The Dust Bowl

HIS127 INDEPENDNENT BOOK ASSIGNMENT

Jonathan Arndt
| 7/28/2015

The Great Depression was one of the greatest times of hardship that the United
States has ever experienced. But the people in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado,
New Mexico, and Texas, saw a much darker side of the Depression. Those that stayed
in these areas through the depression were witness to the nations worst prolonged
environmental disaster. (Egan 10). In his book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold
Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan tells the
story of how he believes the combination of risky economic policy and unfortunate
environmental conditions led to one of the worst manmade disasters in American
History.
Egan uses a mixture of primary and secondary sources throughout the book as
he weaves the narrative into three distinct parts; Promise: The Great Plow up, Betrayal,
and Blowup. Firsthand accounts from many children that lived through the dust bowl,
books, and information found in museums are all used as sources. The focus of the
book is on the social and economic impact that the dust bowl had on the people that
lived through it. The results is a dramatic and vivid book that reads almost like a novel.
The textbook, The World in the Twentieth Century by Daniel Brower and Thomas
Sanders was used to compare Egans interpretations of some of the events.
The years following the end of World War I were a roller coaster of prosperity in
the United States. The world took sides and cooperated to fight but once the war was
over many nations, especially the U.S., went right back to pre-war isolationist policies.
This is clear in the route that economic policies took after the war; high tariffs to protect
US interests and no push to increase international trade.

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Governments raised tariffs to protect their own producers from foreign

competition. Under these conditions, global recovery from war remained unstable.
(Brower, 74). But the U.S. economy grew rapidly after 1923 thanks to the auto and oil
industry. The roaring twenties gave the American people a glimpse of what fortune
could be theirs if they simply took ahold of the opportunities given to them.
One of the greatest opportunities at that time was the abundance of land in areas
that used to be called the Great American Desert. The Government and investors had
for a long time tried to get people to move to the southern plains of Kansas, Oklahoma,
and Texas but had difficulty because of the bleak opportunities that the harsh
environment presented. The most successful business since the late 1800s had been
raising cattle on ranches using the abundant prairie grass. The most famous of these
was the XIT ranch which was the largest ranch in the world at one time.
The key to the success of the ranch was the short buffalo grass that covered it,
XIT had been part of the New Worlds magical endowment grasslands covering 21
percent of the United States and Canada, the largest single ecosystem on the continent
outside the boreal forest. (Egan, 19). This was the same grass that had supported the
huge herds of buffalos that used to roam the west. Investors used the XIT as an
example of the opportunities that the open land presented. But the success of XIT was
short lived, A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid
years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups. (22), the weather was
just too moody to raise cattle with consistency. This pattern would continue and
eventually be one of the key factors in the Dust Bowl.

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The failures of XIT did not deter investors from trying to attract people to the
same area and sell them land. They worked with agents from the Department of
Agriculture to show the people how to farm the land where not even 20 inches of rain
fell per year (24). The key to making it was to plant dryland wheat and use windmills to
pump up water from below the ground, Any three-toed fool could do it, the agents said.
As for the overturned ground, use the dust for mulch. (24). The XIT cowboys laughed
at these claims because they knew from experience that the only thing that could grow
consistently was the buffalo grass. But people kept trying, taking advantage of the dirt
cheap land prices to become their own landlords. The federal government even offered
free train rides to people looking to settle No Mans Land.
For many years the wheat farmers scraped by with just enough success to
sustain them there. All of this changed once the effects of WWI took the price of wheat
and doubled it and the government guaranteed the price on the global market (43). New
farming technology developed at this time replaced livestock with powerful tractors.
There was now a surplus of open land in the Great Plains and means to produce a
valuable commodity at a fast pace. What had been an anchored infinity of grassland
just a generation earlier became a patchwork of broken ground the expansion would
continue in the decade after the war, even as there was no need for it. (43). Broken
ground would soon become the fuel for the massive dusters that covered everything in
their paths.
But for most of the 1920s the Great Plains had good wet years with plenty of
rain. People kept coming because they could make it rich and there was no end in sight.
However, almost everyone did not see the dangers of plowing up all of the land, or they
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choose not to. Egan quotes a troubling report by the Bureau of Soils; The soil is the
one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses, the Federal Bureau of
Soils proclaimed as the grasslands were transformed. It is the one resource that cannot
be exhausted, that cannot be used up. (51). Egan sees this transformation as the
tragic manmade effect that led to the Dust Bowl. The pattern of success built on bad
policy was seen not only in the plow up of the Plains but throughout the economy of the
1920s, the author of the textbook also agrees: U.S. policy was only one of many
factors, but the sad truth was that the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties was not built
on solid foundations. (Brower, 75). There were unchecked assumptions being made in
the stock market and no regulatory action to keep the world economy stable. By the end
of 1929 the global economy was in ruins; damaging all industrial nations, especially
those that provided raw materials and food.
Wheat prices plummeted and the money dried up with the banks that closed.
Instead of slowing wheat production and letting the prices rise, the farmers pushed
harder and produced more wheat and turned up more ground. In 1931 the farmers in
the High Plains produced a record, in excess of 250 million bushels nationwide. The
greatest agricultural accomplishment in the history of tilling the land, some called it.
(Egan, 101). But this was only rewarded with the lowest wheat prices ever. To make
matters worse, the U.S. was also not the only country to increase wheat and food
production once the Great Depression hit. In Russia, The government chose to export
more food, though part of the population starved in the 1932-1933. (Brower, 140). The
tractors had done a great thing, but in the process they had also destroyed most of the
buffalo grass. At this point the disaster was only an economic one, but thanks to the

