Happyland: A History of the “Dirty Thirties” in Saskatchewan, 1914–1937 by Curtis R. McManus (review)

It has long been accepted that the Great Depression posed a unique challenge to North America’s Great Plains. Not only did dryland farmers suffer from the global economic calamity that began in 1929, but they were also forced to contend with the ravages of an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that largely bypassed the rest of the continent. For Curtis McManus, however, this focus on the global depression of the 1930s has skewed our understanding of the role that drought played on the Great Plains throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Using southwestern Saskatchewan as a case study—the “northern tip of what is called the Great American Desert” (10)—McManus attempts to revise our traditional periodization and understanding of the “dirty thirties” in North America.

McManus argues the environmental cataclysm of the 1930s was not completely unexpected; rather it was the culmination of three droughts spanning from 1913 until 1937. Each was accompanied by crop failure and land abandonment, every instance worse than the last. Perhaps the most intriguing element of this argument is not that the region experienced environmental deprivation prior to the 1930s, but how McManus connects these droughts to a distinct change in the region’s outlook, values, and social structure. For McManus the real story of the dirty thirties is the loss of hope among Saskatchewan’s dryland settlers: “the droughts appear to have broken something in the spirit of those who settled south and west Saskatchewan; something was forever altered, changed forever” (228). Accordingly, much of the study is spent detailing how these environmental hardships resulted in a marked increase in drunkenness, spousal abuse, premarital sex, and a general relaxation of dominant moral codes.

While McManus’s thesis is provocative, he fails to connect it to the wider region. The Great Plains experienced drought and land abandonment prior to the 1930s. Yet, it is often unclear how the events in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan reflect the wider province or region. The region, after all, is much larger than the ten rural municipalities from which McManus provides the bulk of his evidence. While this area of Saskatchewan certainly experienced hardship prior to the 1930s, other areas simultaneously underwent periods of prosperity. In the end, there simply is not enough evidence to suggest that these earlier droughts altered the outlook of settlers outside this small section of Saskatchewan before the 1930s.