Hunger fighters

Front matter

MARY ELLEN FRIEDLANDER

HUNGER FIGHTERS

“But it must be borne in mind that all great enterprises are based on work that has been done by individuals whose past is lost in oblivion. Some one has to do the obscure but necessary work of digging a foundation, and if it falls to our part, we must be content with the knowledge that we are playing a necessary part in a great enterprise.”

I

it has been the fate of men who by their dreams and brains have fought hunger for mankind, to die nameless and unknown. Theirs is an earthy science, born ten thousand years before there was such a word as science, beginning in the completely buried days when men first fought nature by their wits. There is no true start to the history of hunger fighters.

There is no question it was Mark Alfred Carleton who brought the magnificent Kubanka wheat from its old home on the Turghai steppe of western Asia to more than four millions of acres of the land of the American Northwest. There is no doubt he died, most miserably neglected and obscure, in a pest-hole in Peru.

There is no recorded beginning of the science of wheat hunters. Nobody remembers the name of the first Turk or Jew or Tartar who tamed the wild wheat of southwest Asia; who, untold thousands of years ago, had the dream to save the seed of this staff of life against the next year s hunger of his tribe. So why not start this story of the adventures of modern hunger fighters with the outlandish deeds of Mark Carleton — who just missed being forgotten4?

Of Carleton there is unquestioned record that his solitary explorations brought the tough Kharkov wheat out of wind¬ swept Starobelsk, Russia, on to twenty millions of acres of the black earth of the plains of the American West. Shortly afterwards he lost one of his children and his home, to say nothing of his teeth, as well as his job. But no one can blame the high authorities and his own underlings who plotted his doom. The strangest part of his grand, melan¬ choly story is this: that the very quality which made him such a fantastic and notable man also brought him to disas¬ ter. He was a visionary.

He was a crude dreamer, just as the nameless Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, American hunger fighters must have been thinkers, mullers over hunches, when they first of all stored water to make thirsty land grow food for men in magic abundance. So Carleton had the queer notion to put the map of the millions of acres of the American dark land side by side with the picture of the giant band of the Rus¬ sian black fallow. He looked. He said, “They’re no dif¬ ferent.”

When I say he was a dreamer, that does not mean that Mark Carleton was a loafer, or a genius to sit around con¬ cocting revolutions in wheat-growing out of his head. No, first and last he was a dynamo for energy, an American of the Midwest; he was six feet of never tired, slope-shoul¬ dered, burly worker. “You know, I’m going to live to be a hundred,” Carleton told his friends. But in spite of such en¬ ergy, he saw visions — some of them foolish — and he was a gambling gazer toward horizons after the manner of a farmer pioneer. His nose was never far from that black earth from which the wheat spike sucks up its starch and gluten; he was always smelling for impossible yields from new soil. That was what helped bring him to his sad end, for he went in over his head trying on his own hook to make a dry farm out of a desert in the Texas Panhandle. “He tried to ride horses going two ways; he tried to mix science and busi¬ ness,” said the kindly, white-bearded, professorial Er¬ win Smith. But who can blame Carleton1? Though our Government seemed not to know it, Carleton did need money for his growing family.

He was born in Jerusalem, Ohio; went to the country school there. But in 1876, when he was ten, his family lugged him along with them out to Cloud County, Kansas. By the time he was eleven he began to get a taste of what it means to try to make a living growing wheat in that stern country. The year he was eleven the black stem rust sucked the sap out of the stalks and shriveled the kernels in the spikes of the wheat of the settlers. The rust demon jumped from farm to farm, rode the whistling west wind from one county to another. Carleton said, long afterwards, “Many fields of wheat were destroyed, never harvested.” He was still in knee pants then, but he remembered: “Sulphur-like clouds of spores filled the air and irritated the nostrils of the workmen.” He hardly knew botany from Bible study, but later he wrote, “A vivid remembrance of the general appearance of the rust inclines me to believe it was Puccinia graminis that did the damage.” So Carleton came to dread the black stem rust.

