Worst Hard Times Those Who

¶ … Worst Hard Times

Those who were not blow away by the Dust Bowl: The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan's book the Worst Hard Times is a chronicle of the American Dust Bowl, when drought combined over-farming and other poor agricultural practices lead to the complete depletion of the soil of the American West. The result was the loss of the livelihood of countless American farmers and a traditional American institution, the small family farm. Today, the land that was once populated with small homesteaders is filled with the conglomerates of agribusiness. The Dust Bowl changed the American economic, agricultural landscape. It also propelled the rest of the nation into economic chaos. The Dust Bowl was one of a contributing fact in propelling the nation and the world into the Great Depression and thus is particularly relevant to read today, in our own climate of economic uncertainty. What Egan's work adds to the larger body of literature on the subject is that his explanation of this time in history revolves not around why it happened and why so many farmers chose to leave the area and become migrants -- Egan also asks what may be the more difficult question of why so many farmers chose to stay on their farms, long after they were no longer profitable. His central thesis revolves around the unique character of the settlers to the area, as well as the character of the land -- the arid, depleted land demanded such resistance to the natural cycles of nature that people did not farm with the land, but against it. They were poor when they moved to the region, and everything they had was tied to the soil and the vain hopes that the wheat boom would come again.

According to Egan, the physical causes of the Dust Bowl were both environmental and man-made. The areas that were most affected of the American plains, encompassing much of the Midwest and Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and of course Oklahoma (leading to the term 'Oakies' for the migrants from the area) was once great, fertile, sprawling grasslands filled with buffalo. The grass anchored the soil and the native tribes hunted the buffalo. Because the tribes existed in fairly sparse numbers, the balance of animal, man, and nature was perfect. But then the natives were pushed off the land, and massive waves of buffalo hunting and cattle farming by white settlers eradicated the grass on the arid soil. Destroying the buffalo and grazing cattle on the dry plains, which were daily whipped by fierce winds, created poor soil conditions and upset the delicate ecosystem that was already characterized by little rain, and dry, mineral-poor soil. When the cattle farmers left, few people wanted the land, except for poor, determined immigrants, desperate for their own small plots in a rapidly shrinking American heartland. The people who moved in were called 'sodbusters,' because of the grit and steely determination it required to break the surface of the plains.

However, despite the generally poor conditions, these sodbusters were greeted with an unexpected gift -- the years immediately after the great push west, the region was afflicted with an anomalously high level of rainfall. Then wheat boom came to the region, which encouraged more mass planting. When the surge in prices abated the farmers were unaccustomed to the real climate of the region and the economic difficulties they had to face on a daily basis. The boom had spawned close-knit communities, filled with schools and churches. They had been lulled into a false sense of security about the hardiness of the soil. Convinced that the rain levels and the demand for wheat would rise again, the sodbusters tried to farm every inch of land available to pay for their equipment and mortgages. Greed, in other words, fueled the Dust Bowl and Mother Nature was only to blame in so far as she did not show her true colors when many of the foundational settlers first arrived. Technology proved an 'enabler' of their desperate, misguided farming efforts after the boom of the early 1920s -- the new one-way plow and tractor enabled farmer to farm more land over the course of a day with greater ease. The initially unending profits and this new form of ploughing proved both a blessing and a curse -- a blessing in the sense that it enriched the hardscrabble farmers through sales volume when demand was high and supply was low in other regions of the world, but a curse because it placed no check upon the farmers in their abuse of the environment.

Given the over-farming that the land was ill-suited for, the soil grew even poorer in its mineral composition, and became afflicted, after the period of uncharacteristic rainfall, with a terrible drought. Dust drifted like snow, in tsunami-like waves, the likes of which had never been seen before. People and animals died from breathing in the dust, and only after the federal government and the New Deal taught the farmers more effective and ecologically sound farming practices did the land become rehabilitated. However, a casual reader might exclaim with surprise why anyone was left. One answer may be partially due to personality -- there was something about the region that self-selected the most stubborn and most determined settlers imaginable, even when times were good. Also, even before the period of uncharacteristic rainfall, many would-be homesteaders were warned off of the land, with the counsel that there was a reason no one wanted it, even though it had been cleared of Indians.

The reputation of the land was not the only deterrent that the sodbusters of the Dust Bowl had to overcome. There was the problem of getting there -- only the steeliest could made it so far, in some cases even their pack horses died from exhaustion before the settlers who were carrying everything they had. Many died of thirst along the way. Even during times of rain, the spectacular lightening fires were fanned by the winds and tore through the prairies, perpetually destroying crops. Having endured so much, the settlers were convinced the next season had to be better -- again and again, they told themselves this lie.

A large proportion of the farmers were immigrants, Germans and Russians who had seen so much suffering before coming to America that the Dust Bowl was just one blow in a long series of suffering over the course of their lives. Also, they feared the prejudice they might encounter in non-farming communities, prejudice that even Americans of more conventional backgrounds faced as Oakies. After escaping Europe, enduring prejudice when living in a small town, they refused to leave the only happiness he had experienced their lives, on their farms, even after they turned to dust before his eyes. As an author, Egan paints this inflexible and unyielding determination as both admirable yet also questionable since it is, to some extent, the source of the tragedy.

If such unyielding personalities had not taken such unyielding positions in regards to the land, the farmers would never have over-farmed, and would have respected the land like the Native Americans who lived there before. On one hand, only sodbusters and nesters who wanted to beat the odds would make the trek across the plains and try to farm the unfarmable, and have hardy enough personalities to cling to the land and make it yield crops. They were greedy to make a good living off of the land like the old cattle ranchers, this time, off of the potential for the soil to yield wheat. They brought the same sense of will to master the land as they did to everything else, but nature, Egan counsels, must be listened to, and obeyed.