Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

More Cripple Chronicles of Barbed Wire and the End of a River

By Carol Mell, 4-20-07

	Displays of Barbed Wire, like this one at the No Man's Land Museum, are common in the Oklahoma Panhandle

After ten minutes pondering the broken trees with no hot coffee cause there isn’t any to be found in Goodwell, the first moving vehicle we’ve seen in town pulls up and parks behind us. A woman, hunkered over against the cold, opens up the No Man’s Land Historical Museum that I’ve been waiting to see. Admission is free and they have a wheelchair for me to use though it’s too wide to maneuver through the arrowheads, dinosaur footprint casts and Indian grindstones in glass cases.

A brochure states that the museum’s founders were “those who later beat the double burden of the Depression and Dustbowl and those who witnessed the emergence of the modern Panhandle.” A good part of the museum is dedicated to the gadgetry of pioneers, homesteaders, early ranchers and townspeople, everything from wringer washer machines, cash registers, quilts and toilets to grinders, planers and pistols. Wayne loves the television set in an oak frame with a perfectly round green screen. I like the “Humidicrib,” an early day incubator.

One narrow room is dedicated to Guymon’s Pioneer Day Queens, lilac powder ladies with silver curls shown in their yellowing color photos dressed in pioneer bonnets. Wow, they remind me of my Grandma, Ada Pearl, and her twin sister, Rua Merle. They even have names I haven’t heard in years, Mattie, Hattie, Minnie and Tennie and, of course, Ada and Pearl.

I mentioned in an earlier entry that Panhandlers are fond of barbed wire. Lines of the stuff are hung in restaurants, motels and museums like this one with detailed information about their manufacturers. Barbed wire, pronounced here as “bob ware,” meant ownership, dominion and evidence of civilization in a place that didn’t belong to anyone. The very name, No Man’s Land, was the common name given to the Neutral Strip, an area that was not claimed by the Territory of Kansas in 1854 because its southern boundary was set at the 37th parallel. Texas was a slave state when it joined the union and so could not by law extend its sovereignty over any territory north of 36º 30’. This left a strip of land 34 miles wide and 168 miles in length with the New Mexico territory on the west and the Cherokee Outlet on the east.  Not big enough or populated enough to become it’s own territory, it was attached to the Oklahoma Territory in 1890.

One small exhibit, in a side room just past the two-headed calf, the stuffed pet skunk and the cinnamon foal explained a lot about the area. This room had a county fair feel with newspaper articles pinned to corkboards, one showing an angry black cloud of dirt roiling up like a tidal wave about to swallow a row of neat, white bungalows. The photo was taken in 1936, the image was terrifying and was the only reference we found in the museum to the Dust Bowl. Another showed a group of farmers standing around a burn barrel about to destroy the copy of “Grapes of Wrath,” they held over the flames. They reminded me of the farmers I knew in Yuma, Arizona and the wrath they felt for Cesar Chavez. I suppose those book burning farmers, just like those Arizona growers, denied that the conditions described in the book ever existed in their fields.

My husband, Wayne, who grew up in Fresno, California, grew up surrounded by the children of displaced Okies, people who had fled the dust bowl.

Around the corner was a series of photos and stories about how the Beaver River and Coldwater Creek disappeared. After the buffalo and Native Americans that roamed the area were hunted down and killed, cattle ranchers moved in. Cowboys worked their herds over wide open grasslands. But the ranching was tough, by 1886 herds were damaged by blizzards and tick fever brought by the huge Texas cattle drives through the panhandle to markets in Kansas.

According to the museum exhibit, the Herd Law was passed in 1906 requiring ranchers to fence in their cattle. Their hooves eroded the banks of the streams sending more silt and sand into the flows. By 1910, only four years after the Herd Law, the Guymon Herald reported the Beaver River was no more than a sand bed. Farmers and ranchers then pumped the groundwater dry. A drought put the final seal on the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl.

So, the Dust Bowl started with that very same barbed wire so prominently displayed throughout the Panhandle.

On our way out we meet Sue, who works at the museum.  She’s married to a native Panhandler. Sue says that when it comes to the Dustbowl, her husband and other longtime residents deny that anyone ever left.

“My husband says nobody left,” Sue says, “but then I answer, ‘well, how come your Aunt lives in Oregon and your cousins live in California?’ He just shrugs.”

For Oklahomans to claim no one ever left because of the dust bowl is like New Mexicans who say they all came directly from Spain, not Mexico.

I guess all those Okies that populated John Steinbeck’s novel were fake. 

For the record, Sue explains why all the trees limbs in town are broken off. Two ice storms passed through No Man’s Land in December and the weight of that ice broke off the branches. In March, the clean up in Goodwell is still underway.

We headed out past the broken trees across the rest of the Panhandle, crossing the depressions that used to be the Beaver River and Coldwater Creek. No fakery here. The line of trees says there used to be a river but now clearly there is not. That black cloud of dust in the photograph and those arrowheads aren’t fake either. But, then the spirit of the people who lived through it all and remain in the panhandle is also a true thing. Just goes to show that people write their histories the way they want them. That way we all look better in retrospect.

Just like the people who want the story of Virginia Tech to be about the victims and not the shooter, Panhandlers want the museum to be about the ones who stayed. The ones who left can get their own museum.

Driving east we pass through the town of Slapout and Wahtonga, the home of the Wahtonga Cheese Festival. We have one more stop to make, Fort Supply, before arriving in Oklahoma City.
Though far from Humbug Mountain, you’re still danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well keep going. You’ll be home soon enough.

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