DRY YEARS ON THE TEXAS PLAINS
Papa had two rancher brothers, Joe and Simpson, who had remained
in the cattle business when all the rest of the Johnsons went to
farming. And Papa preferred cattle ranching over cotton farming.
So he got the urge to get back to growing more cattle and not so
much cotton.
This was not just a far-out dream as if he didn't know what he
was doing. After all, he had been in the cattle business with
his father until the time they all moved back to Texas from
Oklahoma. At that time he went to farming because it required
far less capital to be a farmer than to be a rancher. And he was
a young man just starting out on his own.
But now he had accumulated a little of this world's goods and he
thought it was time to step up to a larger place that would grow
enough cows and calves to afford a better future for him and his
family. This was not just a wild adventure. He knew it was
easier to grow a dollar's worth of calves than it was to grow a
dollar's worth of cotton.
We had prospered greatly during our six years on the Exum farm.
But our chances for expanding in Jones County were limited. Most
of the good pasture land had been cleared and put into
cultivation. But on the West Texas plains there was ample room
to expand. The soil was rich for farming and yet not too
expensive for pasture land.
So in 1916 Papa went to that land of promise and bought a section
of unimproved land ten miles southwest of Lamesa. It was a half-
mile wide and two miles long. It was part of the old
Higginbotham Ranch. The ranch was being sold piece-by-piece for
farms. And it seemed to be a very good place to grow feed and
cattle.
Now Papa knew he would have to have a place to live. He knew he
couldn't move onto unimproved land and start making a living on
it. So he also bought another smaller farm about five miles from
the large one. It was fairly well improved. His plan was to
live on the small farm while he sent us kids to school, built
five miles of wolf proof fence around the new land, had a well
drilled, put up a windmill and a water tank and built an eight-
room, two-story house to live in. He did all this on the new
land.
With that much completed, we moved onto the new farm and started
building a small barn, chicken house, car shed, tool house, storm
cellar, wash house, an out house, a yard fence, field fences and
cross fences. This all took quite a spell but by this time the
place was fairly well improved.
But wait--before we did anything to either farm we moved into the
house on the small farm in the dead of winter. Dode and Susie
moved in with us--or rather, we moved in with them. The plan was
for them to farm the small place and we would farm and ranch the
large place. We would live with Dode and Susie until we made the
other place livable.
There we were, all of us, in the cold winter, waiting for the
weather to cooperate so we could begin improving the raw land.
Meanwhile the family who sold us the small farm with the house on
it, and who had planned to be moved out by this date, had not
moved out. And since it was coming a blue norther and snowing
outside. They were not in a big hurry to move out. But they
were kind to us and shared with us what they had--which was ours
of course.
There were four in their family. They retained the kitchen with
a cookstove in it, the livingroom with a heating stove in it, and
a bedroom. They let us have two small rooms in which to store
our furniture and cook and eat and sleep.
There was no flue for a stove in our part of the house. We ran a
stovepipe out through one window and attached the lower end of it
to a small heating stove so we could fry flapjacks and heat the
room. But when the wind blew from the wrong direction, the fire
smoked up our rooms and we had to aim the stovepipe out another
window more in keeping with the direction the wind was going.
It seems that the family in the other part of the house was named
Stewart--Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and their two kiddos. Boy! Did
they deal us misery by not sharing a greater portion of our house
with us. I think I would hate everybody named Stewart except I'm
not quite sure Stewart is the right name.
Man, it was cold! As I said, there were four of them in three of
our rooms with good stoves in two of the rooms. And in the two
rooms that we had there was Papa, Mama, Susie, Dode, Earl, Joel,
Albert, Ollie Mae, William Robert, and me--ten of us. And out in
the pasture were all our cows and horses, practically freezing to
death. Mr. Stewart was using our sheds for his cows and horses.
Papa had bought two or three carloads of cows in Jones County and
had shipped them to Lamesa by rail, along with our horses,
household goods and farming tools.
You know the old saying, "Things could have been worse." Well
this time we didn't think things could ever be worse. But we
were wrong. They did get worse; 1917 was a dry year.
We kids went to school while Dode and Papa went about farming the
small farm and improving the large one. The dry weather
prevailed throughout the year. Grazing dried up and cattle got
poor. Papa did what he could to feed his family and his
livestock.
The United States was at war with Germany and, luckily for us,
Uncle Sam was buying rabbits. Jackrabbits brought ten cents each
and cottontails brought six or eight cents. When we killed a
rabbit, all we had to do was cut open his abdomen and sling his
intestines out. Then we pitched the rabbits into the wagon and
took them to town in the next two or three days.
