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he Worst Hard Time is Egan's riveting description of the Dust Bowl which struck the Great Plains
in the first half of the 1930s. I had never previously appreciated the scope of the disaster. Immense clouds of dust and grit blew across
the countryside, burying cows under drifts, suffocating people caught outside, filling lungs, ears and eyes with fine irritating particles
that eventually led to "dust pneumonia", which could be fatal. One storm carried more soil than was dug out of the earth in the entire creation of the Panama Canal.
The clouds were so huge that the sunlight was blocked out. Some of the storms drifted as far east as Washington D.C. and New York City. The ceaseless
winds generated so much static electricity that discharges were strong enough to knock men over if they shook hands. Everyone drove their Model Ts
with a chain dragging on the ground behind in order to ground the car. Static shocks ran along barbed wire fences; one person reported seeing a
jackrabbit electrocuted when it brushed a wire fence.
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When America west of the Mississippi was first explored by Stephen Long and John Wesley Powell, they called the vast
treeless wasteland The Great American Desert. It was a featureless grassland that stretched for miles in all directions, bitterly cold in the winter
and baking hot in the summer. It was the home to vast herds of buffalo and the Comanches. To defeat the Comanche, the government engaged in wholesale
slaughter of the buffalo - shooting millions of the beasts simply to deprive the Native Americans of their primary food source. Once the bison were
extinct over their southern range, the settlers moved in - creating enormous cattle ranches. But soon there were so many cattle that the price of
beef plummeted, and none of the ranches could survive financially.
Misleading advertisements were put out about how easy farming would be in this desolate landscape. You could claim 640 acres
for free if you just worked the land. The Great American Desert was renamed The Great Plains. A confluence of events briefly made wheat farming lucrative - for
a few years, a bounty of rain fell across the arid terrain. Plus, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia blocked the Ukrainian grain harvest from reaching world markets, and
the price of wheat soared. Farmers poured into the empty wilderness, hooked up their tractors and plowed through the grasses that anchored the soil to the earth.
Naturally, all of this grain created a glut, and prices fell. Plus, Ukrainian grain returned to the world market. Finding themselves
in debt, farmers planted even more acreage - if the price of wheat fell by a half, then they need to grow twice as much to make their debt payments. More acreage of prairie grass was
plowed up, more wheat was planted. The result of course was record harvests which meant
even lower grain prices. There were silos stuffed full of grain no one wanted.
It turned out that those years when eager farmers descended up the Great Plains had been unusually wet. The naturally dry windy weather
returned, it was too dry and too hot to grow wheat. With no plants to anchor the soil, the winds whipped up enormous clouds of dust. The drought went on year after year, and the
storms grew larger. Dunes could bury an entire house. Hordes of locusts appeared, and ate anything that was remotely organic. Unable to endure the hellish conditions, many settlers abandoned their farms and headed elsewhere, leaving beyond a denuded
landscape. The "Okies" headed west to California, looking for a fresh start.
It was the Great Depression, and FDR had just been elected president. Unlike Hoover, who preferred to let "market forces" straighten out the
disaster in the center of the country, Roosevelt tried to find a way to heal the land and rescue the farmers. He sent scientists to explore the causes of the Dust Bowl and see if
there were any steps that could be taken. A number of ideas were tried - contour ploughing, so that the furrows followed the terrain, making the loose dirt less likely to be picked up by the
constantly blowing winds, regrowing grass and starting ranches, and planting rows of trees that would grow up and act as wind breaks. Eventually 200 million trees were planted by
various New Deal agencies, providing jobs and money in a depressed economy.
Today, powerful pumps have tapped the immense, deep Ogallala Aquifer which lies beneath the Great Plains. Roosevelts trees have cut down to make way
for modern combines - but Egan tells us that the aquifer is being drained faster than it can be replenished. It is left to the reader's imagination what will happen when the Ogallala has been
drained dry...
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