Living the Dust Bowl
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| My grandmother, Naomi Fisher Davis and her brother Frank Fisher, Oklahoma circa 1931. |
I remember clearly the first time I heard about dust storms. I was sitting on a red step stool watching my Grandmother Davis standing against the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. I was always fascinated by how she could peel a potato so thin that you could see the knife blade beneath the skin. I remember asking her where she learned to do that, and she told me about the Great Depression and the dust storms that forced her family to migrate to Idaho in the 1930’s. She told me she learned to peel potatoes so thinly because there was no food, and you didn’t waste anything. “If you ate potatoes and carrots for supper, you soaked the peels in water overnight so you could fry them in bacon grease if you had it, for the morning.” My question about why she didn’t have any food prompted her to tell me about how the dust had taken over the farm land Kansas.
Her stories about blowing dust always frightened me but, as most curious children do, I would pelt her with questions about what it was like. She told me the dust would blow in and block out the sun so it was so black that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. She also told about how she and her mother would stuff wet rags underneath the doors to keep the dust out of the house and how she and my uncle would wear bandanas over their nose and mouth so they could breathe. Nothing captured my imagination or crept into my dreams like the stories about dust storms. I remember asking her what the dust was like, and she compared it to flour. “Imagine if someone just came in the house and dumped flour all over the floor, 4 inches thick. That’s what the dust was like, flour.”
None of her stories could prepare me for the impact that Ken Burns’ “The Dust Bowl”, a PBS documentary, had on my understanding of my grandmother’s childhood. The images of dust clouds roiling miles in the air and descending to engulf everything in their wake into darkness made her childhood real to me in a way that nothing else had. I understood that I could never make sense of how frightened she must have been or how desperate the situation was to make her grandmother and mother, both single women, pack up everything they owned to travel to somewhere, anywhere else.
In my teenage years, I used to wonder what would possess someone to settle in the Bear Lake Valley because I was positive it was 50 miles past the middle of nowhere. How could a valley forsaken by modern times and lagging 20 years behind the rest of the world be the place you would want to settle for the rest of your life? I realize now that it must have appeared to be a paradise with a blue glacier lake at its center; promising these women a life free from the drought that caused the dust to blow.
Elinor Pruitt Stewart
as Jefferson's Farmer-Citizen
Except for the occasional paragraph devoted to Sacajawea’s role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, women and their contribution to the settlement of the American frontier are largely absent from the history books I grew up studying. Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s excerpts from Letters of a Woman Homesteader are a reminder that women did play a critical role in the development of farming culture in the West. Stewart’s letters, in particular, provide us with a glimpse into the life of a woman who embodied the virtues endorsed by Thomas Jefferson and entwined in farming mythology.
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| Elinore Pruitt Stewart operates a hay maker at her ranch in Burntfork, located in Sweetwater County, in 1925. It was not uncommon for ranch women of the time to help with field work in addition to keeping house and rearing children. (Courtesy of Sweetwater County Historical Museum) http://trib.com/elinore-pruitt-stewart |
In the nineteenth and twentieth century, women willingly left the domestic sphere to improve their economic and social circumstances by homesteading the West. Stewart’s desire to own her land independently of her husband supports the idea that women were capable of owning and operating their own farms. Stewart goes further by expressing joy in this activity and writing about her pride in a successful harvest.
Thomas Jefferson writes "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds” (Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1785. ME 5:94, Papers 8:426). Stewarts tie to the land she homesteaded in southwestern Wyoming is obvious and deep. She loves the land and she loves farming. Her maternal pride in her daughter’s ability to grow her own potato crop at the age of six represents a female agriculture legacy that should be more fully celebrated in American Studies.
As our text points out, the correspondence between Stewart and Coney occurred during a period in history that focused on the working conditions of women and children in industrial factories and was published as a book “within context of a national dialogue” (Kinkead, Funda and McNeill 130). The work also contributes to a larger discussion about women succeeding and thriving independently on American farms. Literature about women in the American studies often represents them in stereotypical gender roles and farming today still remains a largely male dominated profession. It is important to open the discussion to include the successes of female farmers as independent business owners and agricultural stewards.
Works Cited
Kinkead, Joyce, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill. Farm: A Multimodal Reader. Southlake:Fountainhead, 2014. Print.
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