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Made by man, controlled by government, bad time for cows


LBJ GRASSLAND – The LBJ National Grassland was established in 1937 when the government began purchasing land not suitable for farming for land conservation. Messenger Photo by Brian Knox

Lynda Parker emailed me and asked: “A few years ago a person … told us a story about cattle on the Grasslands during the Depression. He said that all the abandoned and starving cattle on the Grasslands were driven north of Alvord to a ravine where they were shot and buried. We … were wondering exactly what did happen during the time that the federal government bought up the land.”

“‘I got to figure,’ the tenant said. ‘There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.'” -The Grapes of Wrath.

The Caddo and LBJ National Grasslands, according to the U.S. Forest Service, which is responsible for their management, were established in 1935 and 1937, respectively, and comprise more than 38,000 acres, over 20,000 of which is in Wise County. I’m not sure why the Forest Service always lumps them together, since they are not really that close to each other, but they do. If you’re curious, the Caddo National Grassland is in Fannin County, near the Texas/Oklahoma border between Sherman and Paris.

Joy Burgess-Carrico

The LBJ National Grassland is located almost exclusively in Wise County, with a few acres creeping into Montague County just for fun. It basically comprises the middle portion of Wise County, north of U.S. 380. The Forest Service map I looked at has all of Alvord within the borders of the Grassland.

The question sent to me really covers two different events that took place in the 1930s in Wise County. Both are measures taken by the federal government to try and pull America out of its Depression nosedive.

THE COW-POCALYPSE OF ’34

In the early 1930s, the Midwest suffered several years of drought which created a crisis on many levels. People couldn’t afford to feed their livestock. In an effort to unload their livestock, they tried to sell, and processing plants became overrun and couldn’t handle the demand. The sale price for livestock plummeted. The return on selling no longer justified the cost of shipment.

As prices dropped, farmers were stuck with animals they couldn’t afford to feed and couldn’t afford to sell. It was getting to the point where they were being forced to let their animals starve to death in the fields.

Roosevelt took office in 1933, and one of the first pieces of legislation passed was the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The purpose of the act was to control the market price of agricultural commodities, including livestock. The act made it possible for the federal government to provide loans and subsidies to farmers and also to purchase livestock from farmers, especially livestock otherwise unsellable. They started with hogs and moved on to cattle in 1934.

Once the government bought the livestock, they would do one of several things with it. Generally speaking, they would either slaughter the livestock and can the meat, they would give the livestock to a farmer in need of aid or they would “condemn” the animal. This meant the animal was not fit for food and was usually killed and buried. They called this “livestock reduction.” It was meant to bring “cattle numbers in closer proximity to feed supply.”

The government brought their reduction show to Wise because Wise asked them to. The Decatur Chamber of Commerce applied for drought area designation in the summer of 1934. The designation was granted and gave Wise access to the relief available under the AAA.

The cattle purchasing project lasted until the following January. The Jan. 10, 1935, Messenger reported the government put an end to the project. All told, the county agent reported, 12,000 head of cattle were purchased by the government for about $180,000. The price per head was between $4 and $20, depending on age and condition.

I cannot tell you how many animals were condemned. I found percentage ranges from around 20 to 40 percent. So between July 1934 and January 1935, somewhere between 2,400 and 4,800 head of cattle were most likely killed in Wise County.

I did not find any stories about a specific mass culling north of Alvord, but considering the daily purchasing and decisionmaking within a six-month period, rounding up and killing cattle wouldn’t have been that surprising an event. The Grasslands didn’t exist yet, but I suppose north of Alvord is as good a place as any to create giant cow death pits.

The cattle were undoubtedly starving to some degree, but since they were sold, they were not abandoned, as the questioner was told.

The decision to condemn an animal was not arbitrary. Assessors would evaluate the cattle and condemned what they called “scrub cattle.” And all scrub cattle were not necessarily discarded. I found a list of what farmers could do and could not do with condemned cattle. Once condemned, they could can the meat for their own use or for their tenants, but they could not provide it to their neighbors, nor could they sell it. So once the cattle were condemned, it seems the farmer had some choice as to the fate of the animal, or at least the animal carcass. It seems they could get paid for their scrub cow and eat it, too.

