The Unhappy Land

Down from the snow-covered Rockies shrieked a chill gale one day last week, sucking up the powder-dry top soil of southeastern Colorado, tossing clods and pebbles across the cracked farm lands of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, blasting at the withering roots of range lands through central Texas, and blowing on out across the Gulf of Mexico. Across the prairie dust clouds boiled up as high as 20,000 feet in the worst duster since the black days of 1936.

Within 24 hours the dust was gone again and the storm had passed into dry statistics. But beneath the deceptive electric-blue sky that followed, the haunting problem of drought remained--a problem hanging over an unhappy land, so different from the prosperous U.S. around it that it cares not a whit for the stock market, even less for the talk of parity prices and rigid price supports. The heart of the unhappy land is Edwards Plateau, a sheep-and-cattle-grazing area the size of Maine, in south central Texas. Here, day by day, month by month, through five, six, even ten years, the drought has inexorably tightened its grip until economic survival has become a grim, ceaseless battle for ranchers and businessmen alike.

"We're the Backbone." Melvin Wilhelm is a lean, saddle-brown man who has lived all of his 50 years on Edwards Plateau and runs a sheep and cattle ranch near the little town of Menard (pop. 2,000). Last week Wilhelm looked out across the gaunt and tortured hills of his range and stubbornly set his jaw.

"Most of us are damn fools," he said slowly. "We keep a-fightin' and a-hopin' it will rain, because there was a time they used to compare this country with the limestone country in Kentucky. There was a time you couldn't buy land in Menard County. The only way to get it was to marry it or inherit it. So we've got to stick with it. We're the backbone of the ranchers. We're not the Texans who got rich on oil. And we never had the big spreads of land. But we're not sharecroppers, either. In normal years, a man could make between $3,500 and $20,000 on land like this."

Wilhelm runs 650 sheep and 51 head of cattle on his four sections and another thousand acres of rented pasture land, a spread that would normally carry from 1,000 to 1,100 sheep and from 125 to 150 cattle. When the drought took hold in earnest back in 1950, Wilhelm played it smarter than some of his neighbors, sold off his herds to prevent overgrazing, used the cash to buy feed for the animals he kept. Today it costs him a money-losing $12 a year to feed each cow, $2 to feed each sheep.

"Breaks My Heart." Since 1951 Wilhelm has operated his ranch at a net loss of from $1,000 to $1,500 a year. "I really don't see how we're going to pay off our land, at least not in our generation," says his wife, Grace. A calm, friendly woman of 43, she does the work of a hired hand at lambing time, philosophically shrugs off such things as the fact she has never been able to buy carpets for the concrete floors of their ranch home. "The thing that breaks my heart," she says, "is the death of the live oaks. They've been hundreds of years growing, and now they're dying. We'll never see them again in our lifetime."

Over much of the plateau, other ranchers are worse off than the Wilhelms. One rancher who had $90,000 in the bank and ran from 6,000 to 7,000 sheep and 350 cattle in 1950 has seen his herds dwindle to half that size, his bank account vanish. Overall, the sheep population is down to 25% of its 1946 level, the cattle population to less than 15%. Fences sag, corrals go unpatched, farm houses unpainted, equipment unrepaired.

"We'll Be Here." Today Edwards Plateau is living on its bankers. Far from stepping up the foreclosures, the bankers and loan companies extend more and more credit. Says a director of the Bevans State Bank in Menard: "Menard County has borrowed more money in the last twelve months than in the nine years before that. But the loan companies and the bankers are going to stay with the rancher as long as he's out there trying."

Meanwhile Menard, Melvin Wilhelm's nearest town, is becoming a village of oldsters. Its population has dropped more than 25% since 1950 and is still dwindling, as the youngsters go off to aircraft plants at Dallas and Fort Worth, to the oilfields at Odessa, Texas and Hobbs, N.Mex., or to the colleges and state universities. Menard's buildings stand empty, their dirty windows staring blankly into the quiet street, and in some blocks only a single house is occupied. Two years ago the Santa Fe Railroad discontinued passenger service, and the Kerrville bus no longer makes a regular stop.

Suppose this spring the rains should come? Melvin Wilhelm shrugs.

"You'd have to have at least three good years to get your turf back, to build up your herds, get your fences and financing straightened out," he says. "We've been going backwards a long time. It will take a long time to get moving forward again. But when the good years come we'll be here. You can be sure of that."

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