We were looking for most any honorable way to pick up an extra
dollar. I have seen Papa and Mama take a 22 rifle and a lunch
and some horse feed for their team and go out in a wagon and stay
all day, while we kids were in school. Before night they would
come home with rabbits piled eight or ten inches deep all over
the wagon bed.
One man bought a single-shot 22-rifle and some shells on credit--
about eight dollars worth. In one week he brought in enough
rabbits to pay off the debt. That was one time you might say
rabbits saved our lives.
During the dry weather, while we were slowly losing about
everything we ever had, Papa hired out to haul cottonseed cake in
his wagon to ranchers somewhere west of Lamesa. I didn't know
where he was taking it but there were times I didn't see him more
than once or twice a week.
Monroe Hamilton was one of our neighbors. He and his family
lived about a mile from us. During the drought of 1917 his work
horses got so weak and poor that they became exhausted while
plowing in the field. They stopped in the middle of the field
and had to be unhitched and walked home. He began feeding them
more and working them less while they regained their strength.
Mid-afternoon was about as long as they could keep working.
By the time the horses were strong enough to work all day again,
they had become accustomed to stopping their work about mid-
afternoon and they refused to pull the plow after that time of
day.
One day Monroe became so unhappy with them that he unhitched them
in the field where they had staged their sit-down strike, drove
them to the barn, hitched them to his wagon and trotted them
eight miles to Lamesa to get the mail. Then he trotted them
eight miles back home. They had never experienced becoming
exhausted while pulling a wagon out on the road. They were not
smart enough to pull a sit-down strike anywhere except plowing in
the field.
During World War I, Frank wanted to join the Army. But Mama and
Papa did their part in talking him out of it. He was too young
to be drafted. But he wasn't at home much after that. He worked
here and there in defense work. He told us he worked awhile in a
powder factory in West Virginia. After the war was over, he came
home in 1919 and worked some for Dawson County, doing some
mechanical work on a road grader tractor. Finally, Papa bought a
big truck and let Frank take it and go wherever he could find a
job, hauling whatever anyone would pay him to haul.
Another source of income for us during the dry weather was in
gathering and selling dry bones. There was a ready market for
bones in Lamesa. A lot of cows had died here and there due to
dry weather and cold weather. We hauled and sold quite a few
bones.
We also salvaged a lot of rawhides--dry rawhides. We couldn't
sell them but we could use them ourselves. They were hard and
stiff, but by soaking them in water we were able to straighten
them out, cut them into strips and use the strips for braiding
whips and making other useful articles to be used on the farm.
Despite all the work, we boys had some time off for fun and
adventure. There were times after rains when it was too wet to
plow. But then there might be bushes to be grubbed or we might
have to build fence or maybe chop wood or do any one of a dozen
things that kept bobbing up to be done. If and when we got all
those things done, and then if it was still too wet to plow or
hoe weeds, then we had some time off for ourselves. Also on
Saturday afternoons we took time off, unless there was something
which just had to be done.
We always had Sundays off for rest and play, but never for work
of any kind, that is, work which was of any monetary value,
except routine work like milking cows and feeding the livestock.
The question of work came up one Sunday afternoon when we put
some new tires on our car to go watch an airplane at Lamesa. But
then, that was regarded as play since it involved only recreation
and had nothing to do with work which could in any way produce
anything of value. Sunday was a day for going to church,
resting, visiting friends, playing games, reading, or just
sitting.
Now, if we boys wanted to go out into the pasture and kill a
snake or two with sticks, that was okay. And if we could get a
rabbit without a gun, that was all right too. But, no guns on
Sundays. When a rabbit ran into a prairie dog hole, we could
twist him out with a barbed wire. That was okay on Sunday.
We would run a barbed wire down into the hole and twist it by
means of a crank at the upper end, which was nothing more than
the wire itself bent in the shape of a small crank. As the wire
revolved over and over down in the hole, it would get the barbs
entangled in the rabbit's fur and we could pull him out of the
hole. That was called "rabbit-twisting."
The idea of sin being connected with shooting a gun on Sunday had
probably been handed down from pioneer days when men lived by
hunting game. In those days hunting was a means of making a
living, therefore it was work, and work was not to be done on
Sunday.
Despite the dry weather that seemed to threaten our very
existence, we used water from our well and grew quite a bit of
garden produce. Our garden was like an oasis in a dust bowl.
And then, one day we received a bit of news that was like an
oasis of good news in our desert of bad news.
