The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book, The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: Nebraska-Kansas-Oklahoma, scheduled for publication February 2015. It takes place as the author drives into McCook, Nebraska, September 2009.
One of the first newspaper editors described McCook as being along the “verdant banks and silvery waters”
of the Republican River. The main street goes north perpendicular from the
river up a sharp hill, and for good reason. The “silvery waters” of the river
used to rise out of its banks and transform into a roiling black mass of death.
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| Highway 83, south of McCook, Nebraska |
May 31, 1935 must have seemed like Armageddon to
McCook citizens. Just as a devastating floodwaters rushed downstream killing
several residents, a tornado dropped from the sky west of town and wiped out an
entire farm family, including three children. The flood killed five.
The Republican was one of those untamed Missouri
River tributaries that the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s dammed up in
order to save the folks downstream who insisted on building homes and businesses
on flood plains. Indeed, the spot between Omaha and Denver may have been
somewhat inauspicious. An earlier tornado in 1928 flattened or severely damaged
147 homes. (Miraculously, no one was killed.)
Some of the worst weather in the world takes
place in the skies above me as fronts fight it out in the atmosphere over the
continent’s vast center. “When
elephants fight, the ants get trampled,” is a
saying I learned when I lived in Southeast Asia. It refers to the plight of
peasants when warlords clash. But it works for weather systems and the humans
down below. Floods, tornadoes, blizzards and hail have wreaked havoc in McCook,
and every community along the northern sections of the road.
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| The once mighty Republican River today |
Vivian, South Dakota, on Highway 83 made
worldwide headlines the summer of 2010 when the largest hailstone ever recorded
dropped from the sky. The local man who found the chunk of ice in his yard put
it in his freezer, and at first thought about making a daiquiri with it, but
decided to take it to the post office to weigh it instead. It came in at a
world record 1.9375 pounds, and a U.S. record for width at 18 inches. The storm
brought Vivian national notoriety for a day or two, along with a lot of
insurance claims, for other smaller hailstones punched holes as wide as coffee
cans in roofs and cars.
And although I am intentionally driving the
highway in the late summer, I can’t forget the snowstorms. The Blizzard of ‘49,
still talked about in these parts, buried the Great Plains in yards, not feet,
of snow. It was actually a series of storms, not one event, that lasted for
five months from November 1948 to April 1949. It created monstrous drifts from
thirty to forty feet high. Towns like McCook were cut off from rail, highway
and phone lines. The first storm in November left the town communicating with
the outside world via short-wave radio to a station in Denver. Nebraska had
already suffered three blizzards, two of them around Thanksgiving and
Christmas, when the monster storm hit on January 3, 1949. It continued for
sixty hours, left two to three feet of snow across portions of states with
winds reaching fifty miles per hour. No other blizzard has topped it in
severity in more than sixty years. More and more snow came within the following
weeks, with only a few short days between storms for people to dig themselves
out. This prompted President Harry S. Truman to declare Operation Snowbound to
save millions of cattle and humans on the plains by delivering emergency
supplies by airlift or any means possible. There was so much snow, drifts
didn’t melt for months and folks out in the country were making ice cream from
them as late as July.
The so-called Children’s Blizzard may have been
worse in terms of the death toll. Mother Nature sometimes throws sucker punches
in the winter by creating some unnaturally balmy days before all hell breaks
loose. That was the case on the morning of January 12, 1888, when
schoolchildren in dugouts, sod houses and other rudimentary settler dwellings
left their homes wearing light coats, or no coats at all, for one-room
schoolhouses. Even if there were accurate weather forecasts back then, there
was no means to communicate what was about to hit. Just as the children were
leaving school on their long walks home, a cold front moving faster than a
steam locomotive swept in from the northwest.
As a wall of Arctic air rushed down the plains
from the north, it collided with warm moist air from the south. In the morning,
the people of North Platte and McCook were enjoying the unseasonably warm
weather coming from the south. But within hours, the watery air rose over the
curtain of cold air, feeding moisture into the system, and the two became a
monster.
Weather watchers in Bismarck were the first to
report a rapidly falling temperature and gale force winds at 6 a.m. Five hours
later, the storm struck McCook. The temperatures in Nebraska dropped an average
of 18 degrees in three minutes.
It did not come gently like a snowfall that
starts with some light flakes and then slowly builds in intensity over the next
few minutes or hours. This one came like a tidal wave, and those who witnessed
it never forgot that inky black wall coming for them out of the northwest.
On the Rosebud Reservation, a teacher walked out
the schoolhouse door and was nearly knocked on her feet by a gust of wind. She
had only ventured a few yards, but almost didn’t make it back.
Descriptions of the storm were remarkably
similar to those seen during the Dust Bowl. It was a black cloud rolling toward
them. Instead of carrying topsoil,
this black cloud was all ice.
Survivors likened the snow to sand. The
particles were so fine, each was like a little sting against the face, and they
encrusted the skin within minutes. The particles struck the eyeballs forcing
the victims to shut their
eyes. Some died within a few feet of their doors.
Cattle suffocated as their nostrils froze shut. That night, the wind chill
dropped to 40 degrees below zero.
