One Man’s Dust Bowl: Recounting 1936 with Don Hartwell of Inavale, Nebraska

Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2006) reminded us of one of the greatest, and entirely preventable, environmental disasters of the twentieth century. The calamitous events of that period, and the misguided decisions about land usage that precipitated them, remain indelibly inscribed upon the national consciousness, while in the Great Plains they have come to possess an element, even, of the mythological. As William Riebsame writes, “the Dust Bowl is an enduring image in the collective consciousness of Americans,” an image of cultural and environmental catastrophe whose inherently sensational nature often distracts us from the growing likelihood that “the basic resources of the Great Plains may be slowly, inexorably frittered away.”¹ But because “Nature has extraordinary powers of recuperation,” Donald Worster admonishes us, “it is easy and altogether human to suppress the memory of misjudgment and loss; to revert to old, familiar ways and deny responsibility.” Worster worries that this is precisely what is happening today in that variety of “agricultural capitalism” that is manifested in “its recent apotheosis as agribusiness.”² Like historiographers such as Paul Bonnifield and R. Douglas Hurt, Riebsame and Worster articulate a largely macrocosmic view of the Dust Bowl era, rather like the prospect of the Great Plains one gets while flying at 36,000 feet.³

But this is not the only way to look at things; one also learns by flying nearer the ground. As Pamela Riney-Kehrberg puts it, “when scholars contemplate the major historical events of the twentieth century, such as the Great Depression and dust bowl, their tendency is to read history from the outside in,” moving “from the larger, seemingly all-encompassing event, in to the lives of those experiencing the event.” But that macroscopic scholarly perspective risks missing the intimate view of the Dust Bowl farmer or farm-woman who struggled daily for bare subsistence amid seemingly insurmountable and interrelated natural, social, economic, and spiritual challenges. Such people recorded history “from the inside out,” in documents like letters and diaries that reveal “the perspective of the individual living in the moment, and perhaps not perceiving themselves as engulfed in historical cataclysm.”⁴ One such personal history written from the inside out is the diary of the southwestern Kansan Mary Knackstedt Dyck that Riney-Kehrberg edited; two others are the diaries of Lucy Mabel Holmes and Elsie May Long, also from Kansas, about which C. Robert Haywood has written; another is the diary of Ann Marie Low (North Dakota); a fourth is Caroline Henderson’s more deliberately journalistic Letters from the Dust Bowl.⁵

Another example of history written from the inside out is the diary kept by the Nebraskan Donald Briggs Hartwell (rg3080.am, Nebraska State Historical Society). A daily diary kept by a man is relatively unusual; diaries have historically been regarded as the province of women, as in the cases of Dyck, Holmes, Long, and Low, with whose diaries Hartwell’s is contemporaneous. Moreover, the deeply personal and meditative nature of Hartwell’s diary is uncharacteristic of the “male” (and masculinist) voice of most men’s narratives from the period and region, such as Lawrence Svobida’s account of farming in Dust Bowl Kansas.⁶ Don Hartwell’s diary therefore offers an especially remarkable contemporary insight into the social, economic, and spiritual complexity of the era, when resilience and determination clashed with destruction and desperation in a struggle that first demoralized and then destroyed many of its victims. Many—but not all. There were exceptions, like Donald Hartwell, who lived for most of his life with his wife, Verna, in the community in which he was born: in Inavale, Nebraska, about seven miles west of Red Cloud. Like so many Dust Bowl casualties, the Hartwells lost just about everything—including, finally, even the earlier stability of their marriage—and then vanished into the great dusty bowl of history, where only their names and a bit of their story remains for us to sift through today. That sifting, however, reminds us that even the most...