William Lindsay White wrote a prayer for rain that was printed in the Emporia Gazette during the Kansas drought of 1935. Given how dangerously dry Kansas is again, this shortened version of his prayer bears reprinting:
“O Lord, in thy mercy grant us rain, and by that we don’t mean a shower.
“O Lord of Hosts, we want to look out the windows and watch the regiments of close-packed raindrops march diagonally down. We want to hear the gurgle of the gutters under the eaves, and then the sputter of the downspout.
“God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob, let it come down so hard, let the drops dance so high that the streets and sidewalks seem covered with a 6-inch fog of spatter-drops. Then let it just keep up for a while, and then begin to taper off, and then turn right around and get a lot worse, swishing, pounding, splattering, pouring, drenching, the thunder coming — crackity-bam — and the lightning flashing so fast and furious you can’t tell which flash goes with which peal of thunder.
“Kansas is indeed the promised land, O Lord, and if it gets a break it will flow with milk and honey. But we can’t live much longer on promises. So in thine own way in thine own time, make up thy mind, O Lord, and we will bow before thy judgment, and praise thine everlasting name. Amen.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
19 Comments
Pray for rain? I’d rather see the energy go to ending the war and bringing our soldiers home. Plus we should be praying for forgiveness for all the innocent Iraqis our country has killed and maimed. Let’s get our priorities straight people!
Kansas has been a land of weather extremes for years. From the Great American Desert to the Great American dessert … weatherwise. The year of 1844 was a great flood year mentioned by many pioneers traveling in Kansas. But only a few years later about 1859, Kansas settlers reported not a drop of rain fell for over a year causing many to return east. Did this weather change the course of Kansas history?
The drought of the 1930’s in the midwest caused the horrendous dust storms in Oklahoma and western Kansas. My parents lived in Satanta, Kansas, southwest of Dodge City in those days. As a young person, I thought the great depression was caused by the Kansas drought, dust storms and farm failures but perhaps they only coincidentally contributed to a larger world wide economic conflaguration.
More recently the great flood of 1951 destroyed much of the west bottoms of Kansas City. This flood encouraged building reservoirs on streams feeding into the Kansas River such as Tuttle Creek northeast of Manhattan.
But are we now in a longer and more dangerous weatherchange pattern than thosepast ten-year weather cyles? Will this new cyle, “global warming,” extend for many years into the future? Who really knows?
Damoon, with all due respect, rain is a life and death matter for us in agriculture. It is a far more imminent threat to me and my life than the war…and you know how I feel about the war!!
Great article in the Hays Daily today about the current wheat crop being almost beyond recovery out here, and the same with pastures. All because of a lack of rain. You can expect to see food prices go up eventually, although not as much as oil prices…lololol.
Global warming anyone?
Of course, you know I am gonna say we would have much more luck with a superstitious rain dance than with prayer. Pray into one hand and spit into the other and see which one gets full first. Maybe a human sacrifice is in order. I have some nominees. ROFLMFAO
Sorry, didn’t mean to be insensitive to the plight of the farmer. Maybe we can perform a rain dance at the picnic!
LOL damnoon, just make sure the wind is blowing from the southeast so the rain makes it to the northwest!!
If God can make it rain and take credit for it, can we blame God for the drought?
I think the drought is a filthy zionist plot!!!!!
V.L.R.B!!
kfg, like I said earlier, water is more precious than oil. Who controls the water controls the economy. mega-farms in Calif are getting subsidized water from the canal, paid for by the average joe.
Water, when global warming really starts to take effect, will by the new gold standard. The army corps of engineers cant build dams fast enough, and the dams we do have are in a disasterous state of disrepair.
We still send millions of gallons of water a day pouring into the gulf of Mexico. While cutting it off completly would be an environmental disaster, it’s use could be better handled than it is now.
I really don’t think people know just how bad it’s going to get if we don’t learn better conservation and use of what water we do have. Hell, it might require new farming techniques, genetic engineering, as well as tings we haven’t thought of yet.Soylant Green, baby.
I always thought it was ironic that Kansas pioneers back in the late 1800’s who settled in northwestern Kansas often lived in sod houses with dirt floors and who knows what for roofs because of lack of water and wood. Crops often failed. The great blizzard of 1886 froze many range cattle which led to fencing ranches into farms and closing the overland trails.
But not far under much of that fertile western Kansas land was the natural Ogalala reservoir holding more water than Lake Michigan. I can’t remember the statistics on this nor when someone finally figured out the vast underground lake existed.
In the 1940’s and 1950’s, I remember riding through the Garden City countryside and seeing great geysers of water from irrigation sprinklers watering the sugar beet crops, then an important industry. The fragrance of the sugar beet blossoms in the spring was wonderful.
I haven’t visited Garden City for many years but I presume the sugar beet industry is long gone.
Of course, the Arkansas River which flows through the canyon near Canyon City, Colorado, is depleted and dry when it reaches the Kansas-Colorado border. The dry sandy bed of the Arkansas River near Dodge City is now used for off-road vehicle races.
Some towns in western Kansas are reaching the crises point for lack of drinking water.
Perhaps its time to turn western Kansas back into a vast “Buffalo Commons” area where again only wolves, coyotes, maybe buffaloes, and occasional Commanche Indians are seen in the windswept distance.
JWink,
I got kicked out of the Sierra Club because I have argued for an end to massive third world immigration, legal and illegal based in part on environmental concerns. The same leftists who prattle on about the environment want to see America’s population double through importation of useless third worlders!
Viva La Raza Blanco!!
We better learn to expect more deviations from historical “norms” with the weather as the Great Experiment proceeds.
JWink and Walker (as usual) great posts. This land out here should have never been broken out, and it should be returned to its native state. Buffalo Commons is already here, we just whistle past the grave yard and dont admit it.
I must be the only person here who thinks history will note that governor leadership and her water office appointees have sealed the fate of water in kansas. They had the last chance to put sane water policies in place, and they bowed to irrigation and municipalities that waste water in obscene amounts.
But with a 60% approval rating, we dont need no stinkin’ water policy….
If you want to read a great book about the settling of the great american desert, read Jonathan Rabin’s book Badlands. It is kinda old, but very very good.
He talks about how the railroads marketed their lands to immigrant farmers under false pretenses. He also notes that conventional ag wisdom at the time was that “rain would follow the plow”. If land was broken out, it would cause climate changes that would bring MORE RAIN!! I guess we see how well that worked.
But I am not sure our ag policies or water policies are any more effective today than the rain follows the plow days. The insanity of growing corn and soybeans in the desert is obvious.
OffTopic – somewhat – Is the photo at the top of this thread, a wall cloud?
wow. nice prayer, but sadly another non-issue.
I don’t know about NW Kansas, but we are getting some nice rain here in Wichita today. Haven’t checked it out empirically, but I am sure it is flooding at 2nd and Bleckly.
Lol dd, not one drop here, nor is even one drop predicted. I guess the churchies out here just arent paying the preachers enough!
KFG,Sorry to hear about your lack of rain. I was going to start painting the house today. Darn it, won’t be able to do that today. :-)
R..A…I..N…?
Is that the wet stuff falling outta the sky today? I almost forgot.
I shoulda been over here agreeing with JM instead of wrangling over abortion.
Lots of good posts here and some from folks I don’t see a lot.