On Sept. 14, 1930, a strange dirt cloud swirled out
of Kansas into the Texas Panhandle. Weathermen dismissed it as an
oddity, but it marked the beginning of the worst long-term
environmental disaster the United States has ever known — the
Dust Bowl. That bleak period is chronicled in The Worst
Hard Time, Timothy Egan’s absorbing account of the
people who struggled to survive on the southern Great Plains during
the 1930s.
For generations today who may imagine the Dust
Bowl was just another drought, Egan’s book hammers home the
staggering magnitude of the disaster and, most importantly, the
fact that it was triggered by acts of man, not nature.
Rarely have the consequences of plundering the environment for
short-term economic gain been spelled out as starkly as then, on
the vast grasslands from southern Nebraska to northern Texas.
Between 1910 and 1915, wheat prices doubled and homesteaders rushed
to plant grain. Cowboys warned of the soil, “The best side is up.”
But eager farmers ignored that advice — and paid a terrible
price. In a few years, their plows had ravaged the hardy turf.
Drought descended, and countless tons of topsoil went airborne in
storms that suffocated cattle and buried buildings.
In
interviews with survivors, Egan hammers home the human toll: people
driven mad, children dead of “dust pneumonia,” families subsisting
on ground-up, pickled tumbleweeds.
Eventually, the Dust
Bowl led to soil-conservation districts and better farming
practices, but Egan is not optimistic about the future. Even now,
he notes, pumps suck water from the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the
Great Plains eight times faster than nature can replace it.
Clearly, the lessons of history often go unlearned.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Dust in the wind.
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