The Worst Hard Time

"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 force into internment camps during World War II, where German POWS were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed, and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to the other–all have come and gone through the […] Plains." 

This quote introduces a theme that Egan weaves throughout the book: that the High Plains is often uncared for, and viewed as a dumping ground. Egan begins the thread in Chapter One, by calling the American cowboy's dream ranch unloved. Egan shows how the land was strictly a cash cow for foreign investors, and foreign investors insist on hiring real estate promotors to farm it out. The land’s neglect is also described through the suitcase farmers, who drop in some seedlings and then abandon the land until it produces. Bennett and personnel at the Agriculture College of Oklahoma also show and speak out against the farmers' irresponsibility with the land. In Chapter 11, Egan describes the High Plains as orphaned, continuing the motif of the land being abandoned or unloved. Egan also refers to how Americans in other states didn’t care about what happened in No Man’s Land. On the final page of the book, the Dust Bowl again is described as forgotten.

“The last bison were killed within five years after the Comanche Nation was routed and moved off the Llano Estacado. Just a few years earlier, there had been bison herds that covered fifty square miles. Bison were the Indians’ commissary, and the remnants of the great southern herd had been run off the ground every one of them, as a way to ensure that no Indian would ever wander the Texas Panhandle.” 

This reveals some important facts of the early history of the High Plains. There is documentation that as late as 1880’s thirty to sixty million buffalo still roamed the plains. However, by the end of the century only three hundred buffalo were reported to roam freely. The primary reason for the drastic reduction of the buffalo population was buffalo hunters. In the mid-19th century, trappers in the Midwest had exhausted the beaver population, so they now turned to taking out buffalo tongues, which had become a lucrative business. An estimated 200,000 buffalo were killed annually for this purpose. When the Transcontinental Railroad opened, expanding access to the High Plains, thousands of eastern-based hunting parties came to the west to kill the bison just for sport. The railroads even advertised buffalo hunts done from the windows of a train.

"The ranch land was empty. No people. No bison. No roads. No farms. Just grass–three million acres of it." 

The land in the above quote is the famous XIT ranch, which was on the Texas panhandle and to the south, on the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains. This famous ranch had 781 miles of fence, the largest fenced ranch in the world. In 1887, there were 150,000 head of cattle, and cowboys on the ranch earned thirty dollars a month. Profits from the land raised the money to buy the Texas’s capitol building. The XIT plays an important role in the book in several chapters. First, as the XIT ranch sells off portions of their land, the ranch’s real estate brokers become one of the many false advertisers claiming the land was easy to farm. That false advertising draws people like Dick Coon to the area. In the later chapters of the book, Coon holds a barbeque for all the old XIT ranchers, showing his generosity in hard times. The ranch is also significant because former XIT cowboys attend the meeting that elects Andy James to write the letter to Hugh Bennett approving Operation Dust Bowl.

"Miles to water, miles to wood, and only six inches to hell." 

This is an aphorism that was used by the XIT cowboys to warn the farmers that High Plains land was not meant to be farmed. This quote is embedded in a discussion of how the cowboys hated the farmers and the farmers hated the cowboys. The cowboys viewed the farmers as bonnet-wearing pilgrims and religious wackos, and the farmers viewed the cowboys as drunken, sex-starved hedonists on horseback.

Within the context of this aphorism, Egan emphasizes the region’s drought and tells how the average rain fall was only sixteen inches for the entire year. He explains that the highly-drought-resilient buffalo grass was the only vegetation that had been successfully grown in the region.

“But the new citizens of this new town [Dalhart, Texas] were refugees, each in their own way.” 

Egan consistently portrays his main figures as people who flee to the Dust Bowl from bad circumstances, looking for new hope and a last chance at life. This quote specifically refers to Dalhart, Texas where “Doc” Dawson has moved to in attempt to mitigate health issues. Bam White moves to Dalhart to flee Colorado winters, and Dick Coon has fled the Galveston floods. 

“Folkers bought an International 22-36 tractor, a Case combine, and a one-way plow–a twelve-foot Grand Detour. The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass.” 

Sales of one-way plows skyrocketed in the High Plains during the wheat boom era. The one-way plow allowed wheat farmers in the Dust Bowl to triple their cultivation and production of wheat. It was hailed as a miracle machine and considered brilliant technology. However, this tractor was cited in Hugh Bennett’s report to FDR in 1936 as causing the wheat surplus and eventually the crash of wheat prices. It was also the machine that uprooted the once vast grasslands of the Great Plains, and destroyed an ancient ecosystem. 

“By the end of 1932, one fourth of all banks would be closed and nine million people would lose their savings." 

Banks robbing customers of their life savings is another reason for the economic collapse of the High Plains. In 1932, no banks were insured by the federal government.As a result of these bank closings, FDR passed the Emergency Banking Relief Act in March of 1933, which allowed the federal government to provide additional deposits to banks, and to guarantee deposits. Because the government guaranteed the deposits, Americans redeposited money into the banks, thus restoring the nation's banking systems. This banking crisis and FDR's subsequent actions set a precedent for the U.S. government to insure banking deposits. 

