OKLAHOMA: Short-Grass Salvation

In the short-grass country of southwest Oklahoma, the normal pattern of weather is a cruel one for farmers: too much rain at spring-planting time, drought in the growing season, rain again for the harvest. Year after year, cotton, maize and alfalfa crops have either been washed out by floods or ruinously parched.

This year’s weather was as bad as any since the Dust Bowl days of the ’30s. No rain had fallen, to speak of, all summer. But last week, instead of gloom, there was jubilation in the short-grass country. A $12,000,000 federal reclamation project was formally opened, promising an end, at last, to floods and drought for 50,000 acres of prairie farmland.

At Altus (pop. 8,593), the seat of Jackson County, there were three days of festivities—a banquet, parades, fireworks. The big event was dedication of a new 100-ft. dam across the North Fork of the famed Red River.

On Dedication Day the temperature stood at 110° in the shade—and all the shade the crowd had was a few parasols and newspapers. Visiting bigwigs including Interior Secretary “Cap” Krug and Governor Roy Turner—were little better off under the sheet-iron roofing of their bunting-decked stand.

But to short-grass farmers, enduring the heat and two hours of speechmaking was no great price to pay for the spectacle before their eyes. Above the dam lay a turquoise lake. Below it, through a creek-bed ordinarily dry at this time of year, tumbled a stream of water, enough to feed 340 miles of irrigation canals and ditches.

What this water meant, the farmers had already learned. Last year, 510 acres on eleven farms were irrigated. Their average return, mainly from cotton, was $130 an acre, v. $22 an acre for non-irrigated land. This year, 3,200 acres on 60 farms have been irrigated. On these lands, cotton now stood five feet high and loaded with bolls.” On non-irrigated land, it was only two feet high and barely worth picking.

Secretary Krug voiced the obvious moral: a nation which is endeavoring to rehabilitate the world could use more reclamation projects like the one at Altus.