The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Plowed recklessly during the World War and since, denuded of the vegetation which knits the earth against the onslaught of the winds, powdered by drought for years, these arid lands have taken wing.” [Harlan Miller, “Plow Spelled Doom” New York Times, March 31, 1935.]

The Worst Hard Time presents a humanizing and intimate portrait of the Dust Bowl phenomenon, which devastated the high plains of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas in the mid-1930s. The book begins with stories of settlement in the area, rich with the promise of land for productive farming and ranching.

The demand for wheat as a farm crop increased in the 1920s, and several unusually wet seasons made farming in the semi-arid plains appear promising. Modern farm equipment had made wheat cultivation more productive and harvests larger in other regions of the country, but the land of the plains was not meant or able to support sustained heavy agricultural use.

During the early years, wheat production was high. With the depression, however, came falling crop prices, and even with a wheat surplus, farmers in the region began to lose money. Large scale farming over-tilling of the land stripped away the topsoil and indigenous plant species, leaving the land barren and vulnerable.

In addition to the depression, the Dust Bowl years were also years of drought. Without rain and native grasses to stabilize the earth, Aeolian processes (wind erosion) produced dust storms on an unprecedented scale. Referred to as “black blizzards,” huge clouds of dust would sweep across the land, blackening and filling the air. Often, those exposed to the persistent storms and poor air quality developed an illness referred to as “dust pneumonia.” With ruination of the land and homestead came unemployment, forcing many farmers and residents of the plains to abandon their homes.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935. Image in the Public Domain.

Even when the rains finally came, the Dust Bowl region never fully recovered. With lessons learned from the dust bowl experience, conservationists and the US government restored and protected the some of the grasslands, preventing another occurrence during a severe drought in the 1950s. Many of the towns and counties recounted in this book were never revived or repopulated. Parts of the high plains are still farmed by large agribusiness corporations and irrigated by water from the quickly disappearing Ogallala aquifer.

Scars from the large scale overworking of the land and drought from the Dust Bowl are still visible today.