April 18, 2002

Plains Folk: Letters from the Dust Bowl

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

A title such as "Letters from the Dust Bowl" does not promise cheer. The title is that of a new book from the University of Oklahoma Press, edited by Al Turner. The author of the writings collected therein was a remarkable woman named Caroline Henderson.

The life recounted spans the years 1908, when as a schoolteacher Caroline Boa homesteaded in the Oklahoma Panhandle, through 1965, the year before her death. She married the man who drilled the well on her homestead, Will Henderson, and farmed with him for the rest of her life. She became well-known across the country because of articles she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly during the 1930s, describing her hardships and hopes in a time of drought and depression. Turner has unearthed many additional writings by her, both published articles and private correspondence, thus documenting a full life on the plains.

Tied to the farm by duties and livestock, Henderson never traveled much, but she had a broad world view. She was, as Turner says, "able to ponder Nazi totalitarianism while awaiting the birth of a calf." She was wonderfully literate and expressive, reading deeply and writing beautifully. In the midst of environmental and personal tragedy she captured the image of "hardy yuccas" exposed by wind, "their thick woody roots writhing on the surface and the finer rootlets extending like guy wires for perhaps twenty feet in different directions."

When her daughter Eleanor went off to the University of Kansas at an unusually early age, Caroline went along to look after her --and incidentally, in late middle age, completed an M.A. in literature. Her thesis dealt with "lovers of the soil" in middle western fiction. (Later Eleanor, already a medical doctor, also would go back for a master’s in literature, writing her thesis on Willa Cather.) Caroline Henderson had grit, intellect and heart.

Her story speaks to all plainspersons from Texas to Alberta, for its elements and themes apply to the entirety of the Great Plains. By this I mean that whereas "Dust Bowl" is a term the national media chose to apply to the southern plains, the catastrophe of blowing soil was much broader. The great dust storms, in fact, began earlier in Alberta or North Dakota than they did in Oklahoma. (See "Dust Bowl Diary," by Ann Marie Low, for a North Dakota narrative.)

I mean more generally, though, that Caroline Henderson’s story encapsulates the essential tragedy of life on the plains for most of the 20th century. Her exuberance on taking up her homestead claim was that of the whole country. "I wish you could see this wide, free western country," she wrote, "with its great stretches of almost level prairie, covered with the thick, short buffalo grass, the marvelous glory of its sunrises and sunsets, the brilliancy of its star lit sky at night."

In 1952, however, she wrote, "Every day seems to bring some new sorrow in these last years of fruitless effort and disappointment."

What happened in the intervening years? Well, the Dust Bowl, obviously, of which Henderson wrote, "Nothing that you can see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms. Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all plans for improvement or normal farm work."

There was the recurrence of dust storms in the 1950s, too, and the great blizzard of 1957. There was estrangement from church and community, along with general depopulation of the landscape, making for chronic loneliness.

Most of all, though, despite persistence on the farm, and despite recognition as an author, Caroline Henderson felt like her life had been a failure. Turner says for her "that either she herself had failed, the Jeffersonian vision had failed her, or both."

That was how she saw things. The tragedy lay not so much in the hardships she suffered, but rather in her conclusions about her own life. There was no peace for Caroline Henderson.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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