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

          This is the story of "how the greatest grassland in the world was turned inside out, how the crust blew away, raged up in the sky and showered down a suffocating blackness off and on for most of a decade." It covered parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. At its peak, it affected100 million acres. A quarter of a million people fled in the 1930's. American scientists say it was the number one weather event of the 20th century. 

          The land wasn't much to begin with. It had never really been settled until hardscrabble, desperate farmers homesteaded it at the turn of the 20th century. The land was subject to floods and fires. But it prospered during WWI, when, with irrigation and a government price support for wheat, everyone made money. The key was access to the Ogallala Aquifer, a few hundred feet below ground,  the size of Lake Huron, with water easily pumped to the surface. The wheat replaced the grasslands. The 1920's were wet years in the west. There was a worldwide wheat surplus in 1929 that led to a plummeting of prices the following year. The Depression soon followed. In Sept. 1930, the first black duster, a sandstorm so big and fierce that static electricity in it could short out a car, rolled through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The following year, banks stopped opening in the mornings. Drought and Depression led a third of the farmers on the plains off their lands. In January of 1932, the Texas panhandle saw a black storm 10,000 feet high with winds of 60 miles per hour, sort of a cross between a sandstorm and a tornado. The earth was dead and blowing away. Some began to realize that plowing under a grassland that had been there for 20,000 years may have been a mistake. The wind blew for the entire spring of 1933. The land was dead and soon, almost all of the animals were too.

       The New Deal began to buy the dying animals to restore market balance in the west. The storms continued into 1934; few bothered to plant anything. Millions of acres went fallow. The government began to pay farmers. Harold Ickes, the Sec. of the Interior, believed people needed to abandon the southern plains. A new illness, dust pneumonia, filled lungs and took the most vulnerable. In 1935, scientists estimated that 4.7 tons of dust fell per acre in western Kansas. The worst storm of the decade, Black Sunday, came that April. The above picture expresses the horror of that day. It was breathtakingly wide, 200 miles, as it raced down from the north. The region was on its knees. Congress passed a Soil Conservation Act, and soon 20,000 CCC workers were trying to repair the plains. The US also began to buy back land for $2.75 an acre. The Soil Conservation Council advised FDR that man had tried to do the impossible, to farm where it couldn't be sustained. They advised trying to let the grasslands revert. The president didn't like that idea and ordered that 200 million trees be planted. "In 1937, there were more dusters in the High Plains than in any other year - 134 ." On July 11, 1938, the president visited the plains. There was a massive turnout in Amarillo where, ironically, it poured as his train pulled into town.

     "The High Plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl." Today, much of the land is a national grassland run by the Forest Service.  There is some farming, but it is big agribusinesses sucking the aquifer dry. A few of the families whose stories told this tale have descendants still there. Thanks to my brother again. This is a National Book Award Winner from 2006.