Book Review - The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

Review by Kelly Helm Smith

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin Company

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, as the popular saying goes. Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time - winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Lincoln City Libraries One-Book One-Lincoln selection for 2007 - offers another well-timed chance to learn the lessons of the Dust Bowl. His fresh interviews with survivors bring their experiences to our attention anew. At another level, Egan’s book is an effort to arrive at a workable understanding of what is possible for people who live on the Great Plains.

Early in the book, Egan describes the forces that led to European settlement of the Great Plains. The U.S. government cleared the land of the Indians and bison by the late 1800s through treachery and slaughter. Egan cites a U.S. Geological Survey report from the early 1900s that said, “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.”

Explorers’ accounts of the Plains varied by whether it was a wet or dry year or decade when they passed through. Early maps labeled the area “The Great American Desert,” and explorers described it as like the African Sahara, as “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude,” and as “wholly uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence.”
But the sheer magnitude of the space, a canvas for dreams, proved to be irresistible. Railroad companies, bankers, newspaper publishers and developers were among those who had an incentive to find another story about the Plains. Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. A first wave of settlers was driven off the Plains by harsh winters in the north and by drought in the 1870s and 1890s. But the early 1900s were unusually wet years, as it turned out, and people were eager to believe in opportunities.

Soon enough, Hardy Campbell of Lincoln, Neb., wrote Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual, talking about how to use dust for mulch. Campbell and others theorized that the commotion of plowing and steam engines would disturb the atmosphere and bring rain, and “rain follows the plow” became one of the slogans that induced families to risk moving to dry territory to begin farming. Meanwhile, European farmers were eager to believe that there was a promised land of plenty, as they faced land shortages and conflicts at home.

According to Egan’s account, there were people at the time who knew better. Native Americans understood that the land was well-suited for growing grass and grazing animals. Egan says there were also cowboys who recognized the land’s value as pasture, but not for intensive agriculture. The land they first encountered was bountiful, but tilling turned it upside down.

Families arrived and some began to thrive on the Plains. In the aftermath of World War I, wheat prices were high and rain was plentiful, and land owners and speculators alike had incentives to plow and plant every available inch.

One of the strengths of Egan’s book is the intimate, compassionate glimpses it provides into the hopes that the settlers had for their families, and their fates, as economic, political, ecological and climatic forces converged on their lives. The stories Egan captured cover the multi-state region hardest hit by the Dust Bowl. They range from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles into northeast New Mexico, southeast Colorado, western Kansas and southern Nebraska.

Bam White, for example, was a cowboy traveling south with his wife, three children, all their possessions and no money, when their last horse died near Dalhart, Texas. He decided to stay and make the best of it, “the last best chance to do something right, to get a small piece of the world and make it work,” as Egan says. The Whites sensed the optimism that pervaded the town. Egan describes Dalhart’s unfounded optimism as “a place where dreams took flight on the last snort of a dying horse.”

Egan also chronicles the persistence of George Ehrlich in Kansas and Oklahoma, one of many Germans from Russia who settled the Plains. They brought with them the seeds of a hard winter wheat that had served them well in Russia. They also brought the seeds of Russian thistle, which is now known as tumbleweed, and features prominently in the mythology of the Western United States.

In 1929, wheat prices fell and the stock market crashed. In 1930, it didn’t rain much, and September of that year saw a new kind of weather - a black duster.

The reversal of fortune went on for years, with people clinging to the hope that it could start raining again the next day. Egan’s book details the physical effects of the Dust Bowl, such as dust pneumonia that affected the young, the old and the weak. Cars trailed chains from their axles to discharge the static electricity that otherwise built up. Families lost their savings and, if they stayed, learned to seal cracks around doors and windows and to cover cribs with wet sheets.

One of the saddest accounts is that of Don Hartwell, who started a diary on New Year’s Day, 1936, from his foundering farm on the Kansas-Nebraska border. As the years progress he describes the departure of neighbors and friends for California, poor crops, dismal weather, and how he and his wife, Verna, try to keep their spirits up. They sell off everything they can in an effort not to lose the farm to foreclosure. When they look for work in Denver, Verna is successful but Don is not, so they begin a life apart. In 1939, the bank took the farm, Verna returned for Christmas, and the diary ended. Years later a neighbor interrupted Verna burning her late husband’s diary. It’s now at the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln.

Egan also talks about government responses to the Dust Bowl experience. Hugh Bennett, founder of the Soil Conservation Service, emerges as a prophet of the times in Egan’s account, “a son of the soil” who learned from his father that “the soil of their farm was not simply a medium through which passed a fibrous commodity but also a living thing.” Bennett was one of the first to recognize humans’ role in creating the conditions that led to the Dust Bowl and to advocate policies that encouraged more appropriate soil management practices.

By Egan’s account, Bennett ingeniously timed his presentation to Congress on the need for a Soil Conservation Service to coincide with the arrival in Washington of an immense wind-borne cloud of dust and dirt, an experience that convinced the legislators more rapidly than any amount of testimony could.

The native grasses of the unplowed prairie were better adapted to the extremes of the environment than anyone realized until it was too late. Wind, drought, fire and hard freezes never affected the power of the root system below ground. “As long as the weave of grass was stitched to the land, the prairie would flourish in dry years and wet,” Egan says. “The grass could look brown and dead, but beneath the surface, the roots held the soil in place; it was alive and dormant… Through the driest years, the web of life held.”

Egan’s epilogue credits Bennett with making a long-term difference: He cites a 2004 study that found that “getting farmers to enter contracts with a soil conservation district and manage the land as a single ecological unit,” as well as water from the Ogallala, where it was available, is what kept the land from blowing away again in subsequent droughts.

However, Egan is pessimistic about long-term trends, particularly given the current ethanol-induced incentives to plant fencerow to fencerow. Egan says that the Plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl and that we still don’t fully recognize the need to manage the land sustainably:

“Afterward, some farmers got religion: they treated the land with greater respect, forming soil conservation districts, restoring some of the grass, and vowing never to repeat the mistakes that led to the collapse of the natural world around them and the death of the children breathing its air. Many of the promises lasted barely a generation, and by the time the global farm commodities era was at hand, the Dust Bowl was a distant war, forgotten in a new rush to spin gold from straw.”

Egan correctly identifies the need for a workable story about how we live on the Plains, and points out the downside of our mythological limbo:

“It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons…”

Egan has declined invitations from the Lincoln City Libraries and from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to come and speak. No doubt he is busy and at work on next books, but it’s also hard not to wonder whether he’d find us more appealing if Nebraska had a better story. We’ve got groundwater, we’ve got the Huskers (no matter what), we’ve got space, and we’re a great place to raise kids. But his depiction of the Plains as a wasteland goes beyond land management practices.

A close reading of his indictments makes me want to say, “C’mon, Tim, it’s not that bad.” Not being an exciting place to visit is not the same as being a wasteland. It would be fair to say that, like the roots of the native prairie, the strengths of Plains culture are not immediately visible to outside investigators. Networks are strong and outside influence is slow to penetrate. It’s not a transient society.

When we get our story straight about what works on the Plains, valuing the understated will be part of it. We need to learn to fully appreciate our resources - water, land, space, sky - and to find value in their intrinsic worth, rather than on the commodity market.

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