![when the river runs dry and the sun falls from the sky when the river runs dry and the sun falls from the sky](https://s.mxmcdn.net/images-storage/albums8/3/7/0/3/5/0/12053073_800_800.jpg)
The quiet rural-to-urban migration that began with the drought of the fifties continues in Texas to this day. Others cashed in their livestock and moved to town, never to return to ranch life. Some ranchers with no debt and enough money in the bank were able to hold out until the rains resumed. government stepped in, delivering emergency feed supplies to these cantankerously independent ranchers on a scale that even surpassed the federal intervention of the New Deal period. The sight of just one, drifting in from the horizon, would trigger anxious debates about whether it carried rain or was just an “empty.” If they could afford to, ranchers shipped their cattle to green pastures out of state if they couldn’t, they stayed put and did whatever they could to keep the animals alive until the rains came. Every day, men and women watched the sky for clouds. The environmental cost was equally painful: without new grass growth, cattlemen overgrazed their pastures, which damaged the land and made it more susceptible to mesquite and cedar intrusion. “But he don’t know a damn thing about farming.” The economics were brutal: rising expenses for feed coupled with plunging market prices at the sale barn. “The Lord is a pretty good feller,” goes one old joke, recorded in Rana Williamson’s When the Catfish Had Ticks, a collection of drought humor. True to form, the farmers and ranchers confronted their predicament with resourcefulness and grim humor. In the rural areas the suffering was akin to a biblical plague. The relentless heat wave killed penguins at the Marsalis Zoo and compelled the groundskeepers at the Cotton Bowl to drill a water well in the end zone to keep the turf alive.
![when the river runs dry and the sun falls from the sky when the river runs dry and the sun falls from the sky](https://t2.genius.com/unsafe/223x220/https:%2F%2Fimages.genius.com%2F960d07afd046c6c33aa2976b00bd2d51.300x297x1.jpg)
Its reservoirs got so low that water had to be pumped down from the Red River, whose high salt content fouled pipes, choked landscape plants, and threatened kidney patients. Between 19, the number of reservoirs in Texas more than doubled from 1950 to 1960, the number of farms and ranches shrank from 345,000 to 247,000, and the state’s rural people declined from more than a third of the population to a quarter.ĭallas was the hardest-hit major city. Reservoirs cling to the outskirts of cities, while many of the tiny towns are in various stages of withering away. When the water finally returned, the state had been irrevocably scarred.įlying from Houston to Lubbock today, you can see out the window how the dry spell of the fifties shaped the landscape. Crops shriveled, creeks turned to sand, thirsty cattle bawled, and reservoirs and wells dried up. But the drought that changed Texas forever occurred from 1950 to 1957, when severely deficient rainfall plunged the entire state into an agonizing water shortage. (During a normal year, an average of around thirty inches falls.) During the thirties, soil devoid of moisture turned to dust, rose in fearsome clouds, and blotted out the sun across the High Plains. In 1917, which before 2011 was the driest year on record, an average of just fifteen inches of rain fell across the state. It is our curse of geography and climatology to live in a zone where, as the historian Walter Prescott Webb wrote in 1953, “humidity and aridity are constantly at war.” During every decade of the twentieth century, some part of the state endured a serious drought.