As stated earlier, the livestock purchasing program ended in early 1935, and the whole AAA was ruled unconstitutional in 1936. They had to re-legislate the bill in 1937, once Roosevelt scared the Supreme Court into cooperating with his New Deal efforts (a story for another time), but they left out the livestock purchasing aspects from the new legislation. It was a brief and bloody episode of the New Deal.

NO DUST BOWL II

“The [dust storm] Sunday was the cause of four deaths in this city,” wrote Wylie Young to his parents, as published in the May 2, 1935, Messenger. Young lived in eastern Colorado. “Two men and two women contracted dust pneumonia and died in 12 hours after the storm came up. Today another man died from the effects. One 7-year-old boy was playing in his yard and got lost in the storm and died during the night. They found him next day tangled in a fence. …

“This is the fourth year without a general rain, and if it continues thru 1935, it will be the fifth.

“Another feature of the storms is the static electricity. People wet their hair to keep it from standing on end. You dare not touch a fence, windmill or sheet steel shed. All cars drag chains. Ordinarily a steel shed would discharge the electricity thru the ground, but being perfectly dry, the ground does not carry it. Thirty-one fires in Denver, and many in other towns were laid to static.”

This is a sampling of the effects of the drought in what was eventually termed the Dust Bowl. I quoted a lot of the letter because I found these facts so amazing.

The cause of these colossal dust storms was us. The April 11, 1935, Messenger reports this quote made by an anonymous Washington bureaucrat, “no country has wasted its natural resources so fast as has the United States.” Americans over-farmed and overgrazed the land, killing the topsoil. With a few years of no rain, they found themselves in a big hole in the center of the nation, and it was full of aggressive dust.

Roosevelt’s administration wished to prevent this happening again. So, the federal government passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act. This act, among other things, gave the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to “retire submarginal land.” The purpose of this bill was to “correct maladjustments in land use, and thus assist in contolling soil erosion, {blah blah blah} land conservation, {blah blah blah} {we don’t want another Dust Bowl, so we’re buying up the dried out land and letting it go native}.”

That was the idea.

The government began doing what they could to acquire the land they considered unsuitable for cultivation, in its attempt to save us from ourselves.

Although not technically in the Dust Bowl, Wise County suffered the effects of the drought years, and the government must have felt that the lands in north Wise were the kind of land that needed to be reestablished as native grassland.

I found an Environmental Impact Statement from 1987 that said only 37 percent of the land inside the proclaimed boundaries of the Grasslands is actually owned by the U.S. government. I’m sure they’ve acquired more since that time, but it helps explain why the whole town of Alvord is within its boundaries.

What is and is not the Grassland is not entirely clear to me. It seems to be a patchwork of plots intermingled with private land.

They must have thought they had enough cohesion in 1961, however, because that’s when they slapped a border around what they had in Wise and Montague Counties and called it Cross Timbers National Grassland.

In 1974, soon after the death of Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. government redesignated Cross Timbers as a memorial to the late president. It became the LBJ National Grassland and has been so ever since.

So, what does the LBJ National Grassland represent? It’s a place available for recreation: fishing, hunting, horseback riding. It’s land set aside for conservation purposes, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. This much I already knew. It’s also the product of the government’s efforts to control the mess we found ourselves in from our own mismanagement of our resources. That’s a new angle.

For me it represents the human race’s fatal misconception that we have any real idea what consequences our actions are going to have down the road. There aren’t enough Dust Bowls or ozone layers to convince us that we cannot manipulate our environment however we want.

The Grassland represents the illusion of control. It was created because the government thought it could prevent another catastrophe by doing so, and it’s the final resting place for the government’s efforts to control the market price of livestock. Who knew all this evidence of our effort to control the world was just north of U.S. 380?

Joy Burgess-Carrico is a graphic designer at the Messenger. Email your questions to jcarrico@wcmessenger.com.

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