Uncle Robert got word to us that Old Scotch had returned home to
the Exum place. Papa began getting the car ready immediately and
went after him. I think maybe Joel went with Papa.
A family named Bristow was living on the Exum farm when Old
Scotch returned. Mr. Bristow thought this might be our dog, but
he was not sure. He said it looked as though the dog had
traveled a long, long way. The first thing Old Scotch did was
lie down in the yard and rest. Then he chased all the chickens
out of the yard as he had done many times before. Next he went
into the house and slowly looked through all the rooms, as if
looking for something familiar to him. Finding no one he knew,
he went back out into the yard to rest again.
Then Mr. Bristow phoned Robert Johnson to see if he might know
our dog. Robert drove over in his Buick. Old Scotch met him way
down the road and leaped for joy beside the car all the way back
to the house. He had finally found new hope. The Buick motor
was music to his ears and, although Robert was not home folks, at
least the dog knew him as a friendly neighbor.
When Robert got out of his car, Old Scotch leaped up into the
front seat, sat down and put his paws on the steering wheel.
When Robert saw him do that, he turned to Mr. Bristow and said,
"That's their dog all right."
We had no telephone on our farm on the plains. And we were ten
miles from Lamesa. I don't know how Robert got word to us about
Old Scotch, but Papa lost no time in bringing him home. The
round trip was 280 miles.
When Papa brought the dog home he was covered with lice, there
were sores on his body, some of his beautiful coat had fallen
away and his feet were sore from traveling so far. He had lost a
lot of weight, was poor and half starved.
We believe that some Gypsies stole him and tied him to their
wagon. Gypsies came by our farm now and then, and both we and
our neighbors had a low opinion of them. Theirs were the only
poor, skinny dogs we ever saw.
Anyway, we were mighty glad to have Old Scotch back with us and
we soon had him as fat and sassy and as good looking as ever.
And he was right there with us all the rest of his life.
Now that we had our dog back home, it was time again to settle
down to facing the realities of dry weather and sandstorms. One
day there came a sandstorm from the southwest, as usual. We had
many sandstorms but this one was not just one of the ordinary
ones. This was an extra special--the granddaddy of all
sandstorms. We kids were in school at Ballard and it got so dark
in the schoolhouse we couldn't see to read. We could only sit
and talk or play games. You could clean the dust from the top of
your desk, and two minutes later write your name with your finger
in the new dust.
When school was out at four o'clock in the afternoon, it was so
dark the teacher was afraid some of us couldn't make it home.
She held us there until our parents came for us. The wind was
still very strong. Everyone drove with their lights on, not to
see the road but to see each other.
We couldn't see the sunset--couldn't even see where the sun was
supposed to set. We didn't believe there were any clouds, only
sand and dust. But we really couldn't tell. Anyway, dark came
way before its time.
At suppertime that night there was so much sand and dust in the
air in our kitchen that we ate supper with the tablecloth still
spread over the table, over the food, and over the plates we were
eating out of. We held the cloth up with one hand to shelter our
plates while we reached under the cloth with the other hand to
bring food from our plates to our mouths.
During the afternoon, sand blinded the rabbits and they couldn't
find their way to their burrows. Jackrabbits don't usually
burrow, but cottontails always do when they need shelter. This
time it was different. They needed shelter but couldn't find it.
This time they all sat behind bushes with their tails turned to
the wind and sand.
For hours the sand didn't let up. About ten o'clock that night
the wind shifted around to the west, a little while later, to the
north, and then to the northeast. It still didn't slow up. Each
time it changed directions, it stirred up more sand.
As the wind shifted, so did the rabbits. They moved around their
respective bushes, keeping behind the bushes from the sand, and
with their tails still windward.
When the wind came out of the north, it became very cold and
began to snow. The temperature got down below zero that night
and many rabbits froze to death and were buried under the snow.
For a week or two after that storm, we went hunting and shot dead
rabbits, not knowing they were already dead. They were still
sitting under bushes and looking very much like live rabbits. We
continued to shoot dead rabbits until they were all eaten by
coyotes and buzzards.
It was reported that one rancher near Lamesa lost 500 cows that
night from the cold and the snow.
On one side of our house snow drifted into a huge pile halfway up
our windows. After it melted, the sand which blew in with the
snow was at least two feet deep. That was the first time I can
remember when snow was so dirty we couldn't make snow ice cream.
However, there were many other times later on.
Here is another little rabbit story. On one occasion when Frank
was home, he went rabbit hunting with the other four of us boys.
