Learning from The Dust Bowl
October 15, 2025
By Derek DiMatteo
Timothy Egan’s well-researched book about the dust storms of the 1930s, The Worst Hard Time, is described as “a classic disaster tale” by The New York Times. And it is a tale of disaster—the nation’s greatest environmental disaster—an avoidable one caused by American hubris, greed, and hucksterism; made worse by stubbornness, pride and hope; and eventually only partially ameliorated by ingenuity. Subtitled “The untold story of those who survived the great American Dust Bowl,” the book contains far more stories of those who died or fled than it does those who stayed there and survived. These stories are told in narrative form based on careful research of historical records, interviews, and diary entries. It is fascinating and heartbreaking.
The book’s main focus is on the years 1929–1939 and the mismanagement of the land during that period. To convey these events, Egan tells the stories of six families that moved to the region of the southwest known as the high plains, and area whose center is the Oklahoma panhandle and which radiates outward to encompass parts of Texas and New Mexico to the south, and Colorado, Kansas, and even a sliver of Nebraska to the north. Those families (and others like them) are shown to be victims of hype, hucksterism, and hope. They are part of a longer timeline of human settlement in the region that stretches back at least 700 years and includes ancient indigenous peoples, Spanish conquistadores, the Apache and the Comanche, trappers and hunters, cowboys and ranchers, land speculators, nesters, sodbusters, suitcase farmers, and finally President Franklin Roosevelt’s CCC workers.
The timeline of human settlement charts the shift in how humans treated the land. The earliest indigenous peoples lived successfully in this area, as archeologists discovered “a small urban complex hear the Canadian River” and realized that “people had lived there for nearly two centuries” hundreds of years before even the Native American tribes were there (p. 15). The land was likely just as inhospitable then as it was in the 1900s. The reason the ancient peoples—like the Apache and Comanche—succeeded is that they followed principles of good stewardship whereas the nesters, sodbusters, and suitcase farmers eschewed any semblance of stewardship in favor of exploitation. By flattening, tilling, and over-farming the land, they removed native vegetation, weakened the soil, and made it vulnerable to the powerful windstorms that regularly swept the region. Advances in technology improved farm machinery, which accelerated the destruction. Had the farmers not destroyed the land, the wind would not have carried the soil into the air to form those massive dust storms.
Given the decade-long environmental disaster, we naturally wonder why people were slow to leave the region for a better life elsewhere. Egan tells us that some were simply too poor to leave. But for the rest, the reasons that Egan reveals in the book can likely be divided into two categories: mythology and psychology. The mythology category includes reasons centered around manifest destiny and the American Dream. The psychology category includes the effects of boosterism by influencers such as John McCarty, the spread of a Spartan-esque machismo, the sunk cost fallacy, and annual delusion that next year would be better. Ultimately, those who stayed did so because of a combination of identity and stubbornness.
Here are some final thoughts. The dustbowl—the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history up to that point—was caused by hype, hucksterism, and FOMO. The way that the dust storms traveled thousands of miles from Oklahoma all the way to the Atlantic reminds of the way that smoke from wildfires travels long distances, such as moving from Canada down into northern Pennsylvania. The way in which people settled in that largely inhospitable region without attempting to learn from previous inhabitants while engaging in extractive and exploitative farming policies despite the efforts of scientists and conservationists (such as Hugh Bennett and Aldo Leopold) warning of the negative consequences reminds me of the way in which people behaved the same way when settling the southwestern U.S.—the history of which was recounted in Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and used as the basis for two novels, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang and Paulo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Finally, I appreciated Egan including the work of artist Alexandre Hogue, whose paintings of the devastating decade of the dust bowl make excellent companions to Egan’s book.
References and Resources
Zucker, Steven. [Smarthistory]. “An environmental crisis, Hogue's Crucified Land.” Interview with Laura F. Fry for Center for Public Art History. YouTube. 9 Sept. 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzcbSc1kf9g
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Jones, Phil. “The Dust Bowl as Told in American Art.” The Collector. 20 March 2021. https://www.thecollector.com/dust-bowl-disaster-20th-century-american-art/