The Plains of Eastern Colorado

By Wayne Hare

A few days ago I packed my RV  and headed out towards Tulsa to write about the massacre that occurred there almost 100 years ago. But a few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a link to a Colorado Public Radio broadcast about a place out on the plains of eastern Colorado – an African American farming community that was referred to as simply, ‘the Dry’. The Dry, called that because the folks that homesteaded there referred to it as ‘that dry area west of Manzanola’ shortened it to just ‘the Dry’. Since it wasn’t too far out of my way, I thought what the hell, I’ll go snoop around for an hour or two and then be on my way. I knew that there were no longer any remnants of those bygone days, so I figured that actually being there wouldn’t be all that interesting. I was wrong.

It took a while to find it. I stopped in nearby Walsenburg and asked at the visitor center, but nobody there had ever heard of it. Ditto at both the historical society and the local newspaper. So I drove on to the town that would have been the nearest settlement, Manzanola. But Manzanola, population 419, didn’t have any library, museum, historical society or town offices where I could inquire. Hmmm…so I called the Chamber of Commerce of Rocky Ford, the next town over with a larger population of 3,828 – large enough for a Chamber. They didn’t know where The Dry was either, but they instructed me to go to the Trading Post in Manzanola, the local hardware, feed, and lumber store and talk to Rainy Melgosa. She’d be able to tell me all about it I was assured. So…I went to find Rainy. She wasn’t in, but the clerk called her and she very obligingly came right on over and offered me assistance. It turns out that The Trading Post is kind of the local town meeting place and that Rainy – real name Lorraine - is the de facto town mayor. Rainy, who owns The Trading Post along with almost every other of the very few businesses along the main drag, has lived her entire life in Manzanola. Warm, gracious and friendly, she promptly pointed me to Alice McDonald who at 85 now lives in town but grew up a few miles away on The Dry. 

Before heading out, Rainy and I sat on the bench outside her hardware store and drank bottled water as she told me many stories of the town that she’d live in for 55 years. How the people seemed to have grown less tolerant over the years – along with the rest of the country. How the town used to prosper agriculturally by growing labor-intensive, but very profitable fruits and vegetables for canning at the local Libby Cannery and for sale directly to markets. But as life became more difficult for migrants and workers became almost impossible to find, farmers were forced to turn to ‘one person’, but far less profitable crops such as wheat, hay, and corn. And with that, the town started to die. The canning plant closed. The train stopped stopping and the railroad donated the station to the town which now uses it for a senior center. The town has two police officers who drive old cars with the paint peeling off. Still though - the town does have a certain charm and offers a glimpse into an America of the past.

So I found Alice’s house – more of a friendly seeming compound with an arch in front of the property proclaiming the place to be ‘Old McDonald’s Farm’. Alice was busy working on her flower garden, but she invited me to sit and was happy to talk about The Dry. 

Her grandparents had moved there to homestead in 1915 with her dad with the promise of good soil and productive farming. Before departing Missouri, their good friend George Washington Carver, asked them if they were bringing a cow. When they responded in the affirmative he replied, “That’s good. Watch what it eats and anything the cow eats you can eat too!” It turned out to be good advice. Interestingly some of Alice’s other relatives came to The Dry from Nicodemus KS, another African American agricultural community that I wrote about and filmed a couple of years ago. It turns out that Alice and I have common friends in Nicodemus. I love how small the world can be.

I had been hesitant to bother an 85 year old woman who didn’t know me. But Alice, fully able-bodied, was full of energy and vigor, had a sharp mind, and obviously enjoyed talking about The Dry. In talking about her childhood and her family, there didn’t seem to be anything that she couldn’t recall. But she has good genes. Many of her relatives lived into their hundreds including her mother who lived to be just a couple of weeks shy of 110!

I often find myself surprised and impressed with the background and lived experiences of some stranger that I’m just getting to know. I think that I know them, but of course I don’t. Alice fit the bill. After high school she’d gone on to get her bachelor’s degree and then her master’s at Pepperdine. She taught school in Kansas and then Denver where a few of her teaching cohorts thought that they ought to try teaching in California which was known for its leading-edge teaching techniques. So with the same obvious courage and sense of adventure that had bought her grandparents and the other homesteaders to the plains, off she went. Alice eventually became the principle at a school in Los Angeles. But she always missed home and when she retired she and her husband returned – not to The Dry exactly, but to town which was maybe 10 miles from the old homestead. 

