Chapter 18

Letter to J.B. Kincer

1938

U.S. Weather Bureau

Dear Mr. Kincer:

I am enclosing a little notice in which I mentioned your telling me a year or more ago that the five-year drought cycle was over.

I did so because the Superintendent of Schools at Hettinger told me his boys and girls were so discouraged that they thought there was no use staying in that part of the country any longer. Of course, they can't get away anyway because there is no place to go. He asked me to tell them what I told him about western North Dakota conditions, so I did.

In the current issue of Time Magazine, October 30 [actually the October 3 issue], 1938, there is a very good weather map, showing the situation leading to the catastrophe in New England on September 21.

I wish the weather bureau would provide the newspapers with better contour maps. Of course I have no trouble with the maps myself, although when the Kansas City Star reduces them to two columns it is often necessary to use my reading glass. But I sometimes wonder what the public makes of some of the figures which become almost indistinct under such treatment.

I have a feeling that the New England catastrophe will cause the public to pay a great deal more attention to the weather bureau, and I am hoping that the radio stations will eventually give barometric readings as part of their reports.

I was caught in the blizzard of January 3–4 in North Dakota in 1937 and nearly lost my life [a mild exaggeration if the Adams County Record's story was to be believed], as I got off the roads onto a prairie and went around in a circle for an hour in the blinding storm, finally bumping into my own ranch house. The radio merely had said "Keep off the road, a storm is coming," but they often said that and had they given the barometric pressure I would have, of course, been much more careful.

As a matter of fact, fifteen minutes before the blizzard struck the visibility was good for a mile (it was getting late in the afternoon) and I hadn't left my farm house more than a minute before I could see nothing whatsoever.

Your weather predictions on North Dakota were all right. We had good moisture in western North Dakota this year and I did fall plowing (with a five-row damming lister) for the first time. However the grasshoppers had completely wiped out all my crops this year, except for 40 tons of hay.

Very sincerely yours,

Paul S. Bliss

Letter to Banker E.T. McCanna

Bismarck, North Dakota

Dear Mr. McCanna:

How is everything up in Bismarck? When I was there I had only a few minutes and it was after banking hours so I did not get in.

Everything seems to be looking up as far as moisture is concerned, and next year if the grasshoppers are on the missing list I wouldn't be surprised but what North Dakota will start back up—I mean the western part of the state.

I now have a section of land at my place, twelve miles east of Hettinger, and as you will note from the enclosed I am going in for basin listing. Another thing I am doing is to fence in all my land so that it will not be overgrazed by visiting cattle in the wintertime. I am using electric fence and believe it is both practical and economical.

I am bearing in mind your advice that North Dakota will come back, but that we should have a ranching slant.

I have 40 tons of good hay stacked up and that is all I got for this year — a good farmer who is doing my work told me I should have gotten closer to 100 tons. I told him that if that was the case, we should start fencing right then and there, which we did, and I have sent him the electrical equipment which I obtained from a firm I know here in Kansas City.

I would like to get about 30 young stock and feed them next spring. What do you think of a proposition like that? Of course I could get them now and feed them with the hay I have. However, as I have been spending money for machinery and additional land, I am up against it for ready cash—and you hard-hearted bankers sitting around there with your vaults bulging don't like to let it out. If I could get $1,000, I would start in on both cattle and sheep.

Wish you would look in at my place sometime when you are down in the southwestern corner of the state. The man who is handling my work is Alfred Cayette, who is an old, honest and intelligent farmer. What I would really like to do is to form a company, buy allocated quarter sections cheap off the county, put them in shape for young, honest, aggressive tenants who would raise cattle and sheep, poultry and a few hogs. That sort of a program will pay out big in southwestern North Dakota very shortly now. Give me a little friendly advice on how to go at this sort of thing.

I am still with the Social Security Board on the staff of Region IX, comprising Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and am looking into agricultural conditions very carefully wherever I go.

Very sincerely yours,

Paul S. Bliss