A huge cloud of dust billows over agricultural land in southeastern Colorado. The storms in 1935 were the worst that drought-weary settlers had seen. Photo © Western History/Geneology Department, Denver Public Library
I don’t know how my grandfather persuaded my lace-at-the-throat, college-graduate grandmother to move with him from upstate New York to the frontier town of Cooperstown, North Dakota, soon after their wedding in 1906. And I certainly don’t know what possessed them, five years later, to move across the state to the smaller, wilder town of New England, with their one-year-old son, my father, in tow.
My grandfather was in the loan, real estate and ranching business—a volatile combination in that overly optimistic homesteading era. For many years he did well. Eastern farmers, the author of his obituary said, “were hungry for this rich new land which grew wonderful crops with little labor expended.” But in time the Great Plains showed its fickle nature.
“There was always something,” my father explained once. Either the wheat crop failed because of drought, or grasshoppers descended and ate the stalks. When rain did come, it created a fungus called “red rust” that made the wheat kernels worthless. Eventually my grandfather’s land business faltered.
Following World War I, the national economy slumped. Banks failed, as did some crops. My grandfather found himself woefully overextended. He struggled to clear himself of the debt that clung to him like a parasite. Then, in 1922, at age forty-two, he succumbed to a combination of influenza and meningitis. Soon after the funeral, my grandmother and my twelve-year-old father boarded a train heading east, back to upstate New York with its predictable seasons, less-expansive horizons and fertile, if hilly, farmland.
My forebears faced a tough lot, but it was only a pale foreshadowing of the travails that would descend, a decade later, on thousands of other frontier families and immigrants who had settled several hundred miles south, in what was then called the High Plains. New York Times reporter Timothy Egan chronicles that hellish era in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
Digging into family and climatic histories, Egan traces the trajectory of what has been called the greatest environmental disaster of the twentieth century—the plowing under of the High Plains prairie of the south-central United States. He explains how government-backed agendas and the lure of unsustainable profits convinced homesteaders to plow under more than 35 million acres of short buffalo and blue grama grasses that had held down the arid region’s topsoil for thousands of years, creating the region now known as the Dust Bowl.
“The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses,” the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed back then. “It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up.”
Throughout the 1920s, thousands of families trekked westward to the High Plains, lured by promises of rich farmland that would produce acres of wheat just as soon as the prairie grasses were turned under. They plowed, planted and waited. At first the harvests were good and the profits considerable. But the late 1920s found the newcomers caught in the sticky web of supply and demand. Good harvests did not necessarily bring good prices.
In the East, the nation’s downward spiral began with the crash of the stock market in October 1929. In the High Plains, the warning signs were a glut of grain and plummeting prices. That year, the price for a bushel of wheat dropped to seventy-five cents, down from the $2.25 per bushel farmers were bringing in just a few years earlier. The next year saw a bumper harvest, but by then a bushel of wheat was pulling in between twenty-four and thirty cents—one-tenth of what it netted in 1921, and not anywhere near enough to pay for equipment, seed, hired hands or interest on loans from the bank. Desperate farmers, pinning their hopes on a changing market, plowed more land and planted more wheat.
Meanwhile, the global depression crawled west. Banks began to fail. Eight million people were out of work. In 1931 the nation harvested a record high of 250 million bushels of wheat, much of it from the High Plains where, by then, 33 million acres of native grasses had been plowed under to make way for the golden grain. But the going price per bushel—as low as nineteen cents—was less than half of what farmers paid to grow it. Mountains of wheat rotted under the summer’s blazing sun. “Suitcase farmers” fled, leaving their torn-up lands behind.
Then Mother Nature showed her dark side. The following year, the rains didn’t show up, but the wind did—and so did the heat. Then the dust descended.
A menacing, whirling 10,000-foot cloud churned through the High Plains on January 21, 1932. “Black as the inside of a dog,” folks said. The “black blizzards” swept through the Oklahoma panhandle six times that winter, blinding cattle and smashing windows. Dust storms replaced rainfall. Heat baked the fields, shriveling crops and leaving more earth untethered. Cattle starved. Dust pneumonia claimed the lives of young and old. A massive storm hit in May 1934, measuring 1,800 miles wide and weighing 350 million tons. It carried its load of soil from Montana to New York, where it eclipsed the sun and dumped dust onto the streets—and down the throats of puzzled city folk.
The worst storm was yet to come. Egan constructs scenes from the lives of several families and groups on Black Sunday, the fateful day in April 1935 when a combination of weather systems, fronts and loose topsoil collided to create the largest sandstorm in the nation’s history. It arose with no warning over the Dakotas, and within hours was bearing down hard on the beleaguered High Plains. Two thousand feet high, with winds of sixty-five miles an hour, the roiling black cloud was unlike anything the dust storm-weary populace had yet seen. Wire fences crackled with electricity. Men lost their bearings. The day turned dark as a cave.
I first thought I could read Egan’s book quickly by skimming through the cast of characters and events that shaped this epoch of devastation. But soon I found myself slowing down. Egan brings the environmental disaster home by describing its effects on real people who lived through this unimaginably despairing time. He grounds his stories with staggering statistics that show the cost—in lives, resources, hopes and dreams—when government pushes economic policies without regard for science. His analysis of the politics that held sway in the 1920s and ’30s demonstrates both the folly and the salvation that government is capable of.
The Worst Hard Time is as much a warning as it is a history lesson. In the fourth year of the drought, desperate townsfolk paid a rainmaker to coax rain from the sky. Later, the government planted thousands of trees to try and hold down what was left of the prairie. Neither approach worked. Nature can’t be manipulated. It’s up to us to respect the need for balance, heed the warning signs and act accordingly—or pay the price.