As Alice and I spoke, her son Richard, a surgical nurse and current tri-athlete who grew up in California but also moved ‘home’ a year or so ago showed up and Alice easily convinced him to drive us out to the old homestead. Alice’s family raised dairy cows and sold milk, butter, and cheese. The house was gone – burned by vandals. But the foundation, root cellar, and several cisterns were still there. The Dry eventually became a neighborhood, with most homesteaders farming a quarter Public Land Survey section – or 160 acres. With 160 acres between homes it wasn’t a crowded, soulless, modern day suburb. But it’s flat, so neighbors were able to see each other and the children had a fun, safe childhood. Alice worked hard, but enjoyed the work. There’s a reason the area was called ‘The Dry’, and she spent a lot of time hauling water – first by horse drawn wagon and in later years by truck. But when she wasn’t working she enjoyed playing with the other kids in the ‘neighborhood’. Especially joyful to Alice was horseback riding. 

I asked, so she told me about the many rattlesnakes – a community of critters that is still plentiful in the area. They had two kinds - the large western diamondback and the much smaller, but no less venomous prairie rattler - and how they’d dismount from their horses to “mess” with the smaller snakes, but would just keep on riding past the large diamondbacks. I could relate. I grew up on a dairy farm, rode horses, and as an adult in the west, have picked up and ‘messed’ with my share of rattlesnakes. But there’s a difference. Alice said that she could see where the diamondbacks were because they were so big that they’d part the grass. I’ve never seen a snake part the grass. 

The Dry is flat. But anywhere there was the slightest rise in the land, it was referred to as a hill and most had been named as “such-and-such heights”. Alice pointed out Dixon ‘Heights’ to me, standing a few feet higher than the rest of the prairie. 

After visiting the remains of many of her neighborhood homesteads, after many stories, and after a visit to the cemetery where she knew everybody there who was at rest, Richard drove us back to town. Alice had painted a vivid picture of a vibrant, safe, close-knit, hard-working community of Americans. And for me it was comforting to meet a pioneer who, unlike all the pioneers I’d seen on television, looked kind of l like me. 

In passing through the many small, usually dying agricultural towns of the west, there can be a subtle feeling – at least for me - of discomfort with all the American flags, Trump yard signs, lack of  good coffee shops or brew pubs, unending war memorials, and a population that is seemingly 100% white – all signaling a conservatism and intolerance of anyone not considered to be a true, red-blooded, flag-waving, American. I’m a Marine. I fought for my country. But I definitely feel ‘other’ in these places. Even so, I often enjoy stopping at the local watering hole and trying to get a sense of the people. And of course the beer! Me and Brett Kavanaugh! We both like beer! I’ve always only found friendliness, but still…I find myself wondering how deep that friendliness would go if I moved in next door. 

So I asked Alice if she had ever experienced racism in the area and she answered no. None. Everybody got along and race never really came up. But she did tell me about the local KKK. I knew that the Klan was very prevalent in Colorado for a few years. They deeply infiltrated the state government. But in Colorado at least, they were political, not violent. Alice pointed out the area where her father was walking home one evening after he’d had trouble with his truck. He encountered several Klansmen in their sheets coming from the other direction. They offered each other a friendly ‘hello’ and one of the Klansmen gave Alice’s dad a ride home with a promise to come by the next day to help him with is truck!

Alice did recall two KKK cross burnings. One was at the home of the white school principle in retaliation for hitting a student. The other was at the home of another white man who had beaten his wife. Who knew that the Klan terrorized white people and stood for justice? To this day Alice has no idea why the Klan was in the area. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to intimidate black farmers.

That was an oddly inspiring story for me to hear. I’d like to say that maybe things weren’t as hateful back in the day as they seem to be now. I’d like to have hope that we can return to a kinder time when Americans weren’t driven by politicians to hate one another. But of course with over 4,000 lynchings, castrations, dismemberments, and live burnings in the later part of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century, life for black Americans was more violent back then, not less. But still...it wasn’t the story I expected to hear, and I was glad to hear it. After hanging out with Alice, Richard, and Rainy, I was feeling pretty charitable for a change towards my fellow humans. Maybe I’ll make a point of not feeling so ‘otherly’ the next time I pull up to the bar in some small, western town. 

For more about The Dry

https://www.cpr.org/2020/03/02/the-time-before-a-town-called-the-dry-dried-up/