Now we must turn westward for a hundred miles, and in all the long ride pass but one wheatfield that will pay for cutting; and that depends on rain, and must be cut with a header. Dire distress already stares the settler in the face; and even men, made desperate by hunger in Old Oklahoma, are sending their petitions to Guthrie for food. There are hundreds of families who have nothing but flour and milk, and some who have neither. When a cry goes up for help, it is soon followed by another, saying things are not so bad. This latter cry comes from those who hold property, and who would rather the people starve than that property should decrease.
I saw men who had cut wood, and hauled it sixteen miles, then split it, and carried it twelve miles to market, and after their three days' work the two men had a load for themselves and one dollar and a quarter left. And one man said, "Mine is a case of 'root hog or die,'" and so got fifty cents for his load of wood he had brought fourteen miles; while another man returned with his, after vainly offering it for forty cents. In one town I saw a horse,—a poor one, it is true,—but the man could not get another bid after it had reached one dollar and a half.
Of course there are thousands who are better off; but in the case of very many they were at the very last degree of poverty when they went in. Many of our minute-men preached the first Sunday. They were among the men who sat on the cow-catcher of the engine, and made the run for a church-lot and to win souls. They preached that first Sunday in a dust-storm so bad that you could scarcely see the color of your clothes. To those who never saw one, these dust-storms are past belief. Even when the doors and windows are closed, the room seems as if it were in a fog; for the fine particles of dust defy doors and windows. And should a window be left open, you can literally use a shovel to get the dust off the beds.
You may be riding along, as I was, the hot wind coming in puffs, the swifts gliding over the prairie by your side, the heat rising visibly on the horizon, when in a flash, a dust-storm from the north came tearing along, until you could not see your pony's head at times, drifts six inches deep on the wheat, and your teeth chattering with the cold at one P.M., when at eleven A.M. you were nearly exhausted with the heat.
Strange when you ask people whether it is not extremely hot in the Middle West, they say, "Yes; but we always have cool nights." And, as a rule, that is so; but now as I write, July 9, 1895, comes the news of intense heat,—thermometer a hundred and nine in the shade, and ninety-eight at midnight, followed by a storm that shot pebbles into the very brickwork of the houses.
Every man who can, has a cyclone cellar. Some are fitted up so that you could keep house in them. In one town where I went to speak, the meeting was abandoned on account of a storm which was but moderate; but such is the fear of the twister that nearly all the people were in their pits.
In the Baptist church, where they had a full house the night before, I found one woman and two men; and they were blowing out the lights. The telegrams kept coming, telling of a storm shaking buildings, and travelling forty miles an hour; but it was dissipated before it reached me, and I escaped. Yet I found a man who had lived over a quarter of a century in the West, and had never seen one.
It is a big country. A friend of mine in England wrote me that they feared for me as they read of our fearful cyclones. I was living near Boston, Mass. I wrote back, saying I felt bad for them in London when the Danube overflowed. I had to go over and explain it before they saw my joke.
AFTER A STORM, GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA TERRITORY.
Page 306.