Two Kohl Sisters

Home

16. Fallowed Land





So it happened that only a few weeks before proving-up time, Ida Mary and I had to start all over again. But with the coming of water into that thirsty land it didn't seem so difficult to begin again. And we weren't doing it alone. It was the settlers who built a new shack, a new building for a printing press; the settlers who clothed us during those first destitute days. "This is cooperation," they laughed at our protests. "The Wand has always preached cooperation."

In the cool of the evening I rode out over the devastated prairie, past the charred timbers and ashes of my claim, across the scorched and stunted fields blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain. The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked bleak and sterile.

I rode through the reservation gate. There was no one at home at Huey Dunn's, but his little field of shocked grain lay there in the midst of burnt grass and unharvested fields. Instead of dry chaff there were hard, fairly well-filled heads. It had withstood the drought sufficiently to mature. In an average year it would have yielded a good crop.

On his claim near the reservation a young man was doing quite a bit of experimenting. He was a graduate of an agricultural school. I looked at his fields, which also had come through the drought much better than others. From other farmers scattered here and there who had tried the fallowing plan I got records of methods and results. Then I rode back slowly, thinking of what might be done for the Brulé country.

Drinking water supply could be obtained. The next most vital problem was moisture for the crops. Most of the rainfall came in the growing season, but in dry years it was inadequate and much of it wasted on packed ground. To produce crops in the arid or semi-arid regions, out-of-season moisture--heavy snows and rains--must be conserved. There must be a way to harness it.

Next to lack of moisture was the short growing season. These were the principal barriers to converting the new West into an agricultural domain. The latter problem could be solved, the farmers said. Progress already was being made in developing seed adapted to the climate. The Indians had produced quick-maturing corn through their years of corn-raising in a small way. There could be developed a hardier, short-stalked grain, eating up less moisture, agricultural authorities maintained. The farmers said that nature itself gradually would do a great deal toward that end.

Experience. Science. Time. Of course, this was a land of the future, not of today. The homesteaders had expected to tame it in a year or two, when many years must be spent on even the smallest scientific discoveries. They had demanded miracles. That was because they had no resources with which to await results.

President Roosevelt had done much in turning public attention toward the necessity of reclaiming these public lands, and already much was being done. They had been too long neglected. Years ago, when the supply of government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a land-hungry people. Some way had to be found to make the great arid plains productive.

The Department of Agriculture was turning its attention to the frontier, establishing bureaus and experiment stations in various western states, making scientific research.

At the request of The Wand, two agricultural agents from the State Experimental Farm came to examine the soil and advise us as to its possibilities, as to crops and cultivation. They reported it rich in natural resources, with splendid subsoil. We would have to depend greatly upon the subsoil and its moisture-retaining quality.

And over the frontier there was talk about a new system of conserving moisture. Some said it was bound to sweep the West. The method was called fallowing--the method Huey Dunn had used. It was a radical departure from anything farmers of the rain belts had ever used.

The few sodbreakers who had tried it thought they had found a way to conserve the moisture and at the same time to preserve the land, but it was not they who heralded the plan as a great new discovery. To them it was a way to raise their own crops. They may have learned it in the Old Country, where intensive farming was carried on, or, like Huey Dunn, figured it out for themselves. But it was ahead of the times in the new West and generally looked upon as an impractical idea spread largely by land agents as propaganda. Many of the farmers had never heard of it. What I had heard and read of fallowing now came back to mind. I was in a position to keep better posted on such things than they.

I got out my letters and records and spread them before Ida Mary on the old square table, and with the sweat dripping down our faces from the heat of the lamp we eagerly devoured their contents. Huey Dunn's plan of mellowing, or rotting the soil, was not yet the true fallowing method.

"But it will mean cropping the land only every other year, and plowing and raking the empty soil," Ida Mary said in a tone of misgiving.

"The top soil is kept loosened so that every bit of moisture will be absorbed into the subsoil. Suppose it does mean letting the land lie idle every other year, alternating the fields," I contended. "There is plenty of cheap land here. It will be a way to utilize waste space." Farmers in other arid regions, I learned as I scanned the letters, were raising forage crops on the land in the off year.

But it will take two years, Ida Mary reminded me. The settlers had no money to wait so long for a crop. "And all that labor--" she went on. "It may be the solution, but I doubt if the settlers would listen to any such plan."

I knew she was right. Two years of waiting, labor and expense. Labor was no small item with the poor homesteaders. If the government would put in money to carry out this new system until the farmers could get returns from it--"It is a gigantic project for the government to finance ... it would require great financial corporations to develop this country ..." Halbert Donovan had said.

I talked it over with some of the more experienced farmers on the Strip who understood the processes required. They figured they could plant part of the ground while the other lay fallowing. If it happened to be a wet year, that would give them something to go on. "But, mein Gott, how we goin' to pull t'rough next winter?" old man Husmann raved. Even Chris had no answer.

In the years of experimenting, the fallowing system underwent a number of changes. But we had the plan in its fundamentals. After each rain the land should be loosened; and late in the fall it should be plowed rather deeply to soak up the winter snows. The top soil must be kept from packing. It was worth trying, they agreed, if they could get money to pull through this drought and stay on the land.

