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.

In January of 1887, Rev. John Brown, having finished an investigation into the great drought of NW Texas, told fifty members of the Texas Legislature: “People are leaving that section of the state by the hundreds, doing Texas incalculable injury in advertising it as a state unwilling to provide for it’s own people in distress. Dallas Morning News

In February of 1887 “Word reached Texas that President Grover Cleveland vetoed the drouth bill appropriating $10,000 in seed for the suffering Central Texas area.” Typical; of the Gilded Age Social Darwinist thinking of the time, Cleveland explained that the drouth was a local problem. King, 1965