Men Who Matched the Mountains: The Forest Service in the Southwest

Walter J. (Jim) Caserta was sitting at his desk in his cubby hole in the office of the Soil Conservation Service in Amarillo one day in 1954 when three men walked in and introduced themselves—McCutchen, Davis, and a roly-poly Irishman name of Monighan, long-time Supervisor of the Cibola National Forest.

McCutchen stuck out his hand and said, "Caserta, welcome to the Forest Service!"

"Believe me," Caserta said in reminiscing about this meeting, "I had had about 20 years in Federal service, and that was the first time that anybody had welcomed me anywhere, let alone to the Forest Service. I thanked him. I guess he could see the amazement. He said, 'There's nothing in the world to worry about. We just came over to tell you that you are still holding your present position, and your responsibilities are the same, except you are going to be paid by the Forest Service."

The Land Utilization Project lands in New Mexico, Western Oklahoma, and the Panhandle of Texas had been transferred from the Soil Conservation Service to the Forest Service. The administration of these lands was placed with the Cibola National Forest temporarily.

The dust storms of the 1930's forced this farmer to abandon his farm. He lost 1200 acres of wheat.

The LU project had started back in the dust bowl days when the Federal government was buying up farms and ranches that were blowing away and attempting to stabilize the land and return it to grass when possible.

"We finally leveled enough land in Dallam County (Texas) to start a planting," Caserta said of the early activity. "We couldn't buy grass seed. Nobody harvested grass seed in those days. The only kind we could find was some fool had harvested Amaranthus—pigweed—and we had enough pigweed to sow probably three or four sections of land. Now this sounds perfectly ridiculous, but in those days of panic you did anything you could.

"You couldn't plant ryegrass—the wind would come along and blow it out. Amaranthus seed had some sort of ability to stick to the soil, as they say. We had a good firm seedbed up there, since Joe had wallowed around on the thing for quite a while, while the wind was taking the loose stuff off and it left a hardpan. Well, we got this stuff in the ground and, one of those unusual occurrences, it rained, and we got a good stand of pigweed, and that was the basis of a nurse crop. Later on we started to harvesting our own grass seed and made some plantings that proved quite successful as the years went on. Of course, I'm going over a period of development of maybe three or four or five years, and very quickly, but that was the start of the thing."

Early projects included recreation areas also, and Caserta recalls that he and Clancy Waneka went to the settlement of Hope, New Mexico, with a thousand dollars to spend for a recreational area:

"After spending the night with an old character by the name of White over in Hope, and getting up early the next morning and getting a pail of water out of the irrigation ditch, after moving the manure off the water surface, we got a pail of water and washed our face and hands. We didn't dare drink it. The only other available liquid there was bourbon whiskey or beer.

"We had a very fine breakfast with Mr. White. This was in July but we had deer meat. He called it 'summer beef.' Where he got it, I don't know, except that it was a delightful breakfast, grits and 'summer beef.' Well, Clancy and I decided it was about time to do something for those people. They couldn't afford to drink whiskey all the time, and there wasn't enough beer in the country, no ice to keep it cold, and hot beer is a very unpleasant beverage. We looked around and asked about water. Old Man White said, 'Yeah, there's a well around here; it's about 12 miles off. The thing's over a thousand feet deep.' Right away Clancy's eyes lit up. So did mine. We had a thousand dollars, and we were thinking very seriously of the possibility of the people at Hope gathering around a well and being able to talk, or sit down, and get a pitcherful of nice cool water—an unusual drink. I don't recommend it, but it is an unusual drink. So we decided that we would make a try for a water well. We talked to some local drillers and found out that water was available at about 800 or 900 feet, and there was a possibility that it would cost about a dollar a foot. That left us with enough money for possibly a windmill or a hand-pump, although I don't know who would've pumped a 1,000-foot-deep well by hand. But we were thinking that way. We were a couple of young squirts and just full of ideas. The only thing I think was successful about Hope was the water well. It did come in at about five gallons a minute. We were successful in convincing the Washington Office that this was a good expenditure of recreational funds. We got approval and put it in finally, and put in a couple of picnic tables which you could build for about $10 apiece in those days. In other words, we set Hope up.

"When we got back we found out that the magic wand of Congress had waved, and we had 10 million dollars to build dams with. Ten million dollars—that's a lot of money. So we started the dam projects, and incidentally in that deal such places as Tule Lake, Buffalo Lake, Lake Marvin, which the Forest Service still has; McClellan Lake, another Forest Service endeavor; Wolf Creek Lake, one over near Clovis which never did jell, but we had the money and did plan it. There's another one up by Dalhart, Rio Blanco Lake, and we had plans for about seven or eight more scattered around the Panhandle of Texas. The people we used in construction were largely from WPA. We had as many as 5,000 WPA men on our own payroll, BAE payroll, at one time working on these recreational projects, identified usually as lake projects.

