7/28/2015

The Great Depression was one of the greatest times of hardship that the United
States has ever experienced. But the people in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado,
New Mexico, and Texas, saw a much darker side of the Depression. Those that stayed
in these areas through the depression were witness to the nations worst prolonged
environmental disaster. (Egan 10). In his book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold
Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan tells the
story of how he believes the combination of risky economic policy and unfortunate
environmental conditions led to one of the worst disasters in American History.
Egan uses a mixture of primary and secondary sources throughout the book as
he weaves the narrative into three distinct parts; Promise: The Great Plow up, Betrayal,
and Blowup. Firsthand accounts from many children that lived through the dust bowl,
historical books, and information found in museums are all used as sources. The focus
of the book is on the social and economic impact that the dust bowl had on the people
that lived through it. The results is a dramatic and vivid book that reads almost like a
novel. The textbook, The World in the Twentieth Century by Daniel Brower and
Thomas Sanders was used to compare Egans interpretations of some of the events. I
believe that Egan was very successful in proving and supporting his main points. His
frequent use of firsthand accounts and actual reports from the time really helps to put
you into the shoes of those that lived through the Dust Bowl. Actual quotes from
government officials and reports add a lot of validity to some of his points.
The years following the end of World War I were a roller coaster of prosperity in
the United States. The world took sides and cooperated to fight but once the war was
over many nations, especially the U.S., went right back to pre-war isolationist policies.
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This is clear in the route that economic policies took after the war; high tariffs to protect
US interests no push to increase international trade. Governments raised tariffs to
protect their own producers from foreign competition. Under these conditions, global
recovery from war remained unstable. (Brower, 74). But the U.S. economy grew rapidly
after 1923 thanks to the auto and oil industry. The roaring twenties gave the American
people a glimpse of what fortune could be theirs if they simply took ahold of the
opportunities given to them.
One of the greatest opportunities at that time was the abundance of land in areas
that used to be called the Great American Desert. The Government and investors had
for a long time tried to get people to move to the southern plains of Kansas, Oklahoma,
and Texas but had difficulty because of the bleak opportunities that the harsh
environment presented. The most successful business since the late 1800s had been
raising cattle on ranches using the abundant and resilient prairie grass as feed. The
most famous of these was the XIT ranch which was the largest ranch in the world at one
time.
The key to the success of the ranch was the short buffalo grass that covered it,
XIT had been part of the New Worlds magical endowment grasslands covering 21
percent of the United States and Canada, the largest single ecosystem on the continent
outside the boreal forest. (Egan, 19). This was the same grass that had supported the
huge herds of buffalos that used to roam the west. Investors used the XIT as an
example of the opportunities that the open land presented. But the success of XIT was
short lived, 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. (22), the weather was
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just too moody to raise cattle with consistency. This pattern would continue and
eventually be one of the key factors in the Dust Bowl.
The failures of XIT did not deter investors from trying to attract people to the
same area and sell them land. They worked with agents from the Department of
Agriculture to show the people how to farm the land where not even 20 inches of rain
fell per year (24). The key to making it was to plant dryland wheat and use windmills to
pump up water from below the ground, Any three-toed fool could do it, the agents said.
As for the overturned ground, use the dust for mulch. (24). The XIT cowboys snickered
at these claims because they knew from experience that the only thing that could grow
consistently was the buffalo grass. But people kept trying, taking advantage of the dirt
cheap land prices to become their own landlords. The federal government even offered
free train rides to people looking to settle No Mans Land.
For many years the wheat farmers scraped by with just enough success to
sustain them there. All of this changed once the effects of WWI took the price of wheat
and doubled it and the government guaranteed the price on the global market (43). New
farming technology developed at this time replaced livestock with powerful tractors.
There was now a surplus of open land in the Great Plains and means to produce a
valuable commodity at a fast pace. People quickly poured in and began to work the land
to try and make it rich by farming wheat. What had been an anchored infinity of
grassland just a generation earlier became a patchwork of broken ground the
expansion would continue in the decade after the war, even as there was no need for it.
(43). Broken ground would soon become the fuel for the massive dusters that covered
everything in their paths.
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But for most of the 1920s the Great Plains had good wet years with plenty of
rain. People kept coming because they could make it rich and there was no end in sight.