“How could this be: the drought had persisted through 1930 in much of the country, while the High Plains got enough moisture to produce a bumper crops […] and yet […] nobody would buy [them]?” 

This quote shows how wheat farmers, businessmen and even government economists are confused about the reasons for the economic downturn of the Dust Bowl. Farmers often believed that more production meant more profit. Others, like Arthur Hyde, a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, are perplexed by the fact that the Dust Bowl droughts didn't increase the grain prices as they had always done in the past. What people like Hyde didn’t understand was that product demand and prices were being impacted not only by the nation's Depression, but also by a global economic downturn.

“It measured fourteen feet by thirty-six feet, just over five hundred square feet of High Plains habitat for Bam, Lizzie and the three kids. The roof was tarpaper, which shrieked like a hag in the spring winds. The walls were fingernail thin, and Lizzie said she could not live in a place so cold. Bam and the boys tried to insulate it, tacking pasteboard to the walls […]The house had no water. No toilet. No electric power.” 

This describes the dugout of Bam White and shows the conditions that the first settlers of the High Plains lived in. Settlers had to haul large buckets of water into the dugouts to do the cleaning and cooking. They used kerosene lamps for light and often used manure to fuel their stoves. The quote is also significant because as basic as these living quarters are, White's shack is the reason he stays in Dalhart. White has been saving his money, and he believes that with a place of his own, he’s finally got something in Texas.

“On September 14, 1930, a windstorm kicked up dust out of southwest Kansas and tumbled toward Oklahoma. By the time the storm cut a swath through the Texas Panhandle, it looked unlike anything ever seen before on the High Plains.” 

This is an account of the first black duster to sweep the Dust Bowl area. This first duster marks the many characteristics never seen before in a High Plains dust storm: it rolls along the ground, instead of just from side to side; it's black, instead of beige; it causes enough static electricity to short out cars; and it's painful to human skin. These dusters were caused from loose topsoil from farmers' over-plowing, although this wasn’t known at the time. Meteorologists and weather bureau personnel had no idea what was causing the black duster at the time of the first citing. 

“Nearly two years into the Depression, the town [Dalhart, Texas] was taking on a meaner edge, more desperate, like the rest of the country. What started on Wall Street twenty months earlier now hit the High Plains, a domino of distrust. The more things unraveled, the more it seemed like the entire boom of the previous decade had been helium.” 

This quote ushers in the second section of the book. People are losing their life savings to banks, along with their homesteads, which the government once said would bring them wealth and prosperity. 

“In September 1929, just over 1.5 million people were out of work; by February of the following year, the number had tripled. The economy was not fatally ill, President Hoover said; Americans had simply lost their confidence.” 

Hoover's misunderstanding of the severity of the economic crisis and lack of sympathy for the farmers on the High Plains play a significant role in the early chapters of the book’s second section. Hoover believes that if he could get the businesses up and running, the agricultural economy would then recover. FDR believes the opposite: that if he could get the agricultural end up and running, then the businesses would recover. Hoover's unwillingness to put the farmers' needs as a priority leads to FDR’s 1932 election. 

“At last, they were about to do something, striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure. As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed.” 

This quote relays information about another environmental problem the residents of the High Plains were having. Many towns, including Dalhart, organized rabbit drives on a weekly basis to kill the rabbits eating their crops and taking over streets in the town. Sometimes 6,000 rabbits would be killed in a day. At this particular rabbit drive, 2,000 people attended. Egan describes the rabbit drives as being festive, with people drinking whiskey, and echoes his theme of man destroying nature in a careless manner.

"But the Lucas family had planted themselves in this far edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle at a time when there wasn’t even a land office for nesters. They were among the first homesteaders. What would it mean for the pioneers to leave? And if they move, it was not just the uncertainty of where to go and what to do but also the feeling that they would never again own something. It was a big step down from working on your own quarter-section to being adrift, with strangers staring at you like just another piece of Okie trash, saying you should be deported." 

This quote expresses the inner thoughts of Hazel Lucas Shaw. Shaw, like so many homesteaders, have to constantly reevaluate if they should stay or leave, due to the ongoing environmental disasters. The passage also accurately echoes many of the homesteaders’ attachment to their land as a reason for staying in the Dust Bowl. Further, the quote shows how Hazel Lucas Shaw is aware of the geographical prejudice against the Okies.

"His other idea was to get individual farmers to break down their barriers of property and think beyond their fence lines. It wasn’t enough for one farmer to practice soil conservation if his neighbor’s land was blowing. Bennett wanted people to see the whole of the living plains, not the squares of ownership." 

Hugh Bennett not only wanted to form small, locally-operated soil conservation districts; he also wanted farmers to think collectively about the bigger picture, and the ecosystem they were a part of. According to Egan, Bennett had a lot of problems getting farmers to work together. Bennett, however, stood by his vision and used FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps to execute this vision. At meetings of the CCC, Bennett told the workers they were like soldiers on the firing lines, defending the homeland. 

“The president had his doubts about reverse homesteading. He did not want an uninhabited expanse of sifting sand in the middle of the country. Why not try and change the land itself?” 