It would be romantic claptrap to say that this experience made the eleven-year-old Carleton resolve to free the wheat men from the terror of that black marauding parasite. But the point is that at the swimming, the baseball age, his eyes were open, his nose sniffing, his brain stamped with the look and the smell and the terror of those food-devour¬ ing rust spores. He was definitely too old for his age. In 1887, twenty-one years old, he was given that important¬ looking but so common roll of parchment tied with a nice ribbon to tell the world he was a Bachelor of Science from the Kansas Agricultural College, but he was already way ahead of his teachers. He was an expert botanist, a selftaught lone wolf on whom formal education had none of its usual bad effect. Carleton lived, every spare moment, on those hot flat Kansas lands between the ninety-fifth and ninety-eighth meridians. That endless land was his labora¬ tory.

One day found him on his belly squinting through a mag¬ nifying glass at a spot of rust on the leaf of some tiny plant or grass. Next day he sat solemnly clawing into the mys¬ terious black dry earth to see what it was made of. Every day he made notes of every grass or weed he could find in this strange, sad land of his — where the soil is as rich as the parching wind and finicky weather are haphazard and terrible. He was a kind of roving Amundsen, trying to teach botany tamely for a while, but finishing by feeling like bending out and busting the tight walls of his little college. He had to feel the harshness of the hot winds on his face in the summer; to plod the fields so softly, unnaturally green with their young fall wheat in the autumn. He learned for himself how a hardy, good winter wheat plant grows slow, hugs the ground tight in the fall. He was a tramp. He was the kind of bum that a natural-born natu¬ ral historian can’t help being.

There is no record that he thought of anything else in those days but wheat and rust and rust and wheat, but at nights he sat himself down heavily to plug at Greek, Latin — for culture? Not Carleton — but, confound it, he was sup¬ posed to be a scientist, and in science these wheats, grasses, rust parasites have those jaw-cracker dead-language names. In less than no time he had shouldered his way through three years of Latin and one of Greek. “He went at everything as if he was driving cattle,” said one of his old friends. His country was nothing but wheat. Wheat was his life. To know about wheat, Carleton became a crude kind of language expert and in the end wasn’t afraid to try to jabber in their Siberian jargons at the nomads of the Khirgiz steppe.

n.

the walls of his safe little professorship of Natural His¬ tory in Wichita University got too tight for him. He threw up his job, went back to the State Experiment Station at Manhattan, Kansas; here by the time he was twenty-seven he made a first-class discovery. In those days everybody, including the highbrow botanists of Europe, believed a rust parasite could jump from oats to rye and from rye to wheat. Carleton, a thin, delicate knife in his hands huge like a teamster’s, smeared spores of the black stem rust of oats on to the leaves of oat plants. With care he dug up those young plants, tamped their roots into the black land right in the middle of a plat of wheat.

The oats rusted. The wheat stayed perfectly healthy.

He inoculated the black stem rust that’s the death of wheat into baby wheat plants. These youngsters he trans¬ planted into the midst of a plat of oats. The wheat stalks broke out with the deadly black pustules. The oats all around them flourished with never a sign of the fungus sickness so deadly to wheat. By such simple, exact experi¬ ments Carleton proved that the different grains have each their special and particular rust enemy; straightened out superstitions of farmers — and scientists — that one kind of rust could hop all over the farm to all kinds of crops.

That got him fame, gave him his job of commanding general of all the U. S. Government work on wheat; and in 1894 this hulking Kansan, absent-minded and with gray eyes filmed by a far-away look, landed in Washington. He found his army of wheat scientists and defenders was made up of a lady clerk and a couple of abominably paid helpers now completely forgotten. But Mark Carleton, who was a man of no humor whatever, never remarked on the ridicu¬ lousness of such a department to defend and to improve the scores of millions of acres. After all, this heavy-mustached plainsman was army enough. He set to work.

