Another bin, another harvester

Wildorado, Texas

If you're interested in the history of 20th century grain storage (and who isn't?),
Wildorado, Texas is an interesting little town.

Easter in the Dugout

(NYTBR) ... When a steer’s leg came crashing through its sod ceiling, Wilder wrote that Ma and Laura “laughed because it was funny to live in a house where a steer could step through the roof. It was like being rabbits.”
The Caseys’ dugout was less jolly: “scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centi­pedes and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings.” In rainstorms, Walls writes, “the dugout turned to mud. Sometimes clumps of that mud dropped from the ceiling and you had to put it back in place.” Once, during an Easter dinner, a rattlesnake dropped onto the table, and Lily’s father took a break from carving the ham to chop off its head.
Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in “The Glass Castle,” Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. Continued

Photos: 1. Oklahoma dugout c1909 (Library of Congress). 2. The Faro Caudill [family] eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

The Black Sunday Dust Storm of 1935

"Dust storm. It was conditions of this sort which forced many
 farmers to abandon the area. Spring 1935. New Mexico" - Dorothea Lange

(Wikipedia) Black Sunday refers to a particularly severe dust storm that occurred on April 14, 1935, as part of the Dust Bowl. It was one of the worst dust storms in American history and it caused immense economic and agricultural damage.

It is estimated to have displaced 300 million tons of topsoil from the prairie area in the US. On the afternoon of April 14, the residents of the Plains States were forced to take cover as a dust storm, or "black blizzard", blew through the region.

The storm hit the Oklahoma Panhandle and Northwestern Oklahoma first, and moved south for the remainder of the day. It hit Beaver around 4:00 p.m., Boise City around 5:15 p.m., and Amarillo, Texas, at 7:20 p.m.

The conditions were the most severe in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, but the storm's effects were felt in other surrounding areas. Continued

The First Arbor Day

(Library of Congress) The first official Arbor Day took place on April 10th, 1872. It is estimated that on this inaugural Arbor Day, Nebraskans celebrated by planting more than one million trees.
The occasion fulfilled the dream of J. Sterling Morton, a newspaper editor and former governor of the Nebraska Territory. Morton, an ardent proponent of forestation, lobbied for a holiday to encourage the planting of trees.
According to the National Arbor Day Foundation, counties and individuals that planted the most trees were awarded prizes. Continued

Three Flags Day

(Wikipedia) Three Flags Day commemorates March 9 and 10, 1804, when Spain officially completed turning over the Louisiana (New Spain) colonial territory to France, who then officially turned over the same lands to the United States, in order to finalize the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
The ceremony in St. Louis cleared the way for Lewis and Clark to begin their exploration. Continued

Emptiness

(Encyclopedia of the Great Plains) Emptiness defines the Great Plains. The region typically is described by what is missing: no trees, no mountains, little water, few people. When travelers dread crossing the Plains, it is the endless space, the passage through "nothing" that they fear. The Plains landscape offers no comfortable niches, no categorical grip, no sense of context, not even convincing evidence of movement.
Most North Americans, comfortable in the ornate context of the city, feel uneasy on the Plains. They lose their bearings, their sense of place, and the panoply of stimuli they usually depend upon for a sense of self. Some outsiders simply cannot endure this emptiness. They pay for a plane ticket and avoid the empty drive. In extreme cases, people have given up halfway across, abandoned their cars, and flown home from the nearest airport. Plains residents call the unhinging effect the emptiness can have on outsiders "Plains fever."
Contrary to the typical outsider's perspective, denizens of the Plains are very attached to emptiness. Continued

Tankhouse and Barn

I've posted this scene before, but I like this angle better, though you lose the truck.
Either way, it's in Roosevelt County, New Mexico.

Old House 142

Mt. Dora, New Mexico.

Thieves’ Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer’s Path to the Little Bighorn

Capt. George A. Custer and Gen. Alfred Pleasonton on horseback (Library of Congress).

(Wild West) Countless books deal with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s ill-fated “Last Stand” at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.
Much less ink has been expended on Custer’s venture into the Black Hills in the summer of 1874. There may have been less shooting during that expedition, but it laid the groundwork for the scrapping of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne … Continued

Medicine Lodge Treaty

Ten Bears, a Comanche
signer of the
Medicine Lodge Treaty

(Wikipedia) The Medicine Lodge Treaty is the overall name for three treaties signed between the United States government and southern Plains Indian tribes in October 1867, intended to bring peace to the area by relocating the Native Americans to reservations in Indian Territory and away from European-American settlement.
The treaty was negotiated after investigation by the Indian Peace Commission, which in its final report in 1868 concluded that the wars had been preventable. They determined that the United States government and its representatives, including the United States Congress, had contributed to the warfare on the Great Plains by failing to fulfill their legal obligations and to treat the Native Americans with honesty. Continued

Pastores

(Library of Congress)

(Encyclopedia of the Great Plains) The pastores are a little-known Hispanic sheepherding group whose homeland was the grasslands of north-central New Mexico (Quechero, or Mescalero Plains). Established there by at least the early nineteenth century, the pastores practiced a transhumance lifestyle with their flocks.
... Economically, the pastores were part of either the partido system of herd management or a family business that owned and managed the flock. The New Mexico partido system, adapted from that of Spain, was a means of lending capital at interest that allowed a sheepherder to build up his own flock, thereby moving to the family business system.
... Despite risks, pastores began their incursion into the upper Canadian River valley of eastern New Mexico by 1849 and the Canadian River valley of the Texas Panhandle in the 1860s. In the middle 1870s, with the removal of the Native peoples and near extermination of the bison herds on which they depended, the vast grasslands of the Texas Panhandle and Southern High Plains became open territory. Continued

Cherokee Strip Land Rush

(Wikipedia) ... The Land Run itself began at noon on September 16, 1893, with an estimated 100,000 participants hoping to stake claim to part of the 6 million acres and 40,000 homesteads on what had formerly been Cherokee grazing land. It would be Oklahoma's fourth and largest land run. Continued

George Catlin

Comanche village by George Catlin

George Catlin (July 26, 1796 – December 23, 1872) was an American painter, author, and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West.
Travelling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin was the first white man to depict Plains Indians in their native territory. Continued

An Old Elevator

Hart, Texas

Arthur Rothstein

Perhaps Rothstein's most famous photo, and an icon of the Dust Bowl:
 a farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936

(Wikipedia) Arthur Rothstein (July 17, 1915 – November 11, 1985) was an American photographer. Rothstein is recognized as one of America’s premier photojournalists. During a career that spanned five decades, he provoked, entertained and informed the American people. His photographs ranged from a hometown baseball game to the drama of war, from struggling rural farmers to US Presidents. Continued

Custer's Last Stand

 

(Wikipedia) The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to Lakota as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes, against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which occurred June 25–26, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory, was the most prominent action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. Continued

Allis Chalmers Gleaner

Causey School

The school in Causey, New Mexico, built by the WPA, back when
the homesteads were smaller and the families larger, sits abandoned.

Old House 131

Whatever was in those silos, is still in those silos.
The house sits between Causey and Pep, New Mexico.

Somewhere, somebody is trying to rent this out on craigslist.
"Roomy, rustic country cottage!"

If you look closely, you can see the padlock on the doorframe.
This is a good example of what a leaky roof can do to adobe/sod walls.