#because i can't say it hasnt unconsciously and consciously influenced me and my knee jerk reactions

[kaurwreck]

I feel compelled to confess that another reason i have a strong reaction to settler western narratives and dust bowl romanticism is because, as a child, i was hopelessly addicted to stallion: spirit of the cimarron.

whether my beloved children's animated horse movie is a motivating factor or the but-for causation of my agitation, I'll let you decide.

Can I ask why you hate Steinbeck? I didn't really like his work either, but it also didn't really inspire any strong emotion in me, so I'm curious about the loathing. Love your analyses and have a nice day!

This was a very lovely message. I'm glad you enjoy my analyses and thank you for the kind words. I'm heinously sleep deprived, but I can't settle because I'm frothing at the mouth over Steinbeck and the Dust Bowl, so maybe providing some context will mollify my seven demons enough to let me rest.

But, I'm drained, so rather than provide any meaningful analysis, I'm going to offer a very brief, broadstrokes, abridged timeline of the Dust Bowl, with emphasis on its historical context, most of which will be haphazardly plucked from myriad sources, which I'll link.

It doesn't capture all, if much of any, of my feelings on the matter, but certainly, it's a snapshot of the bitterest bits.

In 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado of Spain became the first European to venture into the Great Plains. He and his expedition were searching for the mythical golden city of Quivira. Instead, they found Kansas.

From 1804-1806, Lewis and Clarke go on an 8,000-mile hike to the Pacific Northwest, harbingering calamity.

The United States of America, drunk on white supremacy, gold in California, religious fervor, and the glut of the Louisiana Purchase, decided it had a divine right to expand westward across North America. In manifesting its destiny, the US leveraged unconscionabile treaties and laws like the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 (along with guns, starvation, and illness) to force many Native Americans to reservations in the West.

From the mid 1850s to the mid 1860s, the West and Plains were struck by a severe drought. This really fucked up the bison, who died in vast numbers.

The Homestead Act of 1862 accelerated the settlement of the western territory by granting land claims in thirty states for a dirt cheap filing fee, five years of sustained residency (after which they could file to recieve proof of ownership), and on the condition that settlers "improve their plot by cultivating the land." These areas were the traditional or treaty lands of many Native American tribes.

Most of those who purchased land under the first Homestead Act were not farmers or laborers and came from areas nearby (Iowans moved to Nebraska, Minnesotans to South Dakota, etc). The act was framed so ambiguously that it seemed to invite fraud, and early modifications by Congress only compounded the problem. Most of the land went to speculators, cattle owners, miners, loggers, and railroads.

Many homesteaders believed that all native peoples were nomads and that only those who owned land would use it efficiently. Few native tribes were truly nomadic. Most nomadic tribes had certain locations they would travel to throughout the year. Other tribes had permanent villages and raised crops. As more settlers arrived, Native Americans were driven farther from their homelands or crowded onto reservations.

Influxes of settlers brought marked changes to the region: bison numbers decreased, fences were erected, domesticated animals increased, water was redirected, non-native crops were planted, unsustainable farming methods increased, and native plants diversity dwindled.

[In 1866, by the way, Congress enacted the Southern Homestead Act to allow poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South to become landowners during Reconstruction. Poor farmers and sharecroppers made up the majority of the Southern population, so the act sold land at a lowered price to decrease poverty among the working class. It was not successful; even the lowered prices and fees were often too expensive. Also, the land made available was mostly undeveloped forestry.]

The late 1870s brought more drought in the Plains. Locusts, which were common to the Plains prior to their sudden extinction, thrived in the drought, ate everything in their path, and ruined crops. The 1875 swarm is estimated to have involved 3.5 trillion insects and covered an area of the West equivalent to the entire area of the mid-Atlantic states and New England. These were the worst swarms during the period of European settlement.

In 1875, Congress passed the Indian Homestead Act to give Native family heads the opportunity to purchase homesteads from unclaimed public lands. This was under the condition that the family head relinquished their tribal identity and relations and, again, "improved" the land. The US government did not issue fee waivers, so many poor non-reservation Natives were unable to pay filing fees to claim homesteads. Those who could pay had difficulty accessing the land because of border disputes due to distance and discord between the US Land Office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This made white settlements easier to finalize into land ownership.

