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

by Timothy Egan

“God didn’t create this land around here to be plowed up,” says White. “He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad.”

The town looked like dice on a brown felt table, the houses wood-framed and bare-ribbed—as tentative as a daydream.

The sky, the horizon, the earth itself had no end. She knew she belonged in No Man’s Land; the lonely prairie felt right.

Pain was submerged until it screamed to the surface,

It was the damnedest thing, and a mystery. What is it? Melt White asked his daddy. It’s the earth itself, Bam said. The earth is on the move. Why? Look what they done to the grass, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.

The great unraveling seemed to be caused by man, Bennett believed. How could it be that people had farmed the same ground for centuries in other countries and not lost the soil, while Americans had been on the land barely a generation and had stripped it of its life-giving layers?

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than “the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.”

When Roosevelt took a trip to the plains, a farmer in North Dakota held up a hand-painted sign: “YOU GAVE US BEER. NOW GIVE US RAIN.” The president was not optimistic. “Beer was the easy part,” he said.

It made silent men cry to see herbivores on what had been the greatest grassland under the heavens dying cruel deaths from this lifeless, cursed turf.

She clung to small things—a houseplant in the windowsill, pictures of the farm when it was full of grain, a belief in tomorrow.

“We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture,” she wrote to a friend in the East, “but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred.”

His sobs behind the shed were carried by the wind.

They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas. And sometimes all of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas seemed airborne at once: black, red, and orange converging.

He could see the outline of graves, and they made him wonder what the Comanche would do if they rose from the dead and found the buffalo grass gone and the land destroyed.

It came in showers at first, the tight clouds frayed at the bottom, and then developed into a downpour. People strained to hold the big flag in place, but it grew heavy as it took on the weeping skies. They wanted the president to see the biggest flag in the world before it broke under the weight of water. Roosevelt rode slowly in an open car, through the rain, down the three-mile length of town to the park. He was hatless, and water splattered off his glasses and ran down his nose, but he kept his political face forward, jaw out, smiling and waving. The rain pooled in the streets, and people stood in fast-rising puddles, their shoes wet, to get a glimpse of the president. When he passed by the big flag, Roosevelt ordered the car to stop. He saluted the seamstresses standing near their creation, and the young men trying to hold the flag above ground. Music still poured forth from the world’s biggest marching band, even as the instruments were pelted. Now the giant flag began to sag; the young men could not keep it from drooping. The stars and stripes bled away from the 150-square yards of cloth onto the wet street, bled purple.

It takes a certain kind of person to make peace with land that has betrayed them, but that is the way with home.