We hadn't had much luck until almost sundown. By that time we
were still about four or five miles from home and we came to
another windmill and waterhole. There was a lot of sagebrush
around the waterhole and jackrabbits began to hop up here and
there. This place was so far from civilization the rabbits were
not much afraid of us. They would hop off a way and stop and sit
up and look back at us.
We all spread out and took a swath about the width of a city
block and circled the waterhole one time--and killed more
jackrabbits than we could carry home. We swung some of them over
our shoulders, tied some to our overall suspenders and carried
some in our hands. It was a long way home and we were plenty
tired before we got there.
During our stay on the plains, tractors had not yet established
themselves on American farms, at least not in our part of the
country. Men were still raising fine work horses and looking
forward to raising even bigger and better ones. A neighbor named
Debnam bought the biggest horse I ever hope to see. A big man
had to reach high to touch his nose, and few men could reach the
top of his shoulders. He was one of the six largest stallions in
the United States and he cost the man $3,600. By the time he was
three years old he weighed 2600 pounds, and his feet were about
as large as a cedar water bucket.
Now Papa needed at least four of those fine work horses but he
didn't have the money to buy them, and he couldn't get the money.
And farm tractors were almost unheard of before the late 1920s.
However, there was a company that made an attachment to go on a
Model T Ford car which was supposed to make a tractor out of the
car. The manufacturers name for the "thing" was "Pull-Ford."
Papa heard of a man who had such a contraption, so he went to
look at it.
Now, the fact that the man was not using the gadget should have
told Papa something. Moreover, the fact that he was willing to
sell it at a bargain should have told Papa something more. And
finally, when he went and looked at it and saw that it was
practically unused, that should have been the final message to
Papa.
But Papa wasn't listening good. He was a man in trouble. Dry
weather and sand colic had claimed some of his best work horses.
And he could buy this thing for a lot less than four horses would
cost. Anyway he bought the attachment and made it fit on the
Reo. I suppose he reasoned that a Reo owner had more sense than
a Ford owner, and even if it was not a success on the man's Ford,
he could make it do the job on a Reo.
Well, anyway he bought it and brought it home and a few days
later he had it all rigged on the old car and ready to go. It
didn't prove to be the best tractor in the world, in fact, it
might compare with a modern tractor of today about like the
Wright Brothers' first flying machine would compare with a
superjet.
Anyhow it worked some. It took one to drive the car and one to
ride the plow. It didn't replace the horse in the field half as
well as the Reo car replaced the horse on the road. Yet it
filled in somewhat when feed was scarce and horses were tired.
This monster didn't have to stop and rest, just stop to get water
and cool off. As a tractor it wasn't so hot--it only got hot.
We didn't spend all of our time at hard work on the farm. Come
Saturday afternoon, if we were pretty well caught up with our
farm work, we would spend an hour or two in Lamesa.
I remember one time we were in Lamesa, when I was eleven years
old. I had spent all my money except a dime. I wanted to buy a
pocketbook to put my money in. There were four stores in town
that sold pocketbooks and I went to all of them but it was of no
use. The cheapest one any of them had was ten cents. Now, if I
spent my dime for one, I wouldn't have any money left to put in
it. And if I didn't buy one, I was apt to lose my dime. What
should I do? That was a big decision for me to make.
I went back to each store time and again, hoping to find a five
cent pocketbook I had overlooked before. But it just wasn't
there. And I don't recall whether I bought a ten cent one or
kept my dime.
Now you may ask, "If you can't remember whether or not you bought
the purse, how can you remember it was on a Saturday?" That's
easy. Saturday was about the only day we went to town. I was a
big boy before I learned that there were people in town on other
days of the week. I hardly knew that stores opened except on
Saturday.
I remember another time in Lamesa when a kid about my size was
aggravating me. Now, we kids were taught not to fight. I grew
up not knowing how to fight, not wanting to fight and thinking
that boys who did fight were bad boys. And here I was, faced
with the stark realization that I needed something I didn't
have--the ability to make a bully leave me alone. I was about as
big as he was, but I was afraid he had the know-how to fight in a
way that could hurt a country boy like me.
I didn't want to fight the boy. I only wanted him to go away and
leave me alone. But he had other plans. We went in and out
among the cars parked by the curb. I was always in the lead, he
was after me. Somehow I had hoped that I could lose him. But he
kept coming back, pinching and hitting me a little harder each
time. I really think my not fighting him encouraged him to get
tougher and rougher.
Then he got me out behind the cars, out near their back wheels,
and he was just about to really let me have it. People on the
sidewalk couldn't see us. It was just him and me. I had to do
something--so I hit him and ran. That proved to be the best
thing I could have done. He came right after me. I knew he
might hit me but he couldn't hit me in the face and bloody my
nose--I had my back to him.
