Rita Blanca National Grassland: The Epicenter and the Land That Would Not Hold

The Rita Blanca National Grassland straddles the border of the Texas Panhandle and the Oklahoma Panhandle, just south of the New Mexico line, in the corner where four states almost meet. This is, by most measures, the geographic heart of the Dust Bowl. The great storms of the nineteen thirties formed and moved in every direction from this region. Black Sunday, the worst single storm of the decade, passed directly over this grassland on April fourteenth, nineteen thirty-five, the day three hundred miles of blackness moved at sixty miles an hour from the north and turned afternoon into absolute dark.

The land in this corner of the panhandle was broken beginning in the nineteen teens, when high wheat prices during the First World War made dryland farming seem like an obvious opportunity. The native short-grass prairie that had held this ground against wind since the last ice age was plowed under in a few years. The wheat grew. The prices fell after the war. The farmers planted more wheat to cover their debts. The soil got thinner. The rains failed. The topsoil had nothing to hold it.

The federal government began purchasing this land after the Soil Conservation Service documented what was happening. The Bankhead-Jones Act of nineteen thirty-seven funded the buyouts. The families who sold were, in most cases, selling land that no longer produced enough to pay the taxes on it.

The Rita Blanca covers roughly ninety-three thousand acres across the Texas and Oklahoma portions. The Forest Service manages it for grazing. The grass has been recovering since the nineteen forties. It takes about forty years for the native plant community to stabilize after the plow. The full soil recovery takes longer than that, long enough that the people who broke this ground are all gone, and the healing is still in progress.