Dust to dust

IN his book “Great Plains,” Ian Frazier notes that pioneers did not consider moving in great numbers to what had been called the Great American Desert until after the Civil War. But when they did, “railroad promoters, governors of empty Western states, syndicates with land to sell, emigration societies, scientists, pretend scientists, politicians in crowded Eastern states, U.S. Geological Survey officials, Walt Whitman, The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, all advertised the Great Plains as a garden spot.”

And so they came, first the cattlemen and then the homesteaders, the latter pouring in and breaking up the sod at an astonishing rate. Flash forward to April 1935, and Time magazine was reporting:

“Last week farmers in ten Midwestern States had sand in their beards, in their hair, in their ears, in their eyes, in their mouths, in their pockets, in their pants, in their boots, in their milk, coffee, soup and stew. Dust poured through the cracks in farmhouse walls, under the doors, down the chimneys.... In Texas the windswept hayfields were alive with blinded sparrows.”

A huge duster had swirled east for a change, scooping up Plains topsoil and dropping it over Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana as well.

What happened? As Timothy Egan reports in his stark and frightening chronicle of the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time,” human folly chopped up the prairie and the grasses that held it in place, and when hard drought materialized, as was predictable, it catalyzed an eco-disaster of vast proportion.

The soil-packed storm clouds of “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, “carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal,” Egan tells us. The year before, in May 1934, another dust storm had also burst outside the usual compass of the Southern Plains, “carrying three tons of dust for every American alive”: Even New York City slipped into partial darkness in that maelstrom, calculated to be 1,800 miles wide, “a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic.”

Most Americans, whether from John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” or Woody Guthrie’s ballads, or the photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, have a generalized notion of the Dust Bowl experience and the 1930s exodus of people from the Southern Plains. (“So long, it’s been good to know ya,” wrote Guthrie, but “this dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, and I got to be driftin’ along.”) What they don’t have is an appreciation of the detailed, slow, particular unfolding of it that Egan provides, as drought drags inexorably on and crops and livestock die off, and people do too, suffocating from “dust pneumonia” and other respiratory ailments.

The dust-choked environment was surreal: Visibility could be cut to a matter of inches, necessitating a tether if one ventured outside. Static electricity charged the air so highly it could knock people down if they shook hands; metal doorknobs and stove handles were covered with cloth as protection, and cars were outfitted with chains to drag for grounding, to keep them from shorting out. The spikes on barbed-wire fences glowed.

Drifts several feet deep surrounded structures and frequently closed roads. Dead cows lined the fenceways, their innards packed with sand. People rubbed Vaseline in their nostrils, wore wet cloths over their faces, or even sponges until the stores ran out, and hung wet sheets over the windows of their houses. The scoop shovel became more valuable than the combine.

The cultural environment went haywire as well, as foreclosures and bankruptcies on family farms (750,000 between 1930 and 1935) eroded communities, and desperation led people to eat Russian thistles -- tumbleweeds -- and road kill. Rabbits were seen as both competitors for food and a source of it: In Dalhart, Texas, and elsewhere, regular drives were organized that drew up to 2,000 people with baseball bats and clubs, and they killed as many as 6,000 rabbits in an afternoon.

Seeking to force rain from the skies, one popular idea was to kill a snake and drape it belly side up on a fence, and “in southwest Kansas, dead snakes were hung for miles on barbed wire, their white-scaled stomachs facing the brown sky,” Egan relates. Shooting explosives into the sky was also tried, to no avail.

Many books on the Depression delve into the Dust Bowl for a few pages, but until Egan’s, virtually none in a generation has focused closely on the region -- “the swift de-carpeting that remade the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, big parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and Southeast Colorado” -- as well as the periods before and after those crucible years of the 1930s. He has based his book partly on research at various state historical institutions and newspaper archives, but what lends real life to his story are the interviews he conducted with survivors, the use of family diaries and the access he was given to several self-published manuscripts of those who were there, in dugouts, sod houses and frame houses.

“God in his infinite wisdom might have made a more discouraging place than Webster Co, Nebr.,” wrote Don Hartwell, a farmer whose diary is excerpted by Egan late in “The Worst Hard Time,” “but so far as I know God never did.”

The most regrettable aspect of Egan’s story -- although this has been detailed elsewhere -- is that the Dust Bowl was an avoidable catastrophe. Roughly 200 million acres were homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, yet “nearly half was considered marginal for farming.” Still, it continued: Between 1924 and 1929, the amount of acreage plowed for agriculture in the Texas Panhandle tripled; from 1925 to 1930, an additional 5.2 million acres of prairie grass were cut up in the Southern Plains, twice the area of Yellowstone National Park.

Rainfall in the region was unusually heavy in the late 1920s, and this, plus a boom in wheat prices, prompted farmers to expand their acreage. Droughts in the 1870s and 1890s and even from 1910 to ’12 had dissuaded earlier farmers from doing the same, and experts as celebrated and knowledgeable as John Wesley Powell had cautioned in a “Report on the Arid Region of the United States” that traditional farming wouldn’t work on the High Plains, for “no part of it can be redeemed for agriculture except by irrigation.”

At its peak, what was dubbed the “Dust Bowl” by an Associated Press reporter had extended to 100 million acres, nearly half of which had been “essentially destroyed,” according to Hugh Bennett, whom President Roosevelt recruited to study and solve the problem. Sensing immediately that poor farming practices were a critical element in creating the situation, Bennett accused the Department of Agriculture of misleading people. When the government insisted in bulletins that soil was one resource “that cannot be exhausted,” Bennett said: “I didn’t know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence.”

Egan quotes extensively from the 1936 report that Bennett and the Great Plains Drought Area Committee gave Roosevelt, who was torn between pursuing paths of conservation and relocation of the region’s people. (Correcting a general misperception, Egan reports that although 221,000 people flooded into California in the late 1930s, only 16,000 of those came from the Dust Bowl region itself.) The entirety of Bennett’s report can be found online as can voices from the Dust Bowl via the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Eventually, the creation of soil conservation districts, different plowing patterns and the planting of 220 million saplings helped ease the crisis (although when rainfall increased in the 1940s and grain prices jumped, farmers ripped out the trees to plant more wheat). Pumping water from underground using deep drilling to tap into the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies the land from South Dakota to Texas, changed the nature of farming as well.

Egan ends his story telling us that the High Plains “never fully recovered”; 70 years on, some land is still sterile and drifting, and farm population on the Plains is down more than 80%. And what about the aquifer, which so changed things? It is declining by 1.1 million acre-feet a year, being drawn down eight times faster than nature can replace it. “In parts of the Texas Panhandle,” Egan cites hydrologists as predicting, “the water will be gone by 2010.”