History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
(Page 4 of 7)
Less than a year after the founding of the Wonder Town of the Plains, two brothers named Clyde E. and Cliff S. McGarraugh—one a farmer, one a rancher-from Harper County, Kansas, arrived at the Perryton railroad station. Clyde E., the farmer, found a man who wanted to trade his farm and move north. They struck a deal, and the McGarraugh farm in Kansas was traded for the Hanna farm in Ochiltree County. Cliff S., the rancher, found his home 25 miles south of town amid rich buffalo and grama grassland on the edge of the cedar canyons leading down to the Canadian River. Farmer McGarraugh settled in four miles north of Perryton with his wife and four children, horses, dairy cows, and an old Model T Ford. One of the kids, Earl, took to farming the best. Before he was ten years old he was tied on the back of a tractor, when he wasn’t milking the cows, or tending pets, or ice skating on the buffalo wallows.
“During the twenties when I was growing up, I learned something more important than just growing wheat,” said Earl McGarraugh, as he wearily lowered his five-and-a-half-foot frame onto a bench near his side door, his face grimy and dusty after moving wheat seed for twelve hours. “The twenties mixed good growing years with the bad. We had years like 1925 when the crop was a total loss. The next year put this county on the map with a record harvest and good prices. We led the country in implement sales as I recall. In 1927 we suffered another almost total loss, but the next year we averaged twenty-five bushels an acre, five more than usual.
“Farming is feast or famine, a cycle understood only by the Maker. Don’t ever have to go Las Vegas. I do enough gambling right here.” McGarraugh has an open, honest face, knowledgeable but not calculating. He always seemed to be smiling about something. The scriptures Earl McGarraugh remembered best from church had to do with trials and tribulations, feast and famine, the ups and downs of life with the Lord seeing you through. The verses from I Corinthians always were read before harvest:
But some man will say, how are the dead raised up? And with what body they come?
Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except to die:
And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:
But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.
It was hard to believe in those words after a year’s work brought little more than the going price of eggs. But this was not brutal country. It only became so as man tried to turn land to his purposes. Man worked it, plowed it, and nourished it through good harvest and bad. It made sense to take life as God’s will. The cycle of plant and harvest, birth and death, good crops and disaster taught that. Man was insignificant creature struggling from dawn to dusk, lost in the vastness between the horizons. Earl McGarraugh learned these lessons early in the terrible years of the thirties. Earl married Elmyra Cone in 1935, the bleakest year of the Dust Bowl. Since 1931, when wheat sold at the lowest price ever—25 to 35 cents a bushel—farmers had survived by selling eggs and cream and anything else but wheat, mainly living by their imaginations.
“Elmyra, fix this boy some lemonade while I get these shoes off. You just had to live through the Dust Bowl to understand how bad it was,” said Earl. “The problem was that farmers were caught in a squeeze of low prices for crops and high costs for necessities. In desperation, everybody doubled their efforts, putting land to the plow that should have been allowed to lie fallow. We gambled then, too, that the rains would come. Well, they didn’t. Worst of all we had those old one-way plows that plowed under the protective cover of vegetation and wheat straw, leaving the tilled land to blow away in the dust storms.”
What blew away was the fertile top soil, which had taken thousands of years to develop. Because farmers had plowed too much and ranchers had overstocked the grassland, the thick-rooted buffalo grass that held the soil together was gone. The color of the dust gave a clue where a storm originated: brown came from Kansas; red from Oklahoma; dirty yellow from West Texas and New Mexico. But the worst were the black dusters, which usually roared in on strong northwesterly winds, sometimes lasting for ten hours and covering almost 250,000 square miles. On a clear Sunday afternoon in April 1935 the granddaddy of them all hit Perryton.
It came from Boise City, Oklahoma, the thirtieth dust storm since early March to reach the Panhandle. People were outside enjoying a warm spring Sunday after church. In the middle of the afternoon the storm appeared on the horizon, a monstrous wall of black-red dust that reached 75,000 feet high. It kept coming like a wall of boiling smoke form an oil fire, an ugly black mass that rolled and rolled over the land. At three o’clock the day was suddenly like night. People and buildings across the street disappeared. Car lights were uselss. Children wetted their dust masks that the Red Cross had issued at school and clamped them over their mouths and noses. The fine silt covered everything inside houses, even though every crack and opening had been stuffed with wet sheets and taped. The dust accumulated around fencerows where tumbleweeds had blown and formed a solid wall that livestock could walk over. Doctors stopped operations because it was impossible to keep instruments sterilized. That night, housewives served supper in sunbonnets to keep the dust away from their eyes and covered their food with gauze. Beneath the dinner table the linoleum pattern had disappeared under a thick coating of transported soil. The black storm finally turned reddish, and objects ten feet away became visible. It lasted all night and broke the next morning.
