Her letters from the Oklahoma Panhandle show that staying was work she had to repeat every day, and a decision she kept reopening.
Before Caroline Henderson swept the dust out of her house, she rubbed vaseline inside her nose. Then she scattered something sold as red cedar sawdust across the floor. It was an oily sweeping compound, and she admitted she couldn't say exactly what was in it. It made the dust clump so it could be pushed out the door. She had already laid oiled cloths along the window sills and pressed them into the cracks around the frames. Some of her neighbors pasted brown wrapping paper over their windows. In the Henderson house, it was oiled cloth.
She described all of this in a long letter dated June 30, 1935, written from Wayside Farm near Eva, in Texas County. Despite the name, Texas County is in Oklahoma, in the Panhandle, the narrow strip of flat land that sticks out from the top of the state's western edge. In the 1930s it sat at the center of the Dust Bowl. Years of drought dried out ground that had been plowed up from native prairie grass, and the wind lifted that loose soil into storms that could blacken the sky at midday.
Most of the letter is about keeping dirt out of a house it had already gotten into. Near the end, Henderson wrote:
"We may have to leave."
The letter went to Evelyn Harris, a farmer in Maryland. The two women had written to each other for years, and The Atlantic Monthly printed their exchange. This letter appeared in the magazine's May 1936 issue, and the easiest place to read it today is a Library of America reprint.
A schoolteacher's homestead in the Panhandle
She came to the Panhandle as Caroline Boa, a young schoolteacher, and around 1907 claimed a quarter section, 160 acres, under federal homestead law, which granted settlers land if they lived on it and farmed it. She married Will Henderson in 1908. Later, when high wheat prices pulled farmers across the Plains to plow more ground, the couple expanded to a full section of 640 acres. She had started writing before the First World War, for the extra money.
Historian Brian Cannon notes in his review of her collected letters that her education and her talent as a writer set her apart from her neighbors. Her house, her workload, her weather, and her money troubles did not. So the letters come from an unusually skilled writer describing a situation shared by the households around her, which makes them a good record of how a family in that place actually reasoned.
Six reasons for not leaving
Right after "We may have to leave," Henderson explained why they hadn't. Put plainly, she gave six reasons:
- the work she and Will had built together over decades;
- her faith that the soil would grow crops again;
- farm machinery suited to farming that particular country;
- the money they had already sunk into the place;
- the fact that they could neither sell it nor rent it out; and
- the cash it would take to start over somewhere new.
The first two are about wanting to stay. The other four are about how hard it was to go. A family with no buyer, no renter, and no money for a fresh start is in a different position from a family that could load a truck tomorrow and decides not to. Henderson put both kinds of reason in the same paragraph and never ranked them. For someone living inside the decision, attachment to a place and the inability to leave it usually come tangled together.
Her own hands weren't the only thing keeping the family there. Historian Richard Lowitt reproduces some of her letters in his history of the Panhandle, and in them she describes getting by with help from "rental checks under the wheat acreage control program." These were New Deal payments to farmers who agreed to plant less wheat, meant to push crop prices up. She disliked the principle of paying farmers to grow less, and she still counted the checks as real help. That winter she wrote that those payments, along with federal wages for public works jobs, had kept the countryside from emptying out entirely.
Another federal payment helped farmers plow furrows across their slopes so the soil would catch in the ridges instead of blowing away. It paid ten cents an acre. She noted that it mostly covered fuel and running costs and left out the labor and the wear on the machinery. The household also sold cream and eggs, and the magazine paid her for the letters.
The oiled cloths were the household's own work, and some of the money that kept them in oil came from Washington. Retellings about self-reliant farm families tend to drop that second part. Henderson wrote about both, side by side, and didn't seem to think they needed reconciling.
The neighbors who left
All across the region that summer, families were going. In the June letter she passed along a friend's count from one neighborhood in southwestern Kansas: 26 families, 109 people, had left or were getting ready to. That August she tallied her own township, a surveyed square about six miles on a side. Of the 136 possible homestead claims there, only eight were still held by the people who first settled them. That number covers several decades, not just drought departures, but it shows how thin the circle of long-time settlers already was when the worst storms came.
