No. 1 Hard

The rail industry was corrupt. Railroad barons, benefiting from government subsidies and the sale of overpriced bonds, raised the value of land in North Dakota simply by providing access to it. They promoted the region as fertile territory just waiting for the cut of the plow. With the help of the federal Homestead Act of 1862—which promised the ownership of 160 acres of land to anyone who could stick it out for five years—hopeful families showed up by the trainload, and little towns sprang up all along the tracks. According to the excellent History of North Dakota, by Elwyn B. Robinson, one settler wrote home to his wife in 1876: “I have not fallen in love with Bismarck. It is a bad specimen of a frontier town, nobody incidentally expecting to stay here permanently, but hoping to make some money to get away with.”

In fact, most of the homesteaders didn’t stay. Of the thirty-nine thousand who filed claims between 1871 and 1890 in North Dakota, only about sixteen thousand met the five-year residency requirement that would give them title to the land. The same sort of wily speculators who always manage to turn a buck while everyone else is losing benefited, buying and selling property inflated in value. But many more people went broke. And thus was set an enduring pattern for the state: modest boom followed by all-out bust. A few good farming years followed by a drought or a flood or a locust plague or a prairie fire or a blizzard that sends everybody packing.

The Depression, for example, hit North Dakota especially hard. During the state’s great drought of 1929–39, countless cattle died from lack of feed or from an accumulation of dust in their lungs or stomachs. It was a stretch of extreme weather, even for North Dakota. In 1936, two records were set: February saw minus sixty degrees; July reached one hundred and twenty one. These were the sorts of conditions that Lois Phillips Hudson recalled in Reapers of the Dust, her fictionalized account of growing up on the state’s prairie, which is as heart-wrenching as Dorothea Lange’s photos for the Farm Security Administration or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. She describes women living in shacks made of sod or odd lumber, going slowly crazy from the ceaseless blowing of the wind, stuffing bits of cloth into wall cracks to keep out the dust. “The thermometer in the shade of our porch registered one hundred and twelve degrees at one o’clock in the afternoon of the first day,” Hudson wrote. “So unobtrusively that we never knew exactly when it happened, eleven of our fattest hens drew their last breaths through beaks straining away from their hard dry tongues and slumped into the hollows they had made while dusting themselves, as though they had dug their own graves.”

CBS news journalist Eric Sevareid, who was born in 1912 in the central North Dakota town of Velva, espoused a similarly bleak view during a later visit to his hometown. “It was a trial of the human spirit just to live there,” he wrote, “and a triumph of faith and fortitude for those who stayed on through the terrible blasting of the summer winds, the merciless suns, through the frozen darkness of the winters when the deathly mourn of the coyote seemed at times the only signal of life.”

The pattern of untenable weather persists. In 1997, the Red River of the North, one of the only rivers in the U.S. that flows northward, rose up and destroyed much of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. And currently, due to more than a decade of above-average rainfall, the aptly named Devils Lake, situated in the eastern part of the state, has been overtaking trees and homes. At Shelvers Grove State Park, along the lake’s northeast shore, a playground stands submerged up to its swings in a bright green swamp. A water spigot juts from the lake like the mast of a sunken ship. The citizens of nearby towns like Minnewaukan, which didn’t used to have lakefront property, are understandably concerned. That’s why the lake, which has no natural outlet, will be connected to the Sheyenne River, which connects to the Red, which runs up into Canada. The plan has given Canadians pause: Since Devils Lake has been self-contained, they worry that exotic species and bacteria will harm Canadian fish.


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