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

THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

BY TIMOTHY EGAN HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 2006, 330 PAGES, $28.00

On Sunday, April 14, 1935, from large sections of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, an estimated 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil rose to a height of several thousand feet and began its journey eastward, "a ragged-topped formation covering the horizon as it rolled across the land like moving mountains" Traveling at speeds of up to 60 mph, this huge "black blizzard" dumped 6,000 tons of dirt on Chicago; fell like snow over Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.; and moved on into the Atlantic, where it covered ships as far offshore as 300 miles. This was Black Sunday, the worst in a series of dusters during the "dirty thirties" Meteorologists have rated the storms the number-one weather event of the 20th century, and historians have termed them the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster in history--truly The Worst Hard Time.

Why did families settle in the and western half of the Great Plains--land described as "the flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least-arable part of the United States"? The government and the media of the day undoubtedly played major roles in "selling" the land to unsuspecting settlers. Congress encouraged settlement of "the last frontier in public domain" and, in 1909, passed the Homestead Act, a desperate move offering inexpensive land and attractive incentives for settlement. Newspaper editors, bankers, politicians, and speculators distributed fliers, broadsides, and brochures advertising "the most alluring body of unoccupied land" in the country, and the government termed it "the last frontier of agriculture" Brochures described areas with paved, tree-lined streets, clean water, and railroads but, when the settlers arrived, they found only stakes in buffalo grass.

People came, though--by the thousands. Civil War refugees, field hands, ranchers, Norwegian farmers, and hundreds of German Russians who had been "adrift for centuries"--all wanted to own their own land. Moreover, people stayed. Egan presents the "untold" story of "nesters" who, having lived through the black dusters of the dirty thirties and the deadening Depression, stayed behind. Nearly two-thirds of the population of the Dust Bowl never left. Egan interviewed survivors--many now in their 90s--and researched their diaries, letters, and personal histories. They "shelter the living memory" from which Egan describes how they suffered from "the brown plague" (dust pneumonia) when "windblown shards" covered dugouts and cabins.

What was the motivation of these nesters? Egan found that, although people "hunkered down out of loyalty to the land or stubbornness," most remained because the land was all they had left. They managed to exist by planting small gardens, working the few jobs available, and receiving minimal government subsidies.

Ecologically stable in presettlement days when bison lived off the native grasses and Indians lived off the bison, the Great Plains ever since has been a national liability of sorts. Egan describes how nearly 100,000,000 acres were stripped bare; what had been prairie turf for 35,000 years was "peeled off in a swift decarpeting" to raise wheat. Years of drought and hordes of insects made farming near impossible, even before Sept. 14, 1930, when the first of the many black dusters hit the area.

He also describes how, as a result of the Depression in the Great Plains, 8,000,000 people lost their jobs and nearly 2,000,000 "lived as nomads." During the exodus to California, thousands made do in orange-crate shacks or rusted-out hulks of junk cars along the roads in "Hoovervilles." In contrast to The Grapes of Wrath, in which John Steinbeck describes the desperate migration of one family to California, Egan relates what happened to many individuals--especially those who stayed on their land in the Dust Bowl.

Egan tells of the post-election "hundred-day dash" Pres. Franklin Roosevelt made to find solutions to the Dust Bowl problem, and he emphasizes the work of Hugh Bennett, the real recovery hero, whose legacy is the establishment of soil conservation districts, the only New Deal operation still in existence.

Egan's "Epilogue" details Roosevelt's dream of recovering land, describes the area the way it looks today, and returns to the very few who have remained on their property over all these years. The government bought 11,300,000 acres, planted 220,000,000 trees, established three national grasslands, and spent millions on subsidies.

Egan criticizes the subsidy system, which presently awards large farms in the area as much as $360,000 a year, "money that has nothing to do with keeping people on the land or feeding Americans." At a rate eight times faster than nature can refill the Ogallah Aquifer, which provides 30% of irrigation water in the U.S., cotton growers are draining it--all so agribusiness can get $3,000,000,000 a year in taxpayers' money to ship fiber to China to make cheap clothing to sell back to stores like Wal-Mart.