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| Blizzard of '49 aftermath |
The cold air mass was felt from the Dakotas to
the tip of Texas, affecting every mile of the land around what would one day be
U.S. Route 83. By the time it reached Abilene, Texas, it was an ice storm that
covered the city in a glaze. When it ended the next morning, hundreds of
victims lay dead in the snow, more than 100 of them school children.
Red Willow County, where McCook is located, had
an earlier disaster in the 1870s, two years after the duke had come on his
hunt.
The locust swarms that swept out of the
mountains are almost inconceivable today. There are no living souls who
remember the phenomena, and the insects that caused the destruction are now
extinct. Similar in appearance, but much more mobile than the grasshoppers that
are stuck in the grill of my car, they came from the Rockies in the billions.
The larva hatched in the soil in numbers that reached millions of per square
acre. The nymphs ate everything in sight, molted five times before sprouting
wings, then flew off together, riding the currents east to the lush prairies,
where they dropped out of the sky, began the cycle again, and grew exponentially
in numbers and began to swarm again. If this wasn’t bad enough for the farmers
who watched helplessly as their crops were destroyed, the plagues most often
occurred during times of drought. The Rocky Mountain locust used the Great
Plains low level jet, a 200-mile-wide stream of air centered in Kansas and
Oklahoma that pushes air at altitudes of up to 1,000 feet in the spring and
late summer. Separate insect clouds rose from the Earth and converged in the
stream to create swarms of Biblical proportions.
Why the mass of insects collectively dropped out
of the sky to denude certain areas of land while bypassing others was a
mystery. The earliest pioneers of Frontier and Red Willow Counties watched as
what appeared to be a black cloud approached from the west. The sunlight
reflected off their wings making the mass glimmer as it approached. They came
down like hail and the crawled in mass on man and beast. They ate the clothes
off farmers’ backs, stripped wood, and cannibalized their own as nothing would
sate their voracious appetite.
General Ord, still commander of the Platte in
1874, sent one of his officers west to Red Willow County to ascertain the
situation in the aftermath of summer’s locust plague. Of the some 800
residents, he reported that two-thirds were on the brink of starvation and
might not make it through the winter. Ord began a campaign to free up stores of
military rations sitting in warehouses that could be distributed to the newly
impoverished farmers of Nebraska and Kansas. It was a months-long, protracted
bureaucratic battle that required congressional approval, but the general
prevailed. Not only were food stocks released that prevented a famine that
winter, it sparked a massive relief effort that helped the farmers get back on
their feet the following spring by providing seeds.
The swarms are hard to comprehend today because
the locusts went extinct—mostly likely destroyed when their habitat succumbed
to the plow.
McCook was also on the northern edge of the Dust
Bowl in the 1930s. The choking clouds of fine dirt that swept over most of
Western Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles in the 1930s were felt as
far away as the East Coast, but the extreme drought that sparked the so-called
black blizzards stretched along Highway 83 from McCook to the Red River in
Texas. The mother of all dust storms occurred on April 14, 1935, and like the
Children’s Blizzard, began with a cold front rolling down the plains from
Bismarck. There was no warm, moist air in this case, though. By this
time, the
drought had spread to the northern plains states, and the savage wind picked up
the loose topsoil and created a two-hundred mile wide cloud of topsoil that
struck as churchgoers were returning home from Sunday services. Sixty-five
–mile-per-hour winds pummeled the unsuspecting victims with freezing
temperatures and grit. Unlike the blizzard of 1888 and the locust plagues, this
was an era when common folks owned cameras. There are dozens of pictures of the
black wall of dirt that hit the day known as Black Sunday. Southwest of McCook,
a twenty-five year old man, Glen O’Brien, his vision impaired by the dust,
collided with a truck and was killed instantly. His girlfriend and the truck
driver survived with minor injuries.
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| Black Sunday on Hwy 83, Perryton, Texas |
“The story of human misery from dust continues
as stifling and killing storms swept portions of five states,” said the April
15 McCook Daily Gazette article that reported the death.
The unbelievably glorious late summer weather
I’ve experienced since I arrived at Westhope two weeks ago still holds as I
turn off the co-signed highways and drive up Norris Avenue. I park the car at
the top of the hill. No tornadoes, blizzards, floods, prairie fires, dust
storms or locust plagues today. The effects of some of these natural disasters
have been mitigated. Blizzards and tornadoes are unstoppable, but the Weather
Service can at least warn us in advance. The Army Corps of Engineers placed dams on the Republican to stop its semi-regular floods. The Rocky
Mountain locust has gone the way of the carrier pigeon, the last swarm was in
1902. Except for a few entomologists, no one misses them.
The Oglala Aquifer is
still beneath my car wheels. Geologists were just beginning to understand its
magnitude during the 1930s drought years, and they couldn’t take advantage of
this vast underground resource. Today, gas-powered pumps draw its fossil water
out of the ground, ensuring that crops will be watered in the hottest, driest
summers.Stew Magnuson is the author of The Last American Highway: A Journey Through Time Down U.S. Route 83: The Dakotas, available at Amazon.com and bookstores and gift shops along Highway 83.
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HERE. And check out the U.S. Route 83 Travel page at www.usroute83.com. Contact Stew Magnuson at stewmag (a) yahoo.com
