Sue Sanders: “The year was 1893, and we weren’t able to raise even seed. Our chances of eating looked almost hopeless that winter. For months we had been living on bacon rinds, black-eyed peas, and cornbread, with an occasional skinny chicken. In addition to this we got about a gallon of milk from our scrub cows. They had kept on coming up every night, and we’d been glad to start milking them again. This milk meant life to our little family, and we were mighty thankful for it. Ma’s blueblooded Jersey had almost given up the ghost. She lay sprawled out under a tree and made no move to get up and find anything to eat. She kept alive for awhile because Ma would sneak out some of our cornmeal to her. When that was gone, Jersey just quiled up and starved to death. Fannie and I had got fighting mad at Ma for giving almost the last bit of our food to that cow. We thought the little Jersey should take her chance with the scrubs. ‘She’s a different breed than those old common cows,’ Ma would say. ‘How would she look in that herd of cattle? She belongs where they have a big barn, and that full of feed.’ But I will take the old common herd every time. I don’t mind saying that I’m proud to be one of them, both in breed and in fact.”

Sue Sanders. Our Common Herd. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1939.

Sue Sanders wrote about the Drought of 1893: “Spring passed without bringing rain. Ma kept us plowing deeper and deeper, trying to draw up moisture from the earth. Plow deep enough, the farmers said, and things will grow till the rains come. I guess it was a good idea, only the didn’t come. We had a couple of showers, but they couldn’t rightly be called rain; it’s sorter stretching things a little to call ’em showers. As summer came on, we saw that there wasn’t any show at all for a good crop; the main thing was to raise enough for feed and seed. We managed to raise some mighty runty cotton and enough nubbins for feed, but nothing more. Many of our neighbors didn’t do that well, and began putting up wild grass and cornstalks for fodder. . . Winter came along and was sorter dreary. We had lots of hard windstorms and cold weather, but no snow or rain. By watching the feed mighty close we got through all right, and Ma figured we were due for a good crop. “First a bad crop and then a good one,” she said. So Fannie and I started our spring plowing early, as we wanted our ground ready for a good soaking. Plowing that hard ground was real labor. I was stronger than Fannie, and it was all I could stand. But she kept at it, swinging those heavy plows . . . and everything we thought might help to get the crops in and make the seeds sprout. I think this heavy work was the main reason Fannie got to be almost an invalid in later life. But all our work was useless. It didn’t rain. The we began to hear rumors of drought all over the South. During that spring and summer water was mighty scarce in Erath County. We had to haul our water for cooking and drinking from a well four or five miles away, and we never knew how long that supply would last. Horses and cattle, coming in from the hills trying to find water, milled around the fence that protected our little [hand dug] water tank, bawling continually. More and more came, and the bawling kept up for days. We got our horses and drove them miles away, but back they came to the water tank, bringing more of the skinny pitiful specimens with them. When either men or beasts get to ganging up, you can look out for trouble. One noon while we were watering our plow horses, the cattle went mad with thirst, broke through the wire fence, and got to the water. In a minute our much-needed water was nothing but mud, in which several of the skinniest cattle were stuck.” Sue Sanders. Our Common Herd, 1939

Sue Sanders wrote that “Assistance finally came from some source at Stephenville. It supplied all the farmers with seed for planting, flour, cornmeal, and a little bacon. This was not given as charity but was to be paid for out of the crop produced, and even then the farmers hated to take it. Although they had been half starved for two years . . . Our team was too weak to make the trip [from Huckaby].” Neighbors, traveling by night so as not to be seen , brought the supplies from Stephenville.

Sue Sanders. Our Common Herd. New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1939.

The Screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax (man-eater) was endemic to Texas and the Southwest, but I can’t find much about them until the late 19th Century. [The 1858 Devil’s Island prison off the coast of French Guiana, was the site of the first recorded screwworm epidemic] The fly lays eggs next to a wound of any warm-blooded mammal, after 12-24 hours the larvae hatch and crawl into the wound and feed on living flesh. Killing the animal in five to ten days. It is supposed that the screwworm fly migrated northward because of warming climate. Cattlemen had to use much of their time riding the range looking for “wormies.” In 1888, a man named George Whitefield complained of horrible headaches, when he went to the door to blow his nose, out came five large screwworms. He died an hour later. (September, Stephenville Empire) A government sterile screwworm fly program ended U.S. infestation in 1966, global warming still encouraging them to migrate northward. The USDA maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Columbia border, dropping sterile flys each week and patrolling the area constantly. An infestation slipped northward in 2016 and showed up in Florida among the deer population, but quick action by the sterile program stopped them that same year.

Mackenzie Tietjen, et. al. “Geographic Population Genetic Structure of the New World Screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax (Diptera: Calliphoridae), Using SNPs.” Journal of Medical Entomology, Volume 59, Issue 3, May 2022; and A.P. Gutierrez and Ponii Arias. “Deconstructing the Eradication of New World Screwworm in North America: Retrospective Analysis and Climate Warming Effects.” Medical and Veterinary Entomology, Volume 33, Issue 2, 2019

“Other places might have several drouths in a single summer, Texas was more likely to have several summers in a single drouth. Drouth here did not mean a complete absence of rain.It meant extended periods of deficient rainfall, when the effects of one rain wore off long before the next one came so that there was no carryover of benefits, no continuity. . . . All this summer it had showered but three times. Each time, the sun broke out from behind the paltry clouds and the west wind swept in furnace hot, stealing the scant moisture before the grass had time to taste the life the brief rainfall had promised.”

Elmer Kelton. The Time it Never Rained

At the beginning of Elmer Kelton’s historical novel about the 1950s drought, the main character remarks that it’s awfully hot and dry but rains will come in the fall. Another man, an elderly Hispanic says:” Not this time. yesterday this whirlwind came across the road and hit my truck. It was turning backwards. That’s a very bad sign . . . I think it won’t rain now for a very long time.”

Elmer Kelton, of San Angelo, wrote the book, “The Time it Never Rained,” about the seven-year drought in the 1950s. He imagined the droughts of 1893, 1918, 1933, and the big one the the 50s as something that “crept up out of Mexico, touching first along the brackish Pecos and spreading then in all directions, a cancerous blight burning a scar upon the land. Just another dry spell, men said at first. Ranchers watched waterholes recede to brown puddle of mud that their livestock would not touch. They watched the rank weeds shrivel as the west wind relentlessly sought them out and smothered them with its hot breath. They watched the grass slowly lose its green, then curl and fire up like drying cornstalks. . . Why worry? They said. It would rain this fall. . . but it didn’t. And many a boy would become a man before the land was green again.

1887: The infamous drought of 1886-1887 was broken in April with a three-inch rain. “The rain came in time to make corn, cotton and oats . . . and to fill the people’s hearts with joy.” The following year was one of above-average rainfall and many farmers produced enough to pay off their farms. Dallas Morning News Within months Stephenville “boosters” were printing brochures touting Stephenville as a paradise – at least until the drought of 1893.

Erath County school teachers complained during the drought of 1886-1887 about not receiving their pay – the explanation was that the state was temporarily out of funds. Dallas Morning News

In February of 1887 the great drought of 1886-1887 continued to parch Erath County, which was close to the geographical center of the dryness at Weatherford. Settlers were returning to the east by the hundreds, while land speculators continued to describe Texas as a semi-tropical paradise.

C. Richard King. Wagons East: The Great Drouth of 1886. Austin: The University of Texas, 1965; and J.W. Williams. “A Statistical Study of the Drouth of 1886.” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook. 21 (October 1945), 85-109.