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turned up land and with no reason to plant a worthless crop, it would soon turn into a
bigger one.
The hostile weather had been a huge part of the downfall of the XIT ranch and it
would be the last straw that would break the wheat farmers backs. By the end of the
1920s the rain began to stop falling and a pattern of drought began. Drought combined
with dirt cheap wheat prices made farmers give up on planting, the government even
paid farmers to not plant. Some experts seen the risk of tearing up the land then leaving
it to blow, but at this point it was too late (Egan, 126). Frequent dust storms soon
became just another part of life on the Great Plains. In early 1932 a 10,000ft dust cloud
appeared that seemed to resemble mountains that moved. It dumped dust everywhere
and in everything, in peoples hair, eyes, and throat. What is it? Melt White asked his
daddy. Its 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. (114).
With no grass to keep the dust down, the wind collected the land and took it into
the sky. The tough grasslands that once held down the dirt was gone and empty
ploughed up land replaced it. In 1934, a 1,800 mile wide dust storm that began in the
Great Plains barreled east, eventually reaching New York. Nothing was safe from the
dust, A snowstorm in March dumped twenty-one inches in No Mans Land, but it fell as
dark flakes. They called it a snuster, snow mixed with dust. (153). The high silica
content of the prairie dust would build up in the lungs and tear at the air sacs. Sinusitis,
laryngitis, bronchitis, and the deadly dust pneumonia, became common for everyone
but especially children and the elderly (173).

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The worst of these dusters hit the week before Easter in 1935 and the day
became known as Black Sunday. The storm turned the sky in the Great Plains black as
night. Anywhere you could hide, houses, cars, stores, the dust would find you and
reduce visibility to zero. The storm had stared in the Dakotas and clawing the barren
plains, charring the sky in five states, producing enough static electricity to power New
York, a fury that has never been duplicated. (221). 300,000 tons of topsoil were in the
air that day, more than twice the amount of dirt that was dug out of the Panama Canal
(8). Drought and dusters would push people out of the Great Plains in huge numbers.
Close to a million people would leave the Great Plains during 1930-1935.
The Great Plains would never recover fully recover from the damage that was
done during the dust bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and
forever changed, but in places it healed. (309). The government later bought up more
than 11 million acres, some of it is still drifting, but the majority of it makes up three
national grasslands.
I believe that Egan was very successful in proving and supporting his main
points. His use and frequent use of firsthand accounts and actual reports from the time
really helps to put you into the shoes of those that lived through the Dust Bowl. The
actual quotes from government officials and reports add a lot of validity to some of his
points.

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Bibliography
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived
the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Brower, Daniel R., and Thomas Sanders. The World in the Twentieth Century:
From Empires to Nations. 7th ed. N.p.: Pearson, n.d. Print.

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