Editing New Ways Old Grudges Werewolf KarstnerLtd (section)

=Rustles=

Back in 1932, a man named Gerhard Karstner got off the train in Williston, North Dakota with a lot of luggage and a thick stack of papers. Born in Germany around 1906, he had emigrated in 1927 with an eye to applying chemicals to farm life. The concept was new then - back before DDT and the bald eagle - and Karstner had some novel ideas. Even at the time they were poorly understood by the public and are moreso now, but they all involved the application of chemicals at different stages of farm life.

With loans from a bank in Bismarck and, it was rumored, a shady grant by a federal government trying to fund industry and job creation during the Depression, Karstner acquired large tracts of cheap former farmland. The Dust Bowl had just begun - and farmland became a lot cheaper when it ceased being farmland and became wasteland. His company, Karstner Chemicals, Limited, was never a huge employer - at its peak it had fewer than 15 permanent employees on the payroll. But in order to ensure the chemicals "took", Karstner used relatively large numbers of manual laborers with picks and shovels. Their jobs were to ensure that the chemicals sprayed, misted, dribbled or thrown by the bucketload over the ground were thoroughly worked into the dirt. The company paid good money, especially with the Depression on. Whenever the handbills went up and word spread of the company doing another test and needing workers, there were always at least ten times as many that they needed.

Contrary to what people told each other later, there were no widespread stories about weird deformities or crippling diseases among the workers. Sure, one or two of them a year died of something painful and horrible - but there was no shortage of causes for that, and the vast majority of them originated somewhere other than the numbered, neatly sectioned experiment grounds (Karstner did not like to call them "fields" unless something was growing in them) where they worked. Karstner raised a few eyebrows and more than a few tempers by employing Native workers alongside white men - then as now, race relations were tense and occasionally ended in violence. But a few judicious firings and refused rehirings ensured that after a while everyone put their hatred of each other aside to earn some money.