The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 20 Summary & Analysis

At the beginning of 1936, Hazel Shaw was five months pregnant. It was unclear if there would ever be a home in No Man’s Land ever again. More than 850 million tons of topsoil had eroded from the Southern Plains within the year, which was nearly eight tons of dirt for every American resident. No one knew where the dirt had gone and what it meant, beyond being unable to farm—and that dust pneumonia would continue to infect people until the soil was stabilized again. Unless something was done, the plains would become as arid as the Arabian desert.

Meanwhile, the towns died. Stores and schools disappeared, and nearly a million people left their farms from 1930 to 1935. The exodus started slowly, initiated by declines in wheat and cattle prices in the northern plains. Drought and dust storms chased people out of the rest of the prairie, particularly Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Hugh Bennett’s challenge was in finding a way for the ground to become stable enough to hold seeds long enough for them to sprout. The administration bought 2.25 million acres to start. One idea was to give some of the land back to the indigenous people. The government decided to purchase up to one million acres for natives, who would run livestock over the land after it had been allowed to rest and regenerate for a few years. Some of it was old Cherokee land in Oklahoma anyway. The government would thus be getting rid of the cowboys and returning the natives.

Baca County was another place where the government wanted to put grass back on the prairie. The government paid $2.75 per acre to take back a homestead. The land would then be left alone—to either re-grow grass or become a desert. This would take place after the windmills and fences were dismantled and the houses were torn down and sold for scrap.

The journalist Ernie Pyle, one of the most influential writers of the day, called the Dust Bowl a withering land of misery. The Atlantic Monthly carried a series called “Letters from the Dust Bowl” written by Caroline Henderson. She wrote about the “bad days of wind and dust.” She wrote nothing during the tortuous summer. Hazel Shaw’s focus for the next year was to bring new life to the world to replace that which had been lost to the storms. She went north to Elkhart, Kansas to give birth to “a black-eyed baby boy.” The baby was named Charles Jr., for his father. He was strong and robust. Hazel was unsure of where to live. Cimarron County had killed both Grandma Louzima and Ruth Nell, and she would never see it the same way again.

Summer temperatures were especially hot. During two days in July and two in August, the temperatures reached 118 degrees—the highest ever recorded in No Man’s Land. It was 117 degrees in Dalhart and 120 in Shattuck. There had been some rain, but it came in massive bursts, causing flash floods. Then, the drought and high temperatures returned. Hazel kept the place so sealed it was like living in a can. Charles, Jr. later developed claustrophobia as a young man, which he thought came from spending his early months “looking up at a dusted, wet sheet from a crib in a sealed apartment.”

Hazel left No Man’s Land at the end of the year. She had first seen the grassland in 1914, at the age of ten. She, Charles, and Charles, Jr. moved to Vici, closer to the center of Oklahoma, near the Shaw family. Hazel would always remember the blackest days in Cimarron County, but she would not hold on to the memories. She wanted to live.

One hundred miles to the east, the Russo-Germans tried to maintain their community around Shattuck. They got some money from the government, about seven dollars a head for cattle, which gave them enough to buy dry goods like flour or sugar. They tried to keep their spirits up by playing music, but the drought was in its fifth year. Their neighbors, the Borths, were suffering from dust pneumonia. Two of the children suffered from the common symptoms of chest pains, fever, and sore ribs. They had to get out of the High Plains or to a hospital. With his children facing death and his land already dead, Gustav Borth thought often of the Russian steppe. Then the bank took his combine, which had allowed him to pile his wheat high during the boom years. He moved the children to Texas to live with cousins. He was homesick and felt like a failure.

The Plow That Broke the Plains put Dalhart in the spotlight, but for John McCarty, it was the wrong kind of publicity. He furiously denounced the film as propaganda. Other Politicians joined McCarty in his outrage. However, Lorentz was not the first person to blame careless agriculture for the wreckage of the plains. Hugh Bennett and cowboys on the XIT had offered similar messages. Doc Dawson’s youngest son, John, shared their view. He left Dalhart in 1929 to practice law in Houston, and returned in the mid-1930s to help his struggling father see if anything could be salvaged from the land—perhaps enough to provide for Doc in retirement. John saw a land that had become like a “moonscape”—no wildlife or vegetation. He thought that the people had done this to themselves, and even his father shared some of the blame.

The government kept the town going. In August 1936, Hugh Bennett went to Dalhart to preside over the biggest soil conservation project on the plains, called “Operation Dust Bowl.” He intended to “slow the drifts by contour plowing, which created great furrows and made it less likely for the earth to lift off in great sheets.” Then, it could be planted over with grass seed imported from Africa. They were building life back from scratch, “to create a place of interdependence, not a crop.” John McCarty tried to impress Bennett, showing him that Dalhart deserved a second chance. They were fighters.