"Now while this was going on, Norm Buck had other duties, too, that he was following up, the stabilization of wild lands. Have you ever been in a dust storm?" Then you know what wild lands are. The land takes off. Today it may have a cover of soil, silt, sandy land, from four to six feet deep. Tomorrow, after a good storm, it may not have any. It may be right down to where you can see the old plow furrows, where the plow point had cut in and left a little groove in the hardpan below. Well, this I saw. One of the places I saw that was Manhattan, Kansas. Clancy and I used to travel a lot together and that was one of our favorite places to visit. An old boy, George Atwood, was the Project Manager there. He had lost one of his hands, I imagine during World War I; he was an ex-soldier and quite a pleasant sort of fellow and an interesting man to meet. They had a dry summer when we went through Manhattan, Kansas, and alongside the river there was a cemetery. We bought cemeteries; we bought cities and towns. La Bajada is one of them, right out here close at hand in case you want a reference on that. Another one was up here near Mora, in the Indian lands south of Mora. But this one at Manhattan was unusual since the cemetery had a wrought-iron fence and swinging entrance gates, the posts of which were cast-iron and they had little round black balls on top of them. Well, the first time I visited the place, all I saw was about a foot of post and a black ball on top of the ground. Later on I went up to see what George was doing; he was always proud of the fact that on one side of the river he had Democrats, and on the other side he had Republicans, and the cemetery was on the Republican side and they had to wait until they had a dust storm to bury the Republicans and preserving those guys was really something. I think it was two years before I made another visit with George. We drove through the gates of that cemetery. It had been uncovered. Those posts were fully six feet high; that much soil had moved in two years.

"That was the type of project that started the Land Utilization program that led toward completion of the developmental stages of the lands and placing them into management stages for utilization by the general public. Six lakes were completed in 1939 and the early 1940's, and opened to the public for recreation use.

Buffalo Lake was dedicated in July, 1941, and Caserta recalls that Dr. H. H. Bennett, Chief of the Soil Conservation Service came out from Washington for the dedication, which attracted 50,000 people.

"He liked to sail," Caserta said. "So that night after a little mosquito bite preventative and things like that, I had the honor of taking him for a sail in Howard Finnell's sailboat. Doc Bennett was dressed in a silk hat and tails. Caserta had on his very best—a tuxedo, which was all I could afford. We got quite a kick out of it. Doc wanted to stand up and walk from one end of the boat to the other, and I knew good and well if he did, he'd fall overboard, because it was all I could do to sit down and stay in the boat. We finally made it back to shore and went back to the group again. Doc never forgot that because on a future broadcast, some several months later, he mentioned the 50,000 people who came out to Buffalo Lake to watch him go sailing. Actually, it was to dedicate the Lake, but Doc remembered the sailing I think more than the dedication."

World War II brought new problems and Caserta recalls that the LU program was able to furnish lands for bombing ranges and air fields and also "the longest runway in the world then was constructed at Dalhart out of caliche mined on the Rita Blanca Lake Project, right inside the city limits of Dalhart."

"Out of this mining operation on the LU Project," Caserta said, "we sold caliche to the Army's contractor for three cents a cubic yard—millions of yards."

During the war, development projects stopped. Caserta explained that "you couldn't hire people to do development; you couldn't hire people to harvest."

There were hundreds of German prisoners of war in the Dalhart area, and thousands of Italian prisoners in the Buffalo Lake area, but government agencies could not use prisoners. The prisoners could be used by the farmers, however.

Caserta recalls that there were some good wheat crops and that the pick and shovel drainage work by prisoners resulted in one of the finest wheat crops ever seen in that country.

After the war, Caserta said, "the stockmen wanted all this good grassland back into private ownership."

"We were just living from day to day, so to speak," he said. "We didn't know when some cowboy was going to ride up and say, 'This is mine, by an Act of Congress'—and it almost occurred several times.

"The cattlemen were quite anxious to get this land back, and they were told by their own counties, 'You can't have it. We're going to oppose you.'

"And that's the reason the LU Program has continued. We made a reputation, locally, of good land managers. Our policy of use of only the available grazing made sense to them. Our grazing was based on land, not on the number of head. Ours was an established preference for so many acres, and that was adjusted annually to what forage there was available. It's still a good premise to handle grazing. There's no use putting 1,000 cattle on a hundred sections if you can't raise 500 on it. It doesn't make sense. If it was capable of supporting 500, we ran 500. If it was 10, we ran 10. And they had no choice.

