Cattle

Cattle are a measure of how the 1930s drought reached beyond failing crops to threaten animal life. In Joe Rantz’s view from a westbound train, they stand beside dry stock ponds, weakened by the loss of the feed on which livestock depended; at one Colorado ranch, starving cattle are shot and their carcasses placed in trenches.

Drought and the loss of forage

The narrative links the animals’ plight to the collapse of the conditions needed to sustain them. Under extreme heat and drought, crops could not grow; without corn, wheat, and hay, livestock could not survive. Cattle therefore register the drought not as distant weather but as a breakdown in the food supply on which farms and herds depended.

Seen from the train

As Joe crosses Oklahoma and eastern Colorado, he sees cattle with protruding ribs and lowered heads standing listlessly at dried stock ponds. The ponds’ mud has hardened and cracked, leaving no relief in the landscape. At a Colorado ranch, he watches men shoot starving cattle and tip the carcasses into large trenches. The scene makes the consequences of the drought concrete: animals are no longer being raised or tended under ordinary conditions, but removed because they cannot be sustained.

Narrative significance

Cattle are not individualized or given a separate storyline; they appear as part of the damaged rural world passing before Joe. Their immobility beside the railroad contrasts with the westward movement of his train, while their condition reveals what the drought has taken from those who remain on the land. The episode gives the environmental crisis a visible cost in animal life as well as in ruined crops and abandoned farms.