“. . . environmental scarcities will have profound social consequences – contributing to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence. . . ”

Thomas F. Homer-Dixon. “Environment, Scarcity, and Violence,” Princeton University Press, 1999.

“The year 1886 was a hard one in Comanche County, a year of social and political upheaval, a year of hardship and drought. By the summer of 1886 the average citizen of Comanche was living on corn pone and blackstrap garnished with turnip greens if he were lucky. Meat was a thing of the past, cattle had to be driven from four to ten miles to water, and most of the herds had been sold before the cattle died of hunger. Farmers could not work, their crops died in the ground, and idle men turned to other things than labor that brought no profit. The people of the county were further agitated by the appearance of a split in the county political organization, a split that soon developed into a full-fledged revolt and the formation of the Human party, the first Populist party in Texas. [The Populist Party was a left-leaning agrarian movement] It did not succeed, however without rousing some hot and flaring tempers still further, for the people took their politics seriously and fought bitterly and sometimes physically over their differing political opinions. Rash actions were the rule rather than the exception. . . Fierce tempers made more fierce by the drought and the political disturbances, were making their points by threats of lawlessness. Mobs in the nominal strength of the law had paid several visits . . . and had come away with prisoners to be left on the first stout limb. . . Comanche County was one watched pot that was beginning to boil.”

Billy Bob Lightfoot. “The Negro Exodus from Comanche County, Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January, 1953, Vol. 56No. 3, pp.407-416. This is a Master’s Thesis based mostly on interviews made during the 1940s.