Now Carleton, who during the thirty-five years of his wheat-hunting was at different times soil expert, Russian scholar, master baker, preacher, strong-arm man for the Government, was first and last a naturalist. He had no faith that men can completely conquer their enemies in Nature. He believed they might trick this kind and savage Dame by obeying her. During his years at Kansas he had tried to cure wheat of its black stem rust sickness by spray¬ ing this or that kind of chemical on his experimental wheat plats. Always he had to report, “The rust appears in the treated and untreated plats in equal abundance.”

“But look,” Carleton mused. “Out home in Kansas there are billions of dangerous rust spores blowing around. . . . But just the same, billions of bushels of wheat manage to grow, too. Somewhere in the world there’s wheat just too tough for any rust parasite to tackle — that’s the wheat I’ve got to look for.”

He started a vast experiment, a silly experiment, too big for a whole modern college full of eight-hour-a-day scien¬ tists. All over the world he sent for wheat, and in little packages a thousand and more varieties of the proudest grains of the four corners of the earth poured in on him. He sat confused among samples of the bearded Onigara from Japan, the Haffkani from Turkey, the bald Kaiser wheat from Germany, and the bearded Prolifero from Italy, near Rome. He tried to keep all these apart from the win¬ ter Ghirka from the land of vodka and the twin wheats Rattling Jack and Rattling Tom from Australia.

Almost a thousand varieties of this strange mix-up, this international congress of wheat sorts, Carleton sowed that year near Garrett Park in Maryland. He planted them in forty-eight-foot rows, hundreds upon hundreds of rows. What will orange leaf rust do to these foreign visitors? Will any of them stand up and laugh at the deadly spores of the black stem rust?

His vast experiment was a discouraging washout.

Look through the dusty files of Carleton’ s first experi¬ ment northwest of Washington, and you ask why Carleton shouldn’t have been totally fed up. See our looming West¬ erner stalking up and down between the experimental rows of his queer international rust-resisting contest, disgusted at the magnificent stands of hundreds of different wheats. Rust? Yes, there is rust, but only the pretty orange-colored dabs of the leaf rust parasite that doesn’t hurt wheat so very much anyway. Rust ? Where is the bad black stem rust that gnaws at the stalks of wheat plants? There isn’t any. . . . Carleton pulls at his magnificent walrus mustache, dis- 8 gusted. . . . These orange spots aren’t the stuff that blasts and murders wheat — no.

“Anyway, what does a fine stand of wheat mean in a nice mild climate like this Maryland one?” There stands Carleton, looking out over his walrus mustache and from under the brim of his big felt hat, away across the soft green hills ’round Garrett Park, out over the dim bulk of the gentle mountains of the Blue Ridge. He looks past those mountains now, straight west and fifteen hundred miles away. . . .

‘There’s where I ought to be testing these sorts — out there in Kansas. . .

From his years of listening to the incessant complaints of farmers, from memories of bleak autumns when he’d watched the winds from the Rockies blow the wheat out of the ground — from such common experiences Carleton came to this fundamental hunch: “It isn’t what a wheat yields in the best years — it’s how it stands the worst ones. . .

He had seen, too often, the tender green of the young winter wheat killed and broken by ice storms, had been in at the bankruptcy of the men who’d planted it, had shaken his head at insanity of their wives driven mad by years of disappointed hopes — and from these sad sights had come this simple science : “I must find the wheat that will stand the worst.”

His science was mixed up with his homesickness for those Kansas plains. Many there were in those grim days of the eighties and nineties who asked why any sensible man should try to farm wheat out there in Kansas, anyway. Carleton had reasons. “It is found as a general rule that the wheat sorts which are able to withstand the most rig¬ orous extremes of climate are the sorts making the best bread.” So he insisted. There’s no doubt he was homesick, and at the end of the summer of 1895 he packed up hun¬ dreds of little bags holding the seed of the survivors of the nearly one thousand champion wheats of the world. He took those bags out to Salina, Kansas, near the ninety-eighth meridian, where wheat has to be real wheat to get its head above ground and keep it there.