I jumped up on the curb with the bully right on my heels. The
first man I passed asked, "Is that boy bothering you?" Before I
could answer him, the boy had turned and was going away. He
didn't bother me any more. He probably thought the stranger was
a friend of mine and that he had better leave me alone or else
the man would get him.
On another trip to Lamesa I went with Papa one day into the back
of a hardware store--back among the shelves of bolts and nuts and
things. Way back there were stacks of silver dollars and half
dollars and other coins, lying there on a shelf where the store
was only half lighted. Papa and the clerk were around behind
some other shelves. They couldn't even see me. It would have
been easy to slip some money into my pocket and walk away. But I
didn't, and I have wondered a lot of times just why I didn't.
There was no question but that I knew it would be the wrong thing
to do. Yet I don't believe the moral aspect kept me from taking
at least some of the money. That is to say, I could have lived
with my conscience but I could not have lived with the
condemnation I would have gotten from my family, once they
learned about it. And I knew that somehow they would learn about
it. Then there would have been the "dishonoring" of thy father
and thy mother.
This would not have been a small thing, like talking back to
Frank in the cotton patch years ago. That was an isolated case
of one boy doing wrong and receiving his punishment. It was my
punishment alone, it hurt no one else in the family and it was
soon forgotten. But taking any part of the money from the store
would have been altogether different. There would have been no
way for me to take some of it, then take my punishment and not
hurt my folks.
Until the depression years of the 1930s, merchants never fooled
around with pennies. If the wholesale cost of an item was four
cents, he would usually sell it for ten cents. Then he could
sell the items at two for 15 cents and still make a good profit.
Well, Papa wanted to buy us kids some firecrackers but the war
was on and they had gone from five cents a package up to ten
cents a package. With six kids at home, that would put quite a
strain on Papa's pocketbook. So while he was figuring how many
to buy, my brother Joel began dickering with the clerk.
"Two for 15 cents?" he asked.
"Yes," came the reply.
"Four for a quarter?"
"Yes, I guess so."
"Nine for a half dollar?"
"Well, yes, okay."
Papa bought the nine packages and we all laughed at how far that
was from ten cents each.
Susie had gotten married about the time we moved to Lamesa. And
with her away from home, Mama was always short handed in the
kitchen, there being so many men and boys in the family and only
one little girl still at home, and she was too little to be of
much help. And since Mama's kitchen work extended to the milk
shed, the henhouse, the vegetable garden, the wash house, the
clothes line, the ironing board, the yard and a few other odd
jobs about the place, she had to cut all the corners she could.
She never put our eating dishes up in the cabinet. After she
washed them, she stacked them back on the dining table and
covered them with a cloth. So, she didn't have to place the
dishes at mealtime. We simply sat down and got our own plates
and tools. And we took only the tools we needed. There was no
need to have to wash a knife, a fork and a spoon when a spoon was
all we needed to use.
We grew up not knowing there were different forks to use for
different things. We used the rule of instinct in choosing the
tool to use. That is, "If it's hard, use a knife, if it's soft,
use a fork, and if it's wet, use a spoon--except in the case of
molasses. You sop molasses up with a piece of biscuit."
To save time and effort, Mama also left certain foods on the
dining table--the salt, sugar, pepper, syrup, honey, vinegar,
pepper sauce and other such things. These were all covered with
the same cloth that covered our dishes. We had no refrigerator.
Nothing would spoil at our house, we ate it before it had time to
spoil.
Mama needed help to wash the dishes after supper. But boys don't
like to wash dishes. So Mama was in trouble--but not for long.
She came up with an ultimatum: "You wash your own supper dishes
or eat out of your same plates for breakfast."
This was a boy's dream come true--no dish washing. This was the
beginning of my sopping my plate clean. We all did. We could
lick our spoons as clean as any woman could wash them in a
dishpan. And I seldom used any tool except a spoon. Plates were
no problem either. When it comes to shining plates, a good,
tough biscuit rind in the hands of a growing boy could just about
put a soap factory out of business. And no matter what he sopped
out of his plate, it added flavor to his biscuit.
When we were through licking and sopping, each of us would place
our spoons on the table at our respective places, turn our plates
upside down over them and take off for things more interesting.
The last one to finish would help Mama spread a cloth over the
entire table and the job was completed. Mama was out of the
kitchen in no time at all. We had learned a long time ago not to
take anything on our plates that we couldn't eat. Now that habit
was paying off.