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

The Worst Hard Time was the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction. And while the work is directed toward a popular rather than an academic audience, it is well researched and benefits from a knowledge of the relevant scholarship. The narrative employed by Timothy Egan as a frame for his forty-year (1901–39) tale of the dust bowl is the by-now-familiar explanation of what happened in that storm-cursed corridor extending from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles up into southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado, about a hundred million acres of land. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the windstorms that ripped across the dust bowl during the Great Depression and ruined the lives of thousands of settlers and “sodbusters” were considered the greatest natural disaster to hit the United States. Even after Katrina, these storms may still hold the record for the human misery and environmental devastation they left in their wake.

In each case, Katrina and the dust bowl, misery was exacerbated by human ineptitude, although the degree to which that was the case, especially regarding the dust bowl, is open to debate. Egan’s position is best summed up by Melt White, one of the survivors he interviewed: “God didn’t create this land here to be plowed up. He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad” (p. 9). Egan’s version of the settlement of the High Plains is hardly the tale told by Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains (1931). Yet Egan admires the fortitude of the settlers and farmers, especially those who stayed behind to fight bad luck and weather. Overall, though, he is skeptical about the enterprise—farming on the arid plains—and more caught up in what might be called the dark side of empire and technology. His tale is a cautionary one.

Settlement of the plains by Anglo Americans, most of them farmers, was driven largely by land speculation and the post–Civil War extension of the railroads into the territories. The Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1909 also played a significant role. Between 1880 and 1925,“roughly two-hundred million acres” were homesteaded, and of that number, “nearly half was considered marginal for farming” (p. 56). Farming methods and machinery that worked well in the humid eastern half of the nation (east of the 98th meridian) had to be modified in order for them to be effective in the windy, arid, treeless plains. The disc plow, barbed wire, dry farming, windmills, and the siphoning of the aquifer, a well-known saga to students of Webb, made it possible to grow wheat. Then the weather turned bad, and the land failed. Dry to begin with, the soil was only made worse when plows ripped up the native grasses—by the roots, so they could not be replenished. Areas the size of entire states back east were stripped bare, and then high winds, drought, and loose soil brought on a disaster almost biblical in scope: plagues of grasshoppers, spiders, air that literally stuck to your skin. While the particulars may not be known to the general reader, the larger story—giant dust clouds said to be ten thousand feet high, haunted faces staring out at the camera, shacks covered up to their roofs with dirt—has become part of American folklore.

Egan remarks that the archaeological record indicates that Native Americans were farming on the plains as far back as “the time of Christ” (p. 122). Deep deposits of wind-blown soils show up in the record as well, which tells us that dust storms are a constant feature of life on the plains. During the Depression, dust storms also struck areas of the plains where native grasses had barely been disturbed. So the extent to which land-use practices of a particular moment in time exacerbated...