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

by Timothy Egan

slow-death shudder.

hurry!’”

That was Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, day of the worst duster of them all.

black blizzards.

“The High Plains continues to be the most alluring body of unoccupied land in the United States, and will remain such until the best means of their utilization have been worked out,” the United States Geological Survey wrote in a report at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Long wrote in 1820 the words that still make him seem unusually prophetic: “In regard to this extensive section of the country, I do not hesitate in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”

Homesteaders were ridiculed as bonnet-wearing pilgrims, sodbusters, eyeballers, drylanders, howlers,

By 1910, almost two hundred million acres nationwide had been patented by homesteaders, more than half of it in the Great Plains.

Just get your piece of the grassland and go to it.

Without a windmill, the Lucas family would not have lasted a day, nor would much of the High Plains been settled. Windmills came west with the railroads, which needed large amounts of water to cool the engines and generate steam. It was a Yankee mechanic, Daniel Halladay, who fashioned a smaller version of bigger Dutch windmills. The Union Pacific Railroad was his first big customer. Eventually, a nester could buy a windmill kit for about seventy-five dollars.

“The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses,” the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed as the grasslands were transformed.

in the first Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909.

Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming.

Drought and a grasshopper plague ravaged the American Plains in the early 1870s.

“In God we trust, in Kansas we bust” was the slogan on banners draped on wagons of people who had tried to grow something and had given up. On marginal lands in Kansas and Nebraska, farmers were walking away and denouncing the railroads for promoting fraud.

She had lived in her Baca County dugout long enough to know the sky held more betrayal than love.

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.” 9 New Leader, New Deal A SEARCH FOR SKUNK HIDES sent Bam White wandering around the High Plains in the year that Americans threw out their president.

Fifty years earlier the government had cleared this land of the finest grass-eating creature on four legs, had cleared away every bison to make room for cattle. Barely one year after Quanah Parker’s Comanche had surrendered and were pushed off the treaty land that had been promised to the Lords of the Prairie for eternity, Charles Goodnight moved his cattle onto the grass, pronouncing it the richest sod on earth. That was yesterday—an eye blink in time. And now the cattle brought to replace the bison were being mowed down because they were starving: they could not stand, could not drink, could not live another day, and even if they could people were unable to make a living off them.

“prairie coal”

And it was true: the dust in Kansas was falling in heaps; a team of soil scientists calculated that during the storms of March and April 1935, about 4.7 tons of dust per acre fell on western Kansas during each of the blizzards.

tomorrow people

Better days were not in the forecast.

the smell of tomorrow again in the air.

Near the town of Hays, where Germans from Russia had settled fifty years earlier, a small boy who had been playing in the fields with a friend dashed for home.

People moved the animals along a V against a fence into a pen, where they were clubbed with bats, chains, and wrenches.

Club,

Exodusters,”

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine, on harvest day, from victory stands.

The men were, in many cases, drunken, or ingrown religious fanatics who were worse to live with and deal with even than the drunks.”

Very dusty, windy, mean.

discouraging and devilish

No Man’s Land, photographed by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration

the boom, the bust, the dust.

“the blackest dark

It takes a certain kind of person to make peace with land that has betrayed them,