in.

here the enlightened farmer, Stimmel, gave Carleton land free of charge. With all the conditions proper to a field ex¬ periment Carleton prepared that dark land, sowed his hun¬ dreds of sorts in little twenty-five-foot rows, exactly. He didn’t wait to watch his green plant children grow. Restless he went to and fro across the Great Plains, bothering farm¬ ers, exploring. And nights, in this horrible little hotel, in that lonely farm house, he read. His nose was in books that told him of wheat with outlandish purple kernels growing in Abyssinia. Or he lay awake, mulling the information that eight inches less of rain falls per year in Ekaterinodar, Russia, than falls in Huron, South Dakota. . . . And he had dreams — strange dreams for a Kansas farmer. . . .

He came back to his new experiment at Salina on the farm of the progressive Stimmel. This was not Maryland, oh, no ! He came back to behold a massacre. Even Carleton shivered in the winds of that harsh autumn, and the dread¬ ful winter got into his very bones. It was too cold. It was too dry. The soil blew, the very land disappeared on the west wind. The soil heaved. It turned warm, rained gently, got suddenly cold, and shining pretty ice covered the tender blades of those hundreds of proud varieties of experimental wheats. It was a massacre.

But Carleton was happy. This experiment was meat for him. Carefully in simple tables he set down the slaughter of his wheat sorts by the grizzly Kansas climate — his own climate. Oh, he was a rare searcher, among hundreds of dif¬ ferent searchers in these days of faith in all of the abstruse theories, formulas, complicated chemistry, laboratory para¬ phernalia. Simple child of nature that Carleton was, he had 10 an instinct that one brutal winter would tell him more than a dozen years of highbrow experiments in a warm hothouse or in the average years of a nice normal climate. So now he viewed the remains of his murdered wheats, picked up what was left of them, took them the next year to his old bailiwick at the State Experimental Farm at Manhattan. And again it was a real Kansas winter. It was what Carleton called in his scientific reports “a severe winter.” And at the end of the summer of 1897 there were less than a hundred out of those thousand wheat sorts left to tell the story.

“I must go to Russia,” Carleton began telling everybody. “I must go out to what they call the black fallow of South Russia, and explore for the toughest wheats that are left there. ...”

Pretty soon going to Russia became an obsession with him, exactly why, none of his old friends seems to know. I have asked some of them who survive him. They all say : “Carleton was a queer fish. . . . Nobody could tell from his rambling talk how his mind worked. . . . He never told us what put it into his head to go to Russia.”

But of one thing there is definite record. While he was roaming up and down through Kansas, one of those days of the many days he stole away from his post of duty, he met certain Russian Mennonites. Strangely successful, wheat¬ raising, God-fearing Mennonites from Russia they were, well-off even in those bitter bad wheat years of the middle eighteen-nineties. Energetic vagabond that he always was, Carleton left his plats of wheat, roved from the Valley of the Red River of the North as far south as the magnificent rolling desolation of the Texas Panhandle around Amarillo. Everywhere he dug into the dark earth, made crude analyses by his own rough science, of samples of it. Rainfall charts were to be found in his satchel mixed up with his shirts. He visited parched places where there was hardly enough rainfall to make a chart of it. Here he quizzed old-time wheat hounds who had somehow hung on in spite of the devil and all of his hellish wind and weather. And every¬ where he found these men raising soft winter wheats, some red, some white. Rather he found men trying to raise such wheat. Rather he watched those men failing, and going, for in those bitter days Old Lady Nature in her tempera¬ mental tantrum drove upwards of a quarter of a million settlers out of Kansas. With absent-minded eyes Carleton watched them go — and remembered his God-fearing Mennonites.

