Dalhart

In his book The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan opens his account of the era with one of the men making that wager.

Bam White was a cowboy traveling from Las Animas, Colorado, to West Texas in search of ranch work when he arrived in the Panhandle town of Dalhart in nineteen twenty-six.

He'd spent his life on horseback, working cattle in the open range.

But what he found instead was sharecropping, a major step down in prestige for a man of his trade, and a sign of what the country had become.

Farmers who had spent the previous decade tearing out every acre of grass they could reach were now, under federal guidance and often with federal payment to offset the lost acreage, putting some of it back.

Bennett put a soil scientist named Henry Howard Fennell in charge of the hardest-hit region, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and the country around them, under a program the agency called Operation Dust Bowl.

Fennell set up shop north of Dalhart.

He worked farm by farm, eventually persuading close to forty thousand farmers to work five point five million acres of land under the new methods.

That's good for Coach Reynolds there out at Bushland.

Dalhart takes down Liberal 34-21.

How about Farwell, man? Getting the win over Muleshoe, 32-31.

Yeah,

Amarillo College, the Lady Badgers cross-country team, they go run in a big meet.

I want to say at Texas Tech.

Anyway, I think they beat last year's national champion in it, Victoria Terraza, I believe, finished in the top 20 in that one, the Dalhart native.

So things really going good.

Yes, so I was born in San Antonio, but quickly we came to the Panhandle.

So I spent about five years in Amarillo, five years in Dalhart, and then moved back around age 12 and finished out the rest of my childhood in Amarillo.

So Panhandle girl.

What brought your family to Amarillo from San Antonio?