The Last Days of the Rainbelt

Epilogue: After the Rainbelt

Epilogue  After the Rainbelt I n many ways, life in the Rainbelt in the century or so following the settlement collapse of the 1890s has not changed much. This is still a sparsely populated land with great distances between settlements. Some areas, like the sand hills north of Wray and the dissected Arikaree valley in Yuma County have remained cattle country, and are so thinly settled that the signposts point to people, individual ranches, more often than to towns. On the mat uplands that the Rainbelters tried to settle, vast lelds of winter wheat, showing bright green through the snows of spring, and golden in June before the harvest, stretch in strips to the far horizon. In some of the heavily farmed areas, as around Idalia, farmsteads are spaced only a few miles apart, standing out as islands in a sea of grain. There is enough population here to support a K-12 school in Idalia, as well as a grain elevator, a lre station, a post oflce, and a few modest homes. Elsewhere there is often just wheat and not a farm to be seen. In these areas, the towns, with few people in their hinterlands, are little more than crossroads with a few ramshackle remains of buildings, no more substantial than when extension agent J. E. Payne passed through in the late 1890s. Life in the former Rainbelt is still a signilcantly different experience for men and women. From 1991–96, geographer Cary W. de Wit conducted a series of interviews with women living on the High Plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, investigating their sense of place. He 152 Epilogue found that whereas men lnd the wide open spaces a liberating environment , with easy access to such outdoor activities as hunting and lshing, and enjoy the solitude and seclusion, women are commonly overwhelmed by the sheer exposure and incessant winds and stimed by restrictive roles and social isolation. Like their pioneer forebears, men continue to have more social interaction through their jobs (and more opportunities for jobs), while women, still often conlned to the house, spoke of a pervasive sense of “numbing loneliness.” Again, like their predecessors in the Rainbelt , women lnd solace and satisfaction in family and community relationships , while men tend to embrace the independence. De Wit concluded that “time has done little to change women’s reactions to the Plains.”1 The population of the Rainbelt is still poor, but it is no longer young. In Colorado as a whole, 9.3 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, but in the upland counties in the eastern part of the state the proportion who are poor ranges from 11 to 13 percent. Opportunities for jobs in the rural areas are few, and salaries for those who are employed are often low. Because of the out-migration of young adults, seeking economic and social opportunities elsewhere, the region now has a concentration of elderly. In Colorado in 2000, the average age of the population was 34.3 years, and 11.6 percent were above the age of 62. Corresponding lgures for Phillips County were 39.8 years and 22 percent, and for Kiowa County, 37.9 and 20.5 percent. The average age of farmers in the counties of eastern Colorado ranges from 54 to 59 years: many young people lack the resources or the desire to follow in their parents’ footsteps.2 Another thread in the fabric of life running from past to present is, of course, recurring drought, unpredictable yet guaranteed. There was the catastrophe of the 1930s, with 1934 the dry heart of a dry decade. Burlington received only 7.7 inches of precipitation that year, and most maps of the Dust Bowl place southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado (as well as the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma) at the core of the disaster. Subsequent severe droughts occurred from 1952–57 (Burlington bottomed out at 6.18 inches of precipitation in 1954, its lowest total in more than a century of record), over much of the 1970s, and most recently Epilogue 153 from 2001–6. This last drought was so arid that no rain at all fell for more than a year in some parts of eastern Colorado, and dust storms once again blew over the land. Farmers in the Arkansas valley had to keep deepening their wells just to stay in contact with the falling water...