Tractor work and kerosene sheets
Through the fall, the farm demanded the same kind of labor as the house. In a January 1936 letter, Henderson looked back on the previous October, when the family cut, hauled, and stored feed for their animals. She noted that she "drove the tractor myself." Her only child, Eleanor, had done some of the tractor work in earlier years, but Eleanor was now in medical school at the University of Kansas and came home only for summer work. For most of the dust years, the farm ran on Caroline and Will.
By March the defenses inside the house had grown. In a letter dated March 8, 1936, she describes bedsheets stretched across the doors and windows and sprayed with kerosene, so the damp fabric would catch the dust before it reached the rooms.
Everything she names came from a shelf or a shed: rags, oil, petroleum jelly, a store-bought sweeping compound, sheets, kerosene. Almost none of it was made for this. And each storm undid the last cleanup, so the same methods had to be repeated, storm after storm, season after season. In practice, staying meant re-oiling the same cloths and re-spraying the same sheets for years.
Asking the question again in March 1936
The Atlantic installment ends with a letter dated March 13, 1936, five days after the kerosene sheets and nine months after the list of reasons. In it Henderson asks whether what she and Will were doing deserved to be called persistence, or whether it was closer to "recklessness and inertia."
She had spent the fall on a tractor and the winter spraying sheets with kerosene, so by inertia she didn't mean idleness. She meant that staying might have become something they kept doing because they had been doing it. The reasons she'd written down in June hadn't settled anything, and she put her doubt in print for a national audience.
There's no scene in the letters where the couple stands in the yard and refuses to go. She wrote the decision down in June, carried it out in chores through the fall and winter, and reopened it in March, and each storm put it in front of them again. It held, though she never wrote as if it were sure to.
What the family did with the land
Rain started coming back in 1938, and some crops with it, though Henderson kept writing about dust, according to the Mount Holyoke College archive that holds her private correspondence. In May 1939 she told her friend Rose Alden that recovery would take years and that she and Will were both worn down.
They kept farming. Purdy, an archivist who edited one of Henderson's essays for publication, wrote that they worked the land until the late 1950s. In December 1965 they moved to Arizona to live with Eleanor. They came back to visit the next spring, and Will died shortly afterward. Caroline died later in 1966. Their ashes were placed on the farm.
The decision that says the most about the land came from the next generation. Writing in 1980, Purdy reported that Eleanor had returned the farm to grass through a federal conservation program and meant for it never to be plowed again. A later account describes the homestead as legally protected from plowing. When a visitor stopped by in 2014, the home quarter was unplowed and rented out for goats to graze.
One of Caroline's reasons for staying in 1935 was her conviction that the soil would grow crops again. Decades later, her daughter made sure it would grow grass instead. Eleanor knew something her mother couldn't have known while sweeping sawdust across the kitchen floor: what the following decades would bring. I read Eleanor's choice less as a rebuke than as one more obligation handed down. Her mother held the family on the land through the worst years, and Eleanor was the one who decided what the land would become once nobody in the family was left to farm it.
Whose reasons got preserved
We can follow all of this because Henderson wrote it down and other people kept it. The magazine printed her, and Rose Alden later gave Caroline's letters to Mount Holyoke, which still holds them.
The 26 Kansas families left nothing like that. In her record they exist only as two numbers, 26 and 109, passed along secondhand from a friend's count. Her letters don't say where they went or how they did. A record of staying survives easily when the person who stayed could write for a national magazine. It tells us how one household reasoned. It can't tell us how many others reasoned the same way, or what leaving cost the people who left.
Anyone who has looked at a house in a fire zone or a floodplain and tried to decide what to do will recognize her list: the years already given, the belief that the place will come back, the money already spent, the buyer who isn't there, the cost of starting over. The letters also show how little writing that list down resolved for her. Nine months later she was asking the question again.
Her letters can't answer for anyone else the question they raise: of your own reasons for staying, which ones are about wanting to be there, and which are about leaving being out of reach?