These quaint folk weren’t chased out; they were build¬ ing fine houses! Carleton saw those farmers, with twenty-five or thirty English words maybe, get yields of thirty bushels to the acre of tough wheat that weighed sixty-two pounds to the bushel — while ruin raged all ’round them. He made friends with these Mennonites, asked them ques¬ tions they couldn’t understand, pestered them. Carleton had a kind of gentle, cruel persistence when he wanted to find out something. “But this wheat — ” he took a bite at a few hard, red kernels of it — “this wheat, where did you get it?” he kept gnawing at the peaceful folk with that one question.

Well, it was called Turkey Wheat. Yes, the first set¬ tlers, their old folks, had brought it from Taurida in Rus¬ sia. It was curious, but when the old folks got into the steerage, every father had carted along a bushel of that wheat with his children and other baggage. That hard wheat was so precious you’d believe those Mennonite pa¬ triarchs would every one of them want to be buried with a bushel of it. “It’s the old wheat of Russia, and it does won¬ derful in this new land,” they told Carleton.

He kept asking around, and found out how at first the millers wouldn’t take this wheat because it was so hard their rollers couldn’t crush it or grind it; found out how the noted Mr. Warkentin had first built a mill to grind it. Such was Carleton’s science. . . .

He went back to his ruined experiments, sniffed around 12 in the fields, and among his papers. “That’s right — some of my Russian hard wheats did stand up better than the others.” But Carleton, alas, was never the kind to be im¬ pressed with the little exactnesses of experimental science, with the tiny differences between this and that little twenty-five-foot row of wheat. No, there was something rough about him as the first fire bringers and wild horse tamers must a hundred thousand years ago have been rough. The sort of crude fact that brought a flash to Carleton’s gray eye was the sight of eighty acres of upstanding Mennonite wheat in the middle of a world of desolation.

There was a rush and a strange sweep to him. And now, born in Jerusalem, Ohio, educated in a little Kansas col¬ lege of the one-building kind that our smart folks laugh at, Carleton takes a jump. This Jayhawker takes a seventhousand-mile jump in his dreams from the dark earth of his own plains to the black fallow of the Slavic lands of Kharkov and Kherson. The world is this man’s laboratory.

IV.

two days before the end of the year 1897, the wheat dreamer married Amanda Elizabeth Faugh t, who was born in Kingman, Kansas. Carleton was by this time so com¬ pletely obsessed with going to Russia that it is amazing he found time to get married; but they married, and were happy — though there’s something to be said against a woolgatherer whose pay is two thousand dollars a year, maybe less, getting married and asking fate to let him be happy. You see, practical people might bring arguments against this strange man’s marrying, though to the sad end of his life Amanda Carleton remained the most devoted of wives, and bore him four children, whom they both loved. It might even be argued that — but this takes us ahead of our story. . . .

Carleton was married on December 29, 1897. On July 4,

CARLETON BOTHERED THE AUTHORITIES

1898, he left Washington, D. C., for Russia and points east.

How he bothered the authorities of the Department of Agriculture to let him go! He interrupted their objections, deluged them with his fantastic imaginings, swamped them with facts, took the map of the Dakotas and Kansas and Nebraska and laid it atop the map of Russia in the region of the Volga. “There, gentlemen,” he kept saying, over and over, “you see how exactly they correspond,” he repeated in his gentle but dreadfully persistent voice. He made the Authorities believe those maps fitted each other like blocks in a child’s game. “There’s no real difference between these continents,” he kept harping — though I ask you, how could this man have known what Russia looked like?

Mysteriously he seemed to sense what he wrote long afterwards: “A traveler on the plains of Kansas, if sud¬ denly transported while asleep to South Russia and de¬ posited in the Crimea, would discover very little difference in his surroundings except as to the people and the char¬ acter of the farm improvements and livestock.”

“Well, what are you proposing to do about it?” asked the tired authorities.

“Don’t you see?” he came back. “On our great plains of the Midwest none of the wheat is native. It got there helter-skelter, brought by this or that random settler. The settlers had no notion whether their wheats could live on those fierce prairies. But in Russia — there the wheat is na¬ tive, has been there since the first savage tamed the wild grass. Don’t you see? The wheats that grow there are the ones fit to survive!