This might be a solution for the future. But for the people on the land the solution must be immediate. Empty purses could not wait two seasons for a good crop; empty stomachs could not await the future, and famine stared the homesteaders on the Lower Brulé in the face.

Our proof sheet came out with the message, "We Can Fallow!" There was encouragement to be derived from it, of course, but it was hope deferred. Then, sitting in the doorway of the shack, leaning against the jamb for support, my pencil held in tender fingers not yet healed, I wrote to Halbert Donovan, setting forth the possibilities of the Strip, and the West, under a moisture-retaining method of farming.

It was a morning in late August when I turned to see a well-dressed man standing in the open door. Halbert Donovan!

At the first meeting he had found the West green and bright with spring colors, and the outlaw printer of the McClure Press excited and voluble over the possibilities of the country. Now the investment broker found a land of desolation and ruin, and the printer in sorry plight, living in a crude, bare shack, clad like some waif of the streets in the clothes donated by the settlers.

But he had come. He had driven out from Pierre along the dusty roads, through the sultry heat, in a long shiny automobile. On the sagging couch leaning against the hot wall, he sat wiping the perspiration from his face as I told him more of the fallowing idea. He had not heard of it. He knew practically nothing about agriculture, but he was a man to whom any method of developing vast resources would appeal.

"At first," he said, little crinkles breaking around his eyes, relieving the sternness of his face, "I read The Wand (how I did laugh at the name you gave it) with refreshing amusement, out of a personal curiosity you had aroused. I wanted to see how long you would hold out. Later I became deeply interested in this western activity."

I knew in what mood he must have reached the shack, after that drive from Pierre, across parched earth, seeing the ruined crops, passing settlers' homes which from the outside looked like the miserable huts one sees along waterfronts or in mean outskirts of a city where the flotsam of humanity live. And cluttered around them, farm machinery, washtubs, and all the other junk that could be left outdoors, with countless barrels for hauling water, and the inevitable pile of tin cans. It was dreary, it was unrelievedly ugly; above all, it looked like grim failure.

Earnestly I faced him. "We aren't done," I told him. "We've just begun--badly, I know, but we can fallow. Make reservoirs. Put down artesian wells." I completely forgot, in putting these possibilities of the Strip before him, to mention the gas and oil deposits which we had discovered during our frantic search for water. I did not think of saying, "We have natural gas here--let's go and look at the Ben Smith ranch with all its buildings piped with gas. And over on the Carter place a drill came up from a shallow hole sticky with oil." But the minds of the settlers were so focused elsewhere that little had been said about these things. With an investment broker interested in mining projects under my very roof, many of us might have become rich and the Brulé prosperous in no time.

Development of agriculture, to my mind, was of broader importance than oil strikes, anyhow. "Men do put money into undeveloped things," I said. "Eastern capitalists risk millions in undeveloped mines and oil fields in the West. This is different. Land is solid."

He answered thoughtfully: "As an investment, land is not so precarious as mines, but there are no big profits to be reaped from it. That's the difference, my girl."

He must have known that even for investors, western land was going to be a big thing. He must have known that the railroad companies were buying it up--that the Milwaukee had gone into a spree of land buying in Lyman County.

I poured him some water from the can we kept in a hole in the ground back of the shack for coolness. He took a swallow and set it down. "Good Lord, how can anyone drink that!" he exclaimed.

"We get used to it," I told him. "And we'll have a better water supply in time. It will rain--it's bound to rain, sooner or later."

He looked out at the blazing sky, the baked earth, a snake slithering from the path back into the dry grass which rustled as it moved. "So this is the land you want to save," he exclaimed. "The incredible thing is that people have managed to stay on it at all!"

"They will stay," I assured him. "Remember that these builders have had nothing to work with, no direction, no system or leadership. What would business men accomplish in such an undertaking under the circumstances? If they had experienced leaders--men like you--"

"In other words," he smiled, "laying up riches where moth and rust do corrupt." He walked to the door and stood, hands in pockets, looking out over the plains. Then he turned to face me.

"My dear girl, I might not be worth a hoot at the job."

"Oh, you would! You would! And if the settlers never repaid you, think what a land king you would become," I laughed.

"No, I don't want the land that way. I want to see the settlers succeed, try to keep them from being squeezed out."

He mopped his face, picked up the glass of water and after a glance at it set it down untouched. "Now, I've been thinking of this western development for some time. It's going to open up new business in almost every field. Aside from all that, it is worth while. I've kept track of you and your Brulé. If one gets his money back here it is all he can expect. How much would be needed to help these settlers hold on--a little grubstake, some future operating money? I like this fallowing idea."

He talked about second mortgages, collateral on personal property, appointment of local agents, etc. He did not want the source of this borrowing power to become known as yet.

It was he who brought me back to my personal predicament when, ready to leave, he expressed his desire to help me, asking if I would accept a check--"For you and your sister to carry on." But I refused. I had appealed to him for the country, not for myself. But his offer mortified me, made me conscious of my shabby appearance, the coarse, ill-fitting clothes, the effects of the fire still visible in rough and smoke-stained skin, the splotches of new skin on my lips, the face pink and tender. Altogether, the surroundings and I must have made a drab spectacle.