"Oil was found on much of the land, and of course the counties benefitted from the 25 percent in lieu of taxes. Our 25 percent was solely restricted to school and road funds.

"Our policy of use of only the available grazing made sense to them. Our fees, compared to National Forest fees, were exorbitant.

"When I left, we were getting a dollar and a half per animal unit a month for grazing. And of this, 25 percent went to the county. So they wanted us to be good land managers."

Hoyt Harvel went to work for the Soil Conservation Service in 1950 and spent 11 years on LU projects developing—or "attempting to develop" as he put it, the area that had been purchased by the government during dust bowl days.

One area had once been part of the land traded by the State of Texas to the XIT Ranch syndicate in return for building the capitol at Austin. Some of the land was sold off and sub-divided into smaller ranches and farms, and the sale of the land was promoted by real estate operators in the East.

"The cultivation started back there in about 1927 and 1928," Hoyt Harvel said, "and they did pretty good with their farming the first year and made a good crop. In 1929 they made a good crop and got a pretty fair price for the commodity produced. And then the drouth hit, and at the same time the depression came on. The cash they got for their crops was very small. Production was very low. Along in the early 30's many of those people said, 'To hell with it!' and got up and left.

"When I say 'got up and left' that's exactly what I mean. There were several of those old farm homes that had dinner sitting on the table. When I went there you could still find old homes that had dishes and plates on the table and dried pinto beans that had been cooked and left sitting on the table. Syrup pitcher with the syrup long since turned to sugar still on the table. They'd moved out, went back to Missouri, Pennsylvania, or wherever they might have come from—and turned the farm back to whoever was holding the mortgage on the land. In many cases it was the Federal Land Bank, and in other cases it was life insurance companies."

Harvel said that he enjoys a "feeling of pride" to go back and see some of the old areas that were fields of sand ripples and see a good stand of side oats gramma, blue grass or switch grass "and cattle grazing all over the place."

"To go back now and see some of those places that I personally had a hand in developing, seeding and putting a fence around, putting windmills on it, and then writing a permit to so and so to put cattle on there, it does give you a feeling of accomplishment," he said.

Today, the National Grasslands, the former dust bowl lands, are again productive.

Harvel said that in 1956 "we almost had another dust bowl." "I firmly believe," he went on, "that if we hadn't had so much of that country back in grass to break up strip cropping, we'd have had another dust bowl then. We had less rain that year than we did any time in the dust bowl years. And we had the wind. The only thing lacking in a dust bowl was bare ground, bare soil. That was what we had in the 30's—no stubble, nothing to hold it. It was dry and the wind always blows. So the three elements for a dust bowl were there in the 30's, whereas we had only two in '56—that was the wind and the drouth, lack of moisture. We did have something on the soil, something on the ground to hold it down."

The Grasslands came under the administration of the Southwestern Region of the Forest Service in 1953. They were managed as a part of the Cibola National Forest until 1960, when they became the Panhandle National Grasslands. Supervisor's headquarters were at Amarillo, Texas.

The Grasslands covered approximately 300,000 acres of rehabilitated lands that were once "dust bowls." From 1958 to 1970, there were five individual areas in the Panhandle National Grasslands: the Kiowa in eastern New Mexico; Rita Blanca, which lies across the border of Oklahoma and Texas; Black Kettle in Western Oklahoma, and the Cross Timbers and Caddo in North Texas. In 1970 the administration of the Cross Timbers and Caddo was assumed by the Southern Region and the other Districts again became part of the Cibola National Forest.

The Grasslands are predominantly suited to grassland agriculture. They are being managed and developed by the Forest Service on a multiple use basis to provide not only feed for thousands of cattle and wildlife but also to offer a variety of forms of recreation, such as picnicking, camping, swimming, boating, water skiing, fishing, and hunting.

A Ranger is in charge of managing each of the Grasslands for maximum utilization of resources in the public interest. Rangers are stationed in Clayton, New Mexico; Cheyenne, Oklahoma; and Texline, Texas.

Forage is one of the most valuable crops produced on the Grasslands, and today more than 13,000 head of cattle owned by more than 360 local ranchers graze the Grasslands under paid permit.

Outdoor recreation is the fastest growing use on the Grasslands. The big attractions are Lake McClellan, Lake Marvin, and Dead Indian Lake. Camp and picnic grounds have been developed at these lakes and at other recreation areas. Range and watershed improvements have enhanced wildlife habitat and the Grassland Districts are growing in popularity among hunters in search of big game—antelope, deer, Barbary sheep, turkey—as well as small game.

Thus the prairie land dust bowl has come back into production in a big way.