“Well—”

“But don’t you see — those are the wheats we must try on our western plains that are exactly like the Russian black fallow . . . cold long winters; hot short summers. And rain — why, almost every inch of the little rain falls in the growing season — in both places. And the soils? You can’t tell them apart!”

“Well—”

“Well, gentlemen, you must send me to find the best Russian wheats!”

It was objected he didn’t know the Russian language. He went home, sat down, proceeded to sweat to learn that awful tongue out of a pile of grammars and dictionaries — ponderously. So, on his merits and without any pull and not by any means on a Government joy ride, Mark Carleton went to Russia. Carleton had no pull, being the worst mixer on earth. “He was terrible to talk to,” said one of his admirers. “He couldn’t see a joke, would look right through the fellow telling it to him and never hear a word of it.” Carleton won his point simply by bulldozing everybody, shrewd old Secretary Wilson included, with arguments they couldn’t answer.

All the summer and autumn this renegade newly-wed wandered in his fantastic hunt for wheat up and down the mysterious black earth of Holy Russia.

He spent a little time with experts in St. Petersburg and Odessa. He drank vodka — not too much. He ate huge quan¬ tities of the admirable hot bread called Kalach in Moscow. But most of that time he was a tall, strange, foreign figure on the endless treeless steppe. He was drawn by a ques¬ tion that was framed on every horizon for him: “What sorts of winter wheats out here are the ones that stand the coldest winds in the most snowless winters?” He was driven for¬ ward to ask, in broken laughable Russian sentences, in Eng¬ lish, and by sign language : “Which of your spring wheats stand the drought and the rust best?” He kept asking these questions of rich farmers, of agronomists, of peasants who hardly knew their own names. But most of all he looked, kept looking. And his great gray eyes seemed to see some¬ thing that drew him always farther toward the East, toward that desolate flat land across the Ural where the map gets completely blank for lack of towns and rivers. First and last he was a squinter at nature. Every moment he knew exactly what he was after: a tough wheat you sow in the fall that will stand the blast of winter; a hard wheat to sow in the spring to stand the dryness and the attacks of the black 16 rust. I have no doubt he would have brought home the spring Kubanka and the winter Kharkov without one word of Russian — for he had eyes. As if science and the getting of knowledge by men were such a new thing, such a mys¬ tery ! Like all first-rate searchers Carleton knew what he needed and had the eyes to see it when he found it. . . .

He came at last, on his eastward trek, to the Turghai steppe forty miles to the southeast of Orenburg, which is reasonably far from Manhattan, Kansas. He got his great frame into a droshky and drove out on to that prairie, hot as the Sahara, hot enough to kid you with mirages of trees that don’t exist and rivers of phantom water. Gravely he got down out of his carriage, fingered the black earth of those bald plains, so powdery dry they suck up the little rains of the short summer shower like a ten-thousandsquare-mile blotter. He stopped by the solitary, skin-cov¬ ered tents of the sullen yellow-skinned Khirgiz: it is only wild ex-nomads like those Mohammedans who would even try to grow wheat in that cursed land. And here the white¬ skinned Anglo-Saxon Carleton came to the end of his search — among these heathen yellow tartars.

Here he found the hard wheat, the durum wheat called the Kubanka. It’s a wheat that it’s hard to tell from barley. Here for God knows how many centuries in western Asia it has been sticking its light green shoots out of ground stirred with a crude tool you’d never take for a plow. It pushes its short sturdy stems upward in weather hot enough to discourage sage-brush. Its flat ripe heads that bristle with long stiff beards are cut by infidel Khirgiz with little sickles in the hottest part of the day. Its glassy hard kernels these ignorant folk thresh out of their chaff by flails, or even by driving cattle or camels round and round on the circular winnows of its straw.

Such is the Kubanka. And here was what Mark Carleton wanted — it was a grain fit for raising in hell by a race of salamanders. It was a wheat for American men who faced hell two years out of six.