Dusting off dark times

Author brings to life pain, devastation of 1930s Dust Bowl

Kelly Lemieux, Special to the News

Published January 6, 2006 at midnight

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The devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina reminded Americans of the resolute power of nature, a power capable of bringing our consumer-driven, relatively comfortable lives to a halt in the face of its awesome power.

The natural tragedy was made worse by the faulty levees that broke, multiplying the damage of the storm and submerging one of the nation's premiere cities like a sand castle in a rising tide.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by 15-year New York Times reporter Timothy Egan, rekindles the memory of another, equally cataclysmic natural phenomenon, one just as exacerbated by the folly of man. Sweeping over the Midwest throughout much of the '30s, The Dust Bowl (a term coined by journalist Bob Geiger) ravaged the lands of the hardy folk who had staked a claim to some of the least hospitable real estate in the country, destroying their livelihoods and making many of them homeless.

"The rains disappeared," Egan writes, "not just for a season, but for years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place, the soil calcified and started to blow."

Egan, a third-generation Westerner and part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for national reporting, has gone back 70 years for his latest book, to a time when the nation was reeling from the financial catastrophe of 1929, when the stock market crashed and 25 percent of the population fell into unemployment.

On top of that fiscal crisis came a drought that dried up the soil of America's agriculture heartland, leaving the United States weakened and threatened from within its own borders. Egan took on the task of finding the last of the survivors of The Dust Bowl and recorded their testimonials for the narratively rich The Worst Hard Time. With excellent prose that details the stories of a dozen characters and the towns they lived in, the author chronicles one of the nation's most difficult travails.

Centered in Kansas, parts of New Mexico, Nebraska and Colorado, and including the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the author reveals in gruesome detail the effects of the "dusters," the sand and soil storms that brewed up like thunderclouds and swept across the dry landscape that had once been rooted by prairie grass and grazed by massive herds of buffalo.

This territory had, for one generation, been tamed by homesteaders lured to its dry expanse at the turn of the century by railroad magnates' settlement schemes. The settlers found "No railroads," Egan writes. "No tracks. No plans for railroads. No businesses. The artesian well was a crude tank next to a windmill." But the hardy homesteaders made a go of it, and in two decades, a layer of topsoil created by a thousand years' worth of animal, plant and soil interaction was plowed under to generate several seasons worth of wheat and other crops.

By the time a massive drought struck the region in the 1930s, the ruptured skin of the earth was ready to blow heavenward in an ongoing series of dust storms that often started in the Montanas and swept their way through the Midwest, only to blow out into the Gulf of Mexico or, in the early '30s, to cake the skyscrapers of New York City and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

The results in the epicenter of the storms were devastating. "Cattle went blind and suffocated," writes Egan. "When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called 'dust pneumonia.' "

One hundred million acres were affected, and 250,000 Americans fled to neighboring states and as far as California, their homes ruined and covered in sand waves that overtopped the roofs.

A member of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, dry farming expert Hugh Bennett, came up with a plan dubbed Operation Dust Bowl, to divide the devastated region into soil conservation districts. Millions of trees were planted and thousands of wells were driven into the underground Ogallala aquifer to tap the water and irrigate the land. And when the president visited in 1938, he was greeted with a downpour of rain in Amarillo, Texas.

The worst of the drought was gone by the end of the '30s, but the land would take decades to heal.

Egan grounds this potent tale with deeply researched interviews with the last of the survivors affected by The Dust Bowl. The pain and anguish of these Depression-era farmers are movingly detailed as the author brings to life their tough existence on the hardscrabble ground. And readers won't soon forget his depiction of the mighty storms that brewed up in the skies of the 1930s Midwest, destroying everything in their path.

Kelly Lemieux is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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