The times it never rained: 3 devastating historic Texas droughts

Not to sound like an old codger, but I feel this drought in my bones.

After a lifetime in Texas, you recognize the patterns.

This summer, much of Texas has sweated through historic heat waves.

Coastal counties have benefited from banks of ameliorating rain, thanks in part to tropical disturbances, but most of Texas remains in drought.

"About 97.5% of the state is experiencing drought — from 'abnormally dry,' the lowest level of drought, to 'exceptional drought,' the most severe level," the American-Statesman reported on July 8. "That's an increase from about 87% at the start of the year, and a massive turnaround from last year, when the percentage was only 12.9% on the week of July 6, 2021, drought data show."

Still, who can say how long it will last? By the time you read this column, a tropical storm could inundate large swaths of the state and, in doing so, break the dry spell. That's often how these droughts end. At least for a short time.

Hurricane Harvey interrupted a dry spell in 2017 by dropping at least 50 inches of rain on Southeast Texas. By 2018, much of the region had returned to drought status.

A history of Texas aridity

How bad can it get? History records three particularly devastating droughts within living memory.

Depending on where you lived, the two worst of the past 100 years took place during the 1930s, when the Dust Bowl worsened the misery of the Great Depression, and during the 1950s, when an eight-year stretch of aridity inspired the title of Elmer Kelton's classic novel, "The Time It Never Rained."

A third awful drought during the early 21st century weighs more heavily on the minds of Texans who are younger than, say, 60, and therefore don't personally recall the 1930s or 1950s.

Although exacerbated by climate change, this is not a new phenomenon. Humans have found ways to survive droughts since they first arrived in this part of the world some 20,000 years ago, according to the latest archeological research.

During the 1500s, the first European to write about Texas, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, stumbled on an agricultural community near present-day Presidio that had not seen rain in two years.

In 1822, Stephen F. Austin's colony lost its first corn crop to dry weather.

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"Each decade since then has been marked by at least one period of severe drought," reports the Handbook of Texas Online. "Associated with dry times are grasshopper plagues, brush and grass fires, sand and dust storms, crop failures and depression, livestock deaths, disease resulting from insufficient and impure drinking water, and migrations of citizens from parched territory."

By some estimates, extreme droughts visit Texas about every 20 years; less severe ones every three or four years.

Droughts during the 19th century stunted the growth of several parts of the state, especially West Texas.

In 1883, for instance, during a wet cycle, railroads punched through West Texas toward the Pacific, while the state government opened up public lands for sale. The double deal drew hopeful farmers and ranchers out west.

Many headed back to wetter climes after the drought of 1884-86.

'These dusty blues are the dustiest ones I know'

You didn't need to be folk singer Woody Guthrie to sing the blues in the Texas Panhandle — and other parts of the Midwest — during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The images imprinted on our collective minds by John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Dorothea Lange's striking documentary photography make the Dust Bowl impossible to forget, even if we didn't live through the times.

Previously, during the 1920s, a rush to cultivate the southern plains — forgetting that parts of this expanse were once called the "Great American Desert" — led to the "great plough-up," during which native grasses, which anchored the soil, were replaced with tilled farms that exposed the soil to the wind.

During the 1930s, stretches of drought, wind erosion and monster dust storms spread across West Texas, along with parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

Wind erosion peaked in the late 1930s with 68 dust storms in 1936; 72 in 1937; and 61 in 1938.

"In Amarillo, the worst year for storms was 1935, when they lasted a total of 908 hours," reports the Handbook of Texas Online. "Seven times from January to March, the visibility in Amarillo declined to zero; one of these complete blackouts lasted 11 hours. In another instance a single storm raged for 3½ days."

"Times were rough during the Depression," the late Travis County farmer Rubert Ceder told the American-Statesman in 2013. He died in 2016. "The drought was so bad, we took in just one bale of cotton. If it wasn't for FDR, I don't know what would have happened."

Ceder felt that the 1930s drought was tougher than the later scorcher of the 1950s.

"We didn't have fertilizer in the '30s," he says. "Then, you just planted, cultivated and gathered, if anything grew."

As Ceder noted, President Franklin Roosevelt's intervention helped. The Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres by 1935, but had declined to 22 million acres by 1940, thanks to the federal Soil Conservation Service, a New Deal program that oversaw more than 500 Civilian Conservation Corps camps during this period.

Eight years during the 1950s with almost no relief

There's a reason Texas history buffs still read Elmer Kelton's "The Time It Never Rained," besides Kelton's expert depictions of West Texas ranch life, and his portrait of a smart, cantankerous rancher named Charlie Flagg. Kelton, who served as the farm and ranch reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times as well as Livestock magazine, left us one of the best records of the Texas drought of the 1950s, when in his own words, "the longest and most severe drought in living memory pressed ranchers and farmers to the outer limits of courage and endurance."

Droughts are slow. Not easy to dramatize. Kelton found a way to do so by taking each disaster, triumph and setback as part of rancher Flagg's steadily constricting circumstances.

Between 1949 and 1957, Texas received up to 50% less rain than usual. Temperatures soared above average. Three years — 1951, 1954 and 1956 — count among the driest in the state's history. The number of Texas farms and ranches was reduced from 345,000 to 247,000, and the state's rural population dropped precipitously.

Economic losses from 1950 to 1957 were estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

The drought ended when an April 24, 1957, storm brought down 10 inches of rain, as well as hail and tornadoes, on wide stretches of Texas within a few hours. The rain continued for 32 days; floods followed.

Rural Texas — once at the heart of the state's self-image — never really recovered.

“Shifting economic trends — including the decline of the railroads, decreased cotton production, and the depressions of 1921 and 1932 — contributed to the wane of rural prosperity,” wrote photographer Jim Alvis in his documentary picture book, "Texas Passing: A Fading Rural Heritage." “In many parts of the state, severe drought conditions in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, not to mention major infestations of insect pests such as boll weevil and screwworm, often proved an overwhelming challenge for small farmers and ranchers.”

Extreme drought not a distant memory

The drought and oppressive heat that peaked in 2011 did not just send folks indoors toward the comfort of air-conditioning; it made planners consider a whole range of options for dealing with future higher temperatures with no increase in rainfall.

The 2011 drought cost the Texas economy $8.7 billion in livestock and other agricultural losses. Rice farmers downriver of Austin were cut off from Highland Lakes water; they have been again and will not receive a water allotment for the second crop of 2022.

Texas A&M scientists estimated that the number of trees destroyed statewide that year by wildfires — the worst of them the Bastrop Complex Fire during September and October — at more than 300 million.

Scientists paid attention. And rang the alarm.

"Experts warn that a warmer Texas likely will to lead to declines in dairy production, steeper competition for water and spikes in disease," environmental reporter Asher Price wrote in the American-Statesman in 2011. "By midcentury, average temperatures in Texas could increase by 5 degrees over the average temperature in the period between 1976 and 2005. By end of the century, average temperatures could increase by as much as 8 degrees."

I remember the 90 days of temperatures in the 100s that year, again in my bones. We lost well-established trees in our garden. A habitual pedestrian, I found that my walking stopped by 11 a.m. and didn't return until the sun was down. The lakes dried up and people stayed indoors with our depressing version of "seasonal affective disorder."

Although in mid-July 2022, we are only half way through the six months of normally hot weather here, I note the dread and despair in people's voices when they talk about the heat.

History demonstrates that it can get worse. Much worse.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@statesman.com.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas drought: a look at the Dust Bowl and other times with no rain