This quote shows how FDR is still looking for a way to change the overall climate of the Dust Bowl, even after Hugh Bennett delivers the Plains Drought Committee report, which advocates that nature’s ecosystems can't and shouldn't be manipulated. FDR believed that the forests were like the lungs of the land, and he thought that by planting trees all across the Great Plains, he wouldn’t have to encourage homesteaders to abandon their farms and turn the Dust Bowl into an empty sandbox. His shelterbelt program planted belts of trees on private land along the Great Plains. 

“‘I'm not gonna put my family in a soup line,’ said Ezra Lowery. ‘Not me. We have food here and a roof over our heads.’” 

Ezra Lowery’s attitude is shared by many of the landowners in the Dust Bowl. At the beginning of the era, there was still an air of independence among the farmers, and they refuse to take civic or government help. The Lowerys dig up yucca roots and pulverize it, mixing it with a little cake meal to feed their cows, which gives the family milk and cream. The Lowerys survive the hardest times by canning tumbleweeds and yucca roots and later feeding them to their family when there was nothing else to eat. Soup kitchens emerge in America in 1929, after the Stock Market Crash.

They are first run just by private organizations, churches or financiers like Dick Coon of Dalhart. By 1935, however, the government opens and sponsors soup kitchens in many regions of the country.

‘‘A TRIBUTE TO OUR PEOPLE: Spartans! No better word can describe the citizen of the north plains country and of Dalhart […]Bravery and hardship are but tools out of which great empires are carved and real men made Spartans.” 

This passage is written by John McCarty, the owner and editor of the Dalhart Texan. He often refers to Dalhart residents as elite Spartans, and compares his tough citizens to what McCarty called the wrist-watch cavemen of the East who had no back bone. People from five counties responded to this article by forming a local dust-fighting rally.

“For once, they did not have to put on goggles or attach the sponge masks or lubricate their nostrils before going outside. They stretched their legs and breathed deep, blinking at the purity of a prairie morning, the smell of tomorrow again in the air.” 

This passage shows how denizens of the High Plains are forced into unusual routines of dressing due to the dusters. They have to wear the goggles to protect their eyes from any silica dust. The sponge masks are often worn to breathe somewhat normally. Vaseline was used to help the sting and harsh dryness from the dust air. This quote is also highly significant as a literary device. The passage opens Chapter 16, “Black Sunday,” right before Egan relates the eyewitness accounts of the duster. The description of the new hope of the day, after so many setbacks, magnifies the terror the characters experience once the storm hits them. 

“It came quicker than most dusters and was deceptive because no wind was ahead of it. Not a sound, not a breeze, and then it was on top of them. They were slammed to the ground and engulfed by a wall, straight up and down, the dust abrasive and strong, building up, twisting. The noise was a ferocious, a clanking, scraping sound. They could not tell up from down, one side from another.” 

This is Ike Osteen's account of Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More than 300 million tons of topsoil are airborne, and the dirt is carried by the highest winds on record. Black Sunday displaces thousands of people, more than any other American environmental disaster before 1935. Black Sunday is also famous because after the storm, Robert L. Geiger coins the term the Dust Bowl, which becomes a catch phrase for journalists and politicians of the day. 

“Lorentz said he wanted only to tell a story that needed to be told: as one arm of the government tried to save the plains, another arm would try to show how people had created the problem.” 

This quote shows how FDR is still looking for a way to change the overall climate of the Dust Bowl, even after Hugh Bennett delivers the Plains Drought Committee report, which advocates that nature’s ecosystems can't and shouldn't be manipulated. FDR believed that the forests were like the lungs of the land, and he thought that by planting trees all across the Great Plains, he wouldn’t have to encourage homesteaders to abandon their farms and turn the Dust Bowl into an empty sandbox. His shelterbelt program planted belts of trees on private land along the Great Plains.

“The situation is so serious that the Nation, for its own sake, cannot afford to allow the farmer to fail, the report concluded. We endanger our democracy if we allow the Great Plains, or any other section of the country, to become an economic desert.” 

This is taken from Hugh Bennett’s Great Plains Drought Area Committee report of August 27, 1936. The report was ordered by FDR, in order to find out what was causing the black dusters and the economic downturn of the High Plains economy. The idea that the government should intervene on the behalf of broken economies in the U.S. was novel for its time. The idea that no region of America should be neglected paves the way for future legislation to assist America's states in economic need. This quote is also a strong characterization of Bennett, who rallies his countrymen to work together to restore not only the nation's ecosystems, but the country's economy. 

“The settlers lacked both the knowledge and incentive necessary to avoid these mistakes. They were misled by those who should have been their natural guides. The Federal homestead policy, which kept land allotments low and required that a portion of each should be plowed, is now seen to have caused unmeasurable harm. The Homestead Act of 1862, limiting an individual holding to 160 acres, was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty.” 

Egan describes the above findings of the Great Plains Drought Committee as "the most damning indictment" (268). The Homestead Act, which promised independence and wealth from owning tracts of arid, barren prairie and steppe land had actually insured the very opposite: poverty, and in the end, government dependence. The quote highlights Egan’s theme of government manipulation.