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

Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin, 2006 320 pages. $28.00

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "Dust Bowl"? I learned about the Dust Bowl in my high school history class. As I recall, my textbook devoted perhaps one paragraph to this event before moving on to other, more important events such as the stock market crash and the banking failure, the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal, and World War II. In fact, except for reading John Steinbeck's literary rant The Grapes of Wrath, I never gave the actual event much thought. However, I recently discovered this overlooked chapter of American history in Timothy Egan's latest book, The Worst Hard Time.

Egan tells the compelling and tragic stories of the people who lived through the Dust Bowl era in the south-central plains of North America.

In 1875, shortly after defeating and corralling the last of the Comanche, General Philip Sheridan told the Texas legislature that, for the sake of a lasting peace, the Anglos should "kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairie can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, the forerunner of an advanced civilization."

Enthusiastically heeding this grim war cry, bloodthirsty Anglos invaded the plains and, within 10 years, killed approximately 25 million animals and left their skinned bodies to rot, leaving behind a hundred million acres of empty, windswept prairie under an endless sky, prompting the rhetorical question What shall we do with all this unoccupied land?

Thus began "The Great Plowup," an era of tremendous success for the nesters and the sodbusters who settled and tamed the prairie, replacing native plants with thirsty wheat and corn. Since these were unusually wet years on the Great Plains, both crops and towns grew and farmers became rich, first purchasing expensive farm equipment, then luxuries such as pianos and designer clothing from France.

But this era ended with the stock market crash of 1929, followed by an intense decade-long drought. As little as 10 inches of rain fell in a single year and soil temperatures soared to as high as 141 degrees Fahrenheit. Grasshopper, tarantula, black widow, and centipede populations exploded. Winds carried topsoil for thousands of miles, dropping it onto Chicago, New York City, and Washington DC, coating ships several miles off the Atlantic coast. A quarter million people fled the resulting dust storms in the 1930s.

But most people stayed put. Why? To answer this question, Egan introduces us to an amazing cast of survivors through interviews, profiles, and quotes from contemporary private journals. Egan's powerful prose transports the reader into once-vibrant prairie towns such as Boise City and Dalhart and Inavale.

Throughout, Egan focuses on the land and the people. When banks fail and take farmers' hard-earned savings with them, driving them to plow even more sod for cash crops, we watch their agonizing struggles as the drought escalates and precious topsoil dries up and blows away. We despair alongside them when the land appears to be recovering, just a little bit, only to have grasshoppers descend with voracious gusto upon tender young crops, wood fences, and even the clothes on their backs.

Today, some of this Scarred land still drifts aimlessly on persistent winds, still not recovered. Today, those "healed" portions of the Great Plains are primarily under the control of agribusinesses that suck 15,000-year-old glacial meltwater out of the Ogallala Aquifer to satisfy thirsty crops--an aquifer that is predicted to run completely dry in 100 years or less. Have we learned nothing at all? Today, as we face the looming effects of widespread environmental damages and global warming, is this nation doomed to mindlessly repeat its failures?

Egan provides no answers to these crucial questions, but he does provide plenty to think about in his passionate but reasoned account of the Dust Bowl days. This fascinating but sad tale about the greatest environmental disaster in the history of this nation serves as a stern warning about the very real consequences of human ignorance, greed, and hubris.