For the most part, the 1870s drought was followed by a period of wetter than usual conditions that encouraged widespread belief that 'rain follows the plow'. As in, settlers convinced themselves and each other that by cultivating the land using dryfarming crops that needed more water than the Plains could sustainably provide, they could alter its climate, and rains would come.

In 1886, a severe winter killed vast numbers of cattle. This was shortly followed by another severe drought that went on until 1896.

In 1887, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts decided that Native Americans would prosper if they owned family farms, and his Dawes Act carved reservations into 160-acre allotments. This allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands further. Only those families who accepted an allotment of land could become US citizens. Much of the land subject to the Dawes Act was unsuitable for farming, and large tracts of the allotments were leased to non-Native farmers and ranchers.

After Native American families claimed their allotments, the remaining tribal lands were declared “surplus.” The remaining land was given to non-Native Americans. Land runs allowed the land to be opened to homesteaders on a first-arrival basis.

Unable to catch a hint, the 1880s was a feverish period of settler migration to the West, boosted by both the railroad companies and state and federal governments promising land to those who'd settle it, seemingly without regard for the land's actual carrying capacity.

By the late 1880s, the bison population was thoroughly decimated, meaning the threat of starvation for Native Americans was constant, forcing dependence on the US government and its paltry settlements. Railways, rifles, and an international market for bison hides led to “the Great Slaughter” from about 1820 to 1880, and the bison population plummeted from 30-60 million (estimates vary) to fewer than 1,000 animals. Other factors that contributed to the near-end of the bison: the US military’s directive to destroy bison as a way to control the Native Americans, the introduction of diseases from cattle, drought, and competition from domestic livestock (horses, cattle, sheep).

By the 1890s, drought made clear that the methods of 'dryfarming' used for non-irrigated cultivation of crops, never based on sound science, were wholly inadequate for settling the arid regions of the West. The drought also ended the idea that sturdy settlers, working alone, could manage; the amount of land needed to support even a family was much larger than specified in the Homestead Act but, more crticially, also larger than a family working alone could irrigate. Notably, the 1890s drought was not very dusty, as the Plains were still grassy.

The 1890s drought is partly responsible for the beginning of federally-driven irrigated agriculture with the Reclamation Act of 1902. The act provided for irrigation projects known "reclamation" projects — because irrigation would "reclaim" arid lands for human use. (Unrelatedly, evidence suggests that Native Americans and their precursors may have been in the Plains for at least 38,000 years.)

Theoretically, under the Reclamation Act, the federal government would provide inexpensive water for which farmers would pay, and such payments would then finance the construction of the water projects. The projects' immense construction costs soon proved the premise unrealistic. For example, earlier self-supporting projects created by local initiatives had cost less than twenty dollars an acre. The federal reclamation projects, by contrast, cost an average of eighty-five dollars an acre. Thus, the farmers' share of the federal expenses proved too great a sum for their repayment.

The farmers couldn't pay for their self-sustaining irrigation projects, but Congress extended the repayment periods and continued its irrigation projects. (When repayments still weren't coming in by 1910, Congress advanced $20 million from general treasury funds).

By 1909, most of the prime land in the valleys along the West's rivers had been homesteaded, so to allow dryfarming, which again, the last drought made clear was ill-suited for the arid climate, Congress increased the number of acres for homesteads willing to cultivate lands which could not be easily irrigated. There was a wet period, so the soil was fertile, and settlers, who were still immigrating to the Plains in droves, understood that to mean they were right, rain followed the plow, so they plowed the shit out of it.

In the 1910s, the price of wheat rose, and then, with the onset of the Great War, so did demand for wheat in Europe. So, the settlers plowed up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn, and other row crops—still on marginal lands that could not be easily irrigated, even with Congress's pretty dams in every river.

In the 1920s, the war had ended, so the demand for American wheat dropped, and the post-Great War recession sank prices. But, it was also the dawn of tractors and farming mechanization, so settlers went in together on machines they couldn't afford to produce wheat fewer people wanted on land too submarginal to sustain it, and tore that grass up with the wild abandon (like, literally, they abandoned soil conservation practices) of transplants who didn't know anything about the grasslands they were ecologically devastating.