However, almost no one, including the government, seen the dangers of plowing up all
of the land. Egan quotes a troubling report by the Bureau of Soils; The soil is the one
indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses, the Federal Bureau of Soils
proclaimed as the grasslands were transformed. It is the one resource that cannot be
exhausted, that cannot be used up. (51). Egan sees this transformation as the tragic
manmade effect that led to the Dust Bowl. The pattern of success built on bad policy
was seen not only in the plow up of the Plains but throughout the economy of the
1920s, the author of the textbook also agrees: U.S. policy was only one of many
factors, but the sad truth was that the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties was not built
on solid foundations. (Brower, 75). There were unchecked assumptions being made in
the stock market and no regulatory action to keep the world economy stable. By the end
of 1929 the global economy was in ruins; damaging all nations, especially those that
provided raw materials and food.
Wheat prices plummeted and the money dried up with the banks that closed.
Instead of slowing wheat production and letting the prices rise, the farmers pushed
harder and produced more wheat and turned up more ground. In 1931 the farmers in
the High Plains produced a record, in excess of 250 million bushels nationwide. The
greatest agricultural accomplishment in the history of tilling the land, some called it.
(Egan, 101). But this was only rewarded with the lowest wheat prices ever. To make
matters worse, the U.S. was also not the only country to increase wheat and food
production once the Great Depression hit. In Russia, The government chose to export
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more food, though part of the population starved in the 1932-1933. (Brower, 140).
Russia would suffer a disastrous and deadly famine, with millions of people dying as a
result. Thankfully the effects of the Dust Bowl would never be that severe but they would
still be disastrous.
The tractors in the Great Plains had done a great thing, but in the process they
had also destroyed most of the buffalo grass. At this point the disaster was only an
economic one, but thanks to the turned up land and with no reason to plant a worthless
crop, it would soon turn into an environmental disaster.
The hostile weather had been the downfall of the XIT ranch and it would be the
last straw that would break the wheat farmers backs. By the end of the 1920s the rain
began to stop falling consistently and a pattern of drought began. Drought combined
with dirt cheap wheat prices made farmers give up on planting, the government even
paid farmers to not plant. Some experts began to see the risk of tearing up the land then
leaving it to blow, but at this point it was too late (Egan, 126). Dust storms that baffled
weather experts would soon become a common occurrence. In early 1932 a 10,000ft
dust cloud appeared in the Plains that seemed to resemble mountains that moved. It
dumped dust everywhere and in everything, in peoples hair, eyes, and throat. What is
it? Melt White asked his daddy. Its the earth itself, Bam said. The earth is on the move.
Why? Look what they done to the grass, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.
(114).
With no grass to keep the dust down, the wind collected the land and took it into
the sky. The tough grasslands that once held down the dirt was gone; empty ploughed
up land replaced it. In 1934, a 1,800 mile wide dust storm that began in the Great Plains
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barreled east, eventually reaching New York. Nothing was safe from the dust, A
snowstorm in March dumped twenty-one inches in No Mans Land, but it fell as dark
flakes. They called it a snuster, snow mixed with dust. (153). The high silica content of
the prairie dust would build up in the lungs and tear at the air sacs. Sinusitis, laryngitis,
bronchitis, and the deadly dust pneumonia, became common for everyone but
especially children and the elderly (173).
The worst of these dusters hit the week before Easter in 1935 and the day
became known as Black Sunday. The storm turned the sky in the Great Plains black as
night. Anywhere you could hide, houses, cars, stores, the dust would find you and
reduce visibility to zero. The storm had stared in the Dakotas and clawing the barren
plains, charring the sky in five states, producing enough static electricity to power New
York, a fury that has never been duplicated. (221). 300,000 tons of topsoil were in the
air that day, more than twice the amount of dirt that was dug out of the Panama Canal
(8). Drought and dusters would push people out of the Great Plains in huge numbers.
Close to a million people would leave the Great Plains during 1930-1935.
The Great Plains eventually stabilized by the end of the 1930s but it would never
recover fully recover from the damage that was done during the dust bowl. The land
came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed.
(309). The government bought up more than 11 million acres of the barren land, some
of it is still drifting today, but the majority of it makes up three national grasslands. The
lasting scars are a reminder of the unforgiving power of nature and why man must be
careful when trying to change it.

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Bibliography
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived
the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Brower, Daniel R., and Thomas Sanders. The World in the Twentieth Century:
From Empires to Nations. 7th ed. N.p.: Pearson, n.d. Print.

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