ABSTRACT
three-quarters of a century ago, the plains rebelled. Not the people, but the ground itself. Overused farmland in the middle of the country literally turned to dust, its broken topsoil swirling over town and countryside alike in vast and deadly dust storms. Grainy black-and-white images from those days look truly apocalyptic. The dense clouds of pulverized earth descended with the force of hurricanes, leaving houses buried up to the second floor, tractors trapped in fields with only their seats and steering wheels left visible. In towns like Boise City, in the far western corner of Oklahoma, residents hid in their homes, their windows closed, wet cloths over their faces, waiting for the dust to depart, for the chance to dig their possessions out of the sand. In the space of a few years 170one of the world’s great breadbaskets became a desert, a “dust bowl.” And its population—the descendants of sodbusters who had, not too many years before, shoveled holes in the earth and made temporary, and tiny, subterranean “dugout” homes for their families while they tamed the land—began to starve. Entire families subsisted on roadkill and boiled tumbleweed. Food pantries in even the smallest towns were inundated with hundreds of desperate, gaunt supplicants. The journalist Timothy Egan, in his book The Worst Hard Time, wrote about the soup kitchen operated out of a sanatorium in the little town of Dalhart, Texas. “Some days, two hundred people waited in line: Mexicans who lived in the shanties near the Rock Island roundhouse, drifters who had just stepped off the train, and longtime Dalhart residents who had not seen a paycheck in three years.”
