The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan (The Immortal Irishman), 2006.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: The Dust Bowl told from the perspective of a couple of small towns in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.

This is one of my favorite history books, mainly because I knew so little about The Dust Bowl before I read it, and also because Egan covers the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon illustrated by the stories of human perseverance and tragedy.

History is the search for causality in past events.  In that regard, the Dust Bowl is a rich vein to mine, as the events that led to it are, to borrow an ironic metaphor, the perfect storm.  Consider this:

• The Great Plains was previously referred to on maps as the Great American Desert. Those familiar with the area knew that with its oppressive weather and limited rainfall, it wasn't good for much more than grazing land, and even then, ranchers struggled to survive periods of drought.  The land was covered with native buffalo grass.
• In the 1870's, Russian emigrants introduced turkey red wheat, a hearty variety better suited for the plains climate.
• Part of General Phillip Sheridan's plan to defeat the Indians of the Great Plains in the 1870's was to kill all the buffalo. Once the buffalo were dead and the Indians on reservations, the government owned land that it didn't know what to do with.
• In 1882 the Texas Legislature sold 3 million acres to a syndicate from Chicago with British investors for $1.23 per acre, to raise money to build a new statehouse.
• The syndicate sought to recoup their investment by marketing the land as good for "dry farming."  They advertised in Europe, the American South and in port cities.
• Land speculators purported the theory that plowing the ground induced rainfall.  The Sante Fe Railroad issued a map that showed the rain line (where it rained 20 inches or more annually) moving west with civilization about 18 miles a year.
• In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company sold 3000 town lots in Boise City, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, for $45 each, using brochures that showed tree-lined streets, an artesian well in the center of home, and "houses any banker would be proud to call home." Unfortunately, the town of Boise City did not yet exist.
• In 1909 Congress amended the homestead act for the western half of the Great Plains, which doubled the amount of land a person could own through improvements to 320 acres.  It was a desperate act that was heavily promoted by railroad companies and prairie state senators to encourage settlement in an area that had never been kind to settlers.
• The Great War in Europe (WWI) increased the demand for wheat, with prices rising from $.80 a bushel in 1920 to $1.60 in 1915, after which the government guaranteed the price of $2.00 per bushel.  This moved wheat from a family farm staple to a commodity export product. Farmers in the Great Plains were getting rich, and many of the struggling settlers became farmers.
• The invention and availability of tractors had a dramatic effect on farming and wheat production, in particular.  In the 1830's, it took 58 hours of work to plant and harvest a single acre. By 1930, it was only three hours.
  
• Tractors were also a stimulus for mortgages, which banks had previously avoided in the area.  But efficient technology along with a few good rain years made mortgages plentiful. Farmers mortgaged everything they had to buy more land to plow up and produce more wheat.
• As the railroad expanded westward it become substantially cheaper to transport wheat to meet the market demands.
• The 1920's featured years of high rainfall.  Many people naively assumed it would last forever, or at least acted that way.  They got while the getting was good.
• In 1917 about 45 million acres of wheat were harvested in America. By 1919, it was over 75 million acres. And the expansion continued even in the decade after the war.
• By the late 1920's there was a worldwide wheat surplus and prices started dropping, down to $1.00 a bushel in 1928.  To make up for the lost pricing revenue, farmers planted more wheat. 
• In October 1929 the stock market crashed.  While only about 10% of Americans owned any stock, the ripple effect on businesses, banks and unemployment were felt deeply in the Great Plains.  
• By 1930, the price of wheat dropped to $.24 a bushel, well below the cost to produce it and bring it to market.  Some farmers held on and plowed even more ground.  But many others simply left their farms.
• On September 14, 1930, the first black duster hit, rolling through towns like a mound of black crud, and carrying enough static electricity to short out cars.  It was a fascinating phenomenon, but people didn't think much more about it.
• 1931 brought the beginning of a drought that would last for eight years in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.  It was also a record year for wheat harvests, with 250 million bushels, an unprecedented agricultural feat in world history.  It sold for below cost.
• Without the buffalo grass and blue gram, which had held the soil for centuries, and with millions of acres of unplanted wheatfields, winds would pick up the dust, creating great dark walls, some of which extended more than 20,000 feet in the sky and moved, sometimes, for hundreds of miles.
• On May 9, 1934, whirlwinds which began in the Dakotas and Montana, carried dust all the way to the New York and Boston, over 350 million tons, and dropping an estimated 6000 tons on Chicago.
• The 1934 Yearbook for Agriculture stated that 100 million acres of farmland had now lost all its topsoil.

Other snippets:

• In the late 19th century, doctors often prescribed a change in geography to treat respiratory ailments, such as what brought Doc Holliday to Dodge City, Kansas. "Every good-sized town in the arid belt had a sanatorium offering various amenities."
  
• In 1872-73, seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped out of Dodge City.  One estimate was that 25 million buffalo had been killed.
• Car owners in the Dust Bowl dragged chains from their cars, which served as a ground to protect it against the static electricity of the dusters.  Men avoided shaking hands with each other because the static electricity was so great it would knock a man to the ground.
• During one storm in 1935 the wind was clocked at 40 mph or higher for 100 straight hours.
• In 1930, 1350 banks failed, followed by 2294 in 1931. At the end of 1931, the Bank of the United States in New York, which had $200 million in deposits, collapsed.  Twenty-five percent of the workforce was without jobs or prospects.
• Many people blamed the Jews, and "Jewish banking" for the collapse. One Christian religious leader would "out" Hollywood celebrities as Jews on his radio show, which was listened to by over a million people.
• The 1930's was the first decade in U.S. history when the number of young children declined.
• People had various theories for how to induce rain.  One was to kill snakes and hang them in the sun.  In Southwest Kansas, dead snakes were hung for miles on barbed wire fences. Another "scientific" theory was aerial bombing, dating back to Plutarch's observation that rain followed battles.  One proponent of this theory was C.W. Post, of Post cereal fame, who owned land in West Texas.  He tried attaching dynamite to 150 kites, and also using a Howitzer, to no avail.
• At it's peak, the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres. More than a quarter million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930's.  It remains the greatest man-made ecological disaster in the nation's history.

"And then the dispossessed were drawn west--from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." 

Grapes of Wrath, 1939, John Steinbeck.

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've read in recent years.  This is 4/50.