Causes of the Dust Bowl Explored in Riveting Book
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was an ecological disaster of a caliber our country hadn’t seen before and hasn’t since, and, as author Timothy Egan points out, much of the devastation was the result of human actions.
By Carolyn Welch
September 2, 2010
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Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived the Dust Bowl — those who, now in their 80s and 90s, will soon carry their memories to the grave — “The Worst Hard Time” tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.
COVER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
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Ignorance, hubris, misguided public policies, greed, extreme weather and good intentions. Mix them all together and you know you’re in for something ugly. In the case of the American High Plains in the early part of the 20th century, these elements came together to create what we know as the Dust Bowl, the subject of Timothy Egan’s book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
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Whatever you imagine about the Dust Bowl, chances are it was worse. Egan’s book chronicles the tragic devastation of the shortgrass prairie of the American High Plains and the almost unbelievable human suffering that resulted from it. Babies choked to death on dusty air, children failed to thrive, families were driven to eat pickled tumbleweed, roads were rendered impassable by low visibility and drifts of dust, farm animals starved, and equipment was ruined.
What’s particularly tragic, and what I had never realized, is that the misery and suffering was the result of human action. Encouraged by a combination of well-meaning governmental incentives and predatory schemes by land investors, would-be farmers arrived in the region (eastern New Mexico and Colorado, western Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas) in large numbers in the 1910s and ’20s. They had reason to think they could prosper by farming wheat — at the time, prices were good and the area was enjoying a period of relatively wet years.
But the land was shortgrass prairie and was best suited for the buffalo that roamed there until they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century. After a few prosperous years of wheat farming, the price of wheat dropped, and it continued dropping for several years, causing the farmers to rip up ever-larger areas of perennial grass for the cultivation of annual crops, until virtually all of the shortgrass prairie had been plowed. In 1929, of course, the stock market crashed. Then the rain pattern in the High Plains shifted. In 1931, an eight-year period of drought began, and the stage was set for catastrophe.
