their doors and shoveled the dirt away from the foundations, but the next duster could fill them in again before the week was out.

The dust got into lungs and left behind an illness called dust pneumonia. In some counties the death rate for infants and old people climbed as the winters came on. It was not always recorded as the cause on a death certificate; families simply said the dust had taken them. The federal government began to act, creating the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 and planting shelterbelts—long lines of trees across the plains—hoping to break the force of the wind. But a country cannot legislate a rainstorm.

Many families gave up. They loaded their trucks with bedding and dishes and pointed the wheels toward California, leaving behind empty houses and fields that had been blown down to the hardpan. The ones who stayed did so because they owned too much to leave, or they had too little, or they simply had a stubborn streak that matched the dry country around them.

The Night the Bombs Fell

Even the war years were a strange reprieve. The country stopped watching the sky for soil and started watching it for planes. During the Second World War, a training base was operating somewhere over the Texas horizon, and one night its bombers flew toward a set of practice lights. The crew mistook the lights of Boise City for the target and dropped their bombs on the town. The bombs were practice—not explosives—so the damage was more anger than ruin, but the town had once again been mistaken for something it was not.

The people of Boise City talk about that night now the way they talk about the dusters: as something that happened, that could not be helped, and that they got through anyway. The scars of the 1930s were already fading by then. The rain had returned, patchily at first, then steadily enough to make the grass come back. But the real change was under the ground, not above it.

Circles of Water

Below the vast empty surface of the high plains lies the Ogallala Aquifer, a fossil sea of water left over from the Ice Age. The water-bearing rock and sand runs beneath eight states, from South Dakota to Texas, and underneath the panhandle it sits deeper than any hand-dug well. In the years after the war, pumps were built that could reach it. With that water, farmers could irrigate acres that had never grown anything but tumbleweeds. Center-pivot systems were invented—long arms of pipe on tall wheels that walk in a circle around a well, spraying a constant rain. From the air, or even from a rise on a gravel road, the circles are unmistakable: green disks on the tan plain, some the size of city blocks, all turning endlessly through the summer.

The irrigation changed everything. The Dust Bowl had taught the country what happens when the ground is laid bare, so the new farming went about things differently enough to survive. Fields were planted in strips, leaving some land fallow. Wheat came back, and corn, and sorghum. Cattle grazed where the prairie had been, and the ranches spread out for miles.

Boise City itself never became a city. It stayed a small, hard-working county seat with a courthouse square, a grain elevator, a few churches, and the kind of diner where the coffee has been on all morning. The Cimarron Heritage Center holds the photographs and artifacts of the dust years, and the stories are told to anyone who comes in from the highway to ask.

On a clear afternoon, standing at the edge of town, the horizon is visible in every direction, and the low sun makes the nearest circle of irrigated ground glow a brighter green than anything else in sight. The dust has not entirely gone. A dry summer can still raise a plume from a recently plowed field. The wind still comes out of Colorado with a bite that can strip paint from a north wall. But the protection of this place is the knowledge of what it lost, and the slow, determined way it built itself back.

The aquifer is not endless. The water in it was laid down over thousands of years and does not refill at the pace the pumps use. Farmers know this; they are already changing, laying drip lines and choosing crops that drink less. The circles may someday close, but the lesson of the Dust Bowl remains: the land decides, and the people get to choose whether to stay and learn again.

Photos: formulanone (CC BY-SA 2.0); StormChaserAmelia, OKJaguar (CC BY-SA 4.0)