The Worst Hard Time:

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan (2006, Mariner Books)

            Maybe if they hadn’t changed the name from the Great American Desert, those settlers would have known what they were getting into. Early surveyors of the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase found “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude” in what would become the northern Panhandle of Texas, the no-man’s-land Panhandle of Oklahoma, the southeastern corner of Colorado, and the western half of Kansas. 

 

            After the Civil War, though, an optimistic rebranding as ‘the Great Plains’ went some way to concealing how inhospitable the land actually was. High and flat, with terrible extremes of weather, it had sustained bison and Native Americans, especially after they acquired horses; in fact, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 promised Comanches, Kiowas, and their kin hunting rights west of the 100^th meridian. You can picture how long that lasted. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Texas slaughtered bison in order to drive the native people out, and liberate the land for cattle ranching. There was plenty of grass: twenty million acres of it in the Texas Panhandle alone, home of the palatial XIT Ranch. The flaw in that program was that while bison can stand the extremes of temperature that the desert offers, cattle are not so hardy. “Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hail-storms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the XIT. A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good for anyway.”

            According to the Federal government, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was good for homesteading. Wells powered by windmills could reach the Ogallala Aquifer, though it might take a hundred feet of drilling. “The pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that would never give out.” The soil under the grass seemed like another endless resource, as the Great War made wheat farming a can’t-miss enterprise. For a few years, every acre of sod busted with a plow meant a twenty-fold return, and there seemed no end to it. There were also a couple of boom years at the end of the next decade, and then, coincident with the stock market crash of 1929, it all came to an end. Though every city had starving people, prices for wheat were so low in 1930 and 1931 that piles of it rotted next to the railroad tracks.

            And then the wind began to blow, and bring the dust with it. And in short order, the dirt, as well. The duster was a completely new meteorological phenomenon, rolling along the ground picking up more dirt. There were no dwellings air-tight enough to resist the blowing dirt, even assuming the wind didn’t break the windows, or carry the whole house away. The storms also carried stunning amounts of static electricity, enough to short out a Model T’s motor or blight a watermelon vine. From time to time, they headed east to New York or Washington, D.C., and then on out to sea; more often, they carried Nebraska’s soil to Texas, and right on back again. People kept shovels in their cars to dig out of drifts on the roads, in the intervals between storms that darkened the world too much to even try to drive.

            The Dust Bowl was the worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century, but I don’t recall ever hearing much of its history before. Egan bases his telling on small-town newspapers, weather reporting, and interviews with a few hardy survivors, and he does a fine job of seeing both the human scale and the grand expanse. We meet the high schoolers whose class play is cancelled because the school gym has been turned into an infirmary, because so many people are down with dust pneumonia. We meet the tarantulas and the black widow spiders, the rabbits and the grasshoppers. We meet the photographers who left us images of desolation, and federal agents who promulgate their theories of land reclamation as part of the New Deal.

            It’s a captivating story, even when it reads like the Israelites in Egypt; we’re still living in its aftermath, and we forget it at our peril.

Any Good Books, December, 2023