I keep staying up too late reading this book about the Dust Bowl. Like a number of beautifully written books about American history, this was recommended to me by my son, Paul Wickelson, an American Studies PhD (University of Utah). The huge dust storms that plagued parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico played a major role in the Great Depression of the 1930's, but I hadn't realized how connected this was to unbridled speculation--the same kind of speculation that preceded the stock market crash. Instead of stocks on Wall Street, it was wheat growing on dryland farms out in the middle of nowhere, where the buffalo no longer roamed, in the newly settled Southern High Plains. Would-be settlers were enticed by cheap land prices and by empty promises of good farming and boom towns serviced by railroad lines and other amenities. In the East, the stock market rose to dizzying heights, bank officers invested other people's money for personal profit, and when it all crashed, the rug was pulled out from under people's feet as their money vanished into thin air.
In the West, it was the ground itself that vanished out from under their feet. Settlers were encouraged by a few uncharacteristically wet years and soaring wheat prices to turn over more and more of virgin prairie sod to plant more and more wheat. This unbelievably lucrative venture lasted until the inevitable glut drove the price of wheat below the cost of production. The wheat market crashed. Farmers could not pay back the loans they had taken out for newfangled time-and-labor-saving tractors and combine harvesters, not to mention nicer homes to replace their leaky, cold dugouts and sod homes, and don't forget more land to plough under and plant to make up for the low prices they were getting! Meanwhile, grain rotted in the granaries or in piles heaped up on the ground, while city-dwellers in other parts of the country went hungry. Then the rain stopped coming; the land, dry and exhausted, could no longer sustain new crops, nor could it even revert back to prairie grass. The deep roots of the prairie sod that had held the soil for thousands of years had been ignorantly ripped out over a short span of years so that the land was left exposed to the perpetual winds of the High Plains. Soil represented a farmer's wealth, and now, the last of that thin dry layer of topsoil was snatched away
by the wind.
by the wind.
That's as far as I've gotten, and like with John Steinbeck's heartbreaking novel, The Grapes of Wrath that covers this same time period, I have truly come to care about the particular characters portrayed and the engagingly written narrative. This is history at it's best--it feels like real life--it hurts like real life.
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