1934 August 30th Thursday
Breeze changed to N.W. then to west and S.W. so was real warm in our room in night. Bright, cool S.W. breeze but got warmer in day. I changed water on pickles and had to put vinegar on them in p.m. as water was fermenting. I looked at catalogs and read & slept. Maggie got meals, baked pies, cake, ironed clothes, mopped floors. All the men went to Noble’s Land, mowed, raked and stacked thistles and ate dinner at Noble’s house with Harry, Fred and Gerald as they [are] putting up thistles on their land on Moore Creek.
Note from Lisa on Russian Thistles: During the Dust Bowl, it was not uncommon for farmers to harvest Russian Thistles for cattle feed. According to Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time, people resorted to eating the tumbleweeds as well.
For more on the origin of the thistle, see National Geographic’s “The Weed That Won the West“: “It was in October 1880 that the Department of Agriculture in Washington first received word of a strange plant that had begun appearing in the newly tilled farmlands of South Dakota. Included with the report was a sample that had been found near the town of Yankton on the Missouri River. The information was filed away and forgotten until, a little more than a decade later, more specimens began arriving in the mail. One came from Aberdeen, 200 miles northwest of the earlier sighting, and another from all the way up in North Dakota. The march was already becoming relentless. In the early 1890s a legislator proposed that a fence be built around the state to stem the incursion. It was too late. By this time the weed had already found its way to Canada.”
Russian thistle (Salsola Kali), or Ink weed, growing in the Colorado Desert, Imperial Valley, California, ca.1910. Photo by Charles C. Pierce
Dale Mize’ barn, built from poles and Russian Thistles (Department of the Interior. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rosebud Agency) circa 1936