Grasslands, by the way, are fertile because when grasses die, their roots die too, and then their roots decay and fertilize the topsoil into rich earth, which nourishes the other grasses—a self sustaining cycle of life and death. Grasses also have extensive root systems that bind soil particles together, improving soil structure and preventing erosion. Soil erosion occurs when soil is exposed to the impact of wind and water, detaching and transporting soil particles, eventually deteriorating the soil's fertility. Soil erosion can also become dangerous when soil is swept downstream and becomes heavy layers of sediment that disrupt water flow and suffocate aquatic flora or when tossed by the wind so that suspended particles cloud the air, eyes, and lungs.

The Great Plains is the windiest region in North America, namedly because of the airstreams coming down from the Rockies to the West, the shifting pattern of the jet stream in upper levels of the atmosphere, and the fronts of warmer, moist air masses moving in from the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast entangling with the cooler, drier air moving southward from Canada and the Arctic.

Between 1925 and 1930, settlers plowed more than 5 million acres of previously unfarmed land, stripping the soil of its native grasses to expand their fields.

In 1929, overspeculation, excessive bank loans, agricultural overproduction, and panic selling (among other things) caused the US stock market to have a kitten hissy fit, kickstarting the Great Depression.

In 1930, the first of four major drought episodes began in the Plains.

In 1931, despite the lower demand, the settlers leveraged mechanized farming to produce a record crop. This flooded the market with wheat that no one could afford to buy. So, settlers couldn't make back their production costs, so they expanded their fields to try and produce more to make a profit, planting wheat or leaving unused soil bare.

The unanchored soil that was once rich, biological earth became friable, and was swept by high winds into apocalyptic dust storms.

In 1932, the US authorized federal aid to the drought-affected states, and the first funds marked specifically for drought relief were released in the fall of 1933.

[In 1933, Congress created the Tennessee River Valley (TVA). The TVA, under the banner of a sweeping mandate from Congress to promote the "economic and social wellbeing" of the people living in the river basin, decided that too many Southerners were living on the land. From 1933 to 1945, TVA sought to solve the South's economic problems by seizing 1.3 million acres from Southerners and displacing an estimated 82,000 people, many of them illiterate and impoverished, from their homes in order to build 16 hydroelectric dams. They flooded valleys where people once lived.]

[In 1938, President Roosevelt addressed the Conference on the Economic Conditions of the South: "No purpose is closer to my heart at this moment than that which caused me to call you to Washington. That purpose is to obtain a statement—or, perhaps, I should say a re-statement as of today—of the economic conditions of the South, a picture of the South in relation to the rest of the country, in order that we may do something about it: in order that we may not only carry forward the work that has been begun toward the rehabilitation of the South, but that the program of such work may be expanded in the directions that this new presentation will indicate."]

By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California. They were not met warmly, and their lives in California were as difficult as the ones they'd left in the Plains, with approximately 40% of migrant farmers winding up in San Joaquin Valley, picking grapes and cotten.

[The Dust Bowl migrant farmers took up the work of Mexican migrant workers, 120,000 of whom were deported from San Jaoquin Valley during the Mexican Repatriation — which refers to the repatriation, deportation, and expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the United States during the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939. Estimates of how many were repatriated, deported, or expelled range from 300,000 to 2 million (of which 40–60% were citizens of the United States, overwhelmingly children).]

John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, in which he invokes the harshness of the Great Depression and arouses sympathy for the struggles of [some] migrant farm workers. He's praised as having "masterfully depicted the struggle to retain dignity and to preserve the family in the face of disaster, adversity, and vast, impersonal commercial influences." He based the novel on his visits to the migrant camps and tent cities of the workers, seeing firsthand the horrible living conditions of migrant families—

[—and, quite possibly, Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown, which was written in the 1930s but not published until 2004, since Random House cancelled its publication after The Grapes of Wrath was released in 1939. Babb had moved to California in 1929 to take a job at the Los Angeles Times. When she arrived, the stock market had crashed, the Great Depression had begun, and the promised job dried up. A migrant without a home, she slept in a city park before leaving for Oklahoma in the mid-1930s, where she witnessed the terrible poverty gripping her native state. Eventually, she returned to California to work for the FSA, serving migrant families stranded without a home or a job, just