Holding out his hand to say good-by, Halbert Donovan saw my shrinking embarrassment. Suddenly he put his arm around my shoulders, drew me to him, brushed back the singed hair and pressed his lips to my forehead; turned my small, blackened hand, palm upward, looking at it.

"I'll help you all I can," he said. "Just keep your Utopian dreams."




So it happened that, before famine could touch these people who had already struggled through drought and blizzard and despair, they found help in sight. Halbert Donovan put up $50,000 as a start, to be dealt out for emergency on land, livestock, etc. Heretofore loans had been made on land only. Now the reliability of the borrower himself was often taken into account as collateral. It was enough that we knew the borrower was honest, that he was doing his best to conquer the land and to make it yield. We gambled on futures then, as we had done before. That it was eastern capital, handled through a system of exchange and agencies, was all that those who borrowed knew or cared.

And each day we scanned the heavens for signs of rain. We searched for a cloud like a starving man for bread. The settlers went stalking about with necks craned, heads thrown back, eyes fixed on the sky. And the cartoonist from Milwaukee took to looking for a cloud with a field glass. A cloud no bigger than a man's hand would raise the hopes of the whole reservation. But in vain we searched the metallic blue of the sky.

With spectacular ceremonial and regalia the Indians staged their "rain dance." The missionaries had long opposed this form of expression by the Indians, and their objections led to a government ban which was finally modified to permit some sort of ritual.

These symbolic dances were not mere ceremonials for the Plains Indians; they were their one means of expressing their emotions en masse rhythmically, of maintaining their sense of tribal unity.

The first part of the ceremony was secret and lasted for several days. After that the public ceremony began. Painted according to ritual, they danced in a line from east to west and back again, whistling as they danced, every gesture having its symbolic meaning. The whistle symbolized to them the call of the Thunderbird.

Pioneers belong to the past, people are prone to say; savage customs belong to the past. But it was in the twentieth century that primitive men, their bodies streaked with black paint, fasted and danced, overcoming an enemy as they danced, compelling the Thunderbird to release the rain. And on the Strip men and women prayed as fervently to their own God, each in his own way.

That night, something breaking the dead stillness woke me. A soft, slow tapping on the roof of the shack, like ghostly fingers. It increased in tempo as though birds, in this land without trees, were pecking at the roof; it grew to a regular drumming sound. I lay for a few moments, listening, wondering. Then I leaped out of bed, ran to the door and stepped outside.

Rain! Rain! Rain!

"Ida Mary," I called, "get up! It's raining!"

She was out of bed in a moment as though someone had shouted "fire."

In nightdress, bare feet, we ran out on the prairie, reached up our hands to the soft, cool, soothing drops which fell slowly as though hesitating whether to fall or not. And then it poured. The grass was wet beneath our feet.

We lifted our heads, opened our lips and drank in the cool, fresh drops. I lay down on the cool blanket of earth, absorbing its reviving moisture into my body, feeling the rain pattering on my flesh.

Over the prairie dim lights flickered through the rain. Men and women rushed out to hail its coming--and to put tubs and buckets under the roofs. No drop of this miracle must be wasted. In their joy and relief, some of the homesteaders, unable to sleep, hitched up and drove across the plains to rejoice with their friends.

After that eternity of waiting it rained and rained, until the earth all about was green and fresh. Native hay came out green, and late-planted seed burst out of the ground. Some of the late crops matured. There was water in the dams! The thirsty land drank deep of the healing rains.

The air grew fresh and cool, haggard faces were alight with hope. The Lower Brulé became a different place, where once again people planned for the future, unafraid to look ahead.

With the mail bag, the salvaged type, and Margaret's few sticks of furniture which she wrote to us to take, we moved back to the homestead, to the site of Ammons.

The settlers had the building up. This time it was a little square-roofed house made of drop siding (no more tar paper). A thin, wall-board partition running halfway to the ceiling divided the small living quarters from the print shop.

The McClure Press had died the natural death of the proof sheet, and the proof king was submerged in the cause of prohibition. Later he was appointed federal prohibition agent for the state of South Dakota. He gave us most of the McClure Press equipment. So I got that hand press, after all. What few proofs were yet to be made in that section were thrown to The Wand. With the current proof money coming in we bought the additional supplies necessary to run the paper.

I sent a telegram to Halbert Donovan: "Rain. Pastures coming out green. Dwarfed grain can make feed in the straw. My flax making part crop. Dams full of water. Fall fallowing begun." In hilarious mood I signed it "Utopia."

Delivered the twenty-five miles in the middle of the night, special messenger service prepaid, came the answer: "Atta girl. Am increasing the stakes."

He did. Halbert Donovan's company interested other financial concerns in making loans, "to deal out through competent appraisement."

So the Brulé won through, as pioneers before them had done, as other pioneers in other regions were doing, as ragged, poverty-stricken, gallant an army as ever marched to the colors.