Earl shoveled dirt from the attic when it began to sag and threatened to fall. He and Elmyra nailed up quilts and shoveled out dust in the morning only to see it pile up by nightfall. Nothing kept the silt out. An old boy named Woody Guthrie, who’d lived in Pampa, down south of Perryton, was singing about it that year:
A dust storm hit and it hit like
thunder;
It dusted us over and covered us
under;
Blocked out the traffic and
blocked out the sun.
Straight for home all the people
did run, singing:
So long, it’s been good to know
yuh.*
“Two years after that storm, in 1937,” Earl said, “our first boy, Melvin, was born and we were still living with dust. Elmyra kept him covered with wet sheets in the back room of our house to prevent his catching what they called ‘dust fever’-a type of pneumonia. When she picked him up after his nap, his sleeping position was outlined in dust. The reason we don’t raise any milo today is because of Melvin’s terrible allergies that developed from his first two years.”
For four months, morning to night in that awful year of 1937, Earl stayed on the tractor, pulling a new “chisel” plow. Fred Hoeme from Hooker, Oklahoma, just northwest of Perryton, had used a road scarifier (a heavy big-toothed implement used to tear up blacktop roads) to plow part of his fields one fall, and his wheat the next spring was better there than anywhere else. He and another farmer put together a plow based on the scarifier. It left stubble and ridged on top of plowed fields, which reduced wind erosion, helped retain moisture, and prevented runoffs. Earl’s neighbor, Harold Kershaw, told him about the plow, and Kershaw and McGarraugh were the first in Ochiltree County to begin using it to rehabilitate the ravaged land. Historians later credited the plow with saving the plains.
Earl was not among the one-in-four farmers who quit during the Dirty Thirties, not was he one of the 80 per cent of Panhandle farmers who joined some form of relief program. Not that he spoke against those who did, but he and Elmyra worked harder than most and saved their money. They had four strong sons who were driving combines and John Deere 820 tractors, about the same summer Don Wagner’s father first tied him on behind a John Deere. On a farm, children were an investment, like machinery. Raymond McGarraugh, the second oldest, and Don Wagner grew up to become best friends. They usually met in town because their fathers put the boys to work when they visited each other’s farms. Raymond starred as right halfback and fullback and Don as tackle on the 1961-62 Fighting Ranger football team at Perryton High. Wintertime was when friendships developed. Spring, summer, and fall demanded work in their respective north forties.
For the McGarraughs, this meant a north forty times 125: 5000 acres of some of the best dryland wheat country in the county, not a bad spread compared to the 560 windblown acres they started with in the Dirty Thirty years. They had made considerable money during the prosperous forties and had been able to buy land near their old homestead. There were nine huge red Case combines (each costing $50,000) in the Quonsets, and nearby were four White four-wheel tractors, eight bobtail wheat-hauling trucks, six pickups, nine smaller John Deere 820 tractors for planting, several barns, and a bunk house. Working for Earl were two full-time hired men, Shorty Martindale and Carl Arginbright.
Last September, Earl McGarraugh was working his soil, letting air into it so the earth could breathe. “I ran the thirty-foot-wide sweep plows all summer after the harvest in June to open up the ground and then used my forty-two-foot-wide rod weeder, that contraption over here, to yank up weeks with its rotating rod,” Earl said, as he walked toward hi Quonsets. “That chicken picker pulverizes the soil and overturns mustard and bind weeds and the volunteer wheat that grew up from the seeds we left during the last harvest.
“There are two times to plant wheat in September,” said Earl McGarraugh, ordering more lemonade and bowls of ice cream from Elmyra. “If you are growing wheat for the purpose of pasturing cattle, you plant the last of August or first week in September. If you planting for crop production, you plant later, from mid-September to the first week in October. I always plant for crop production, so we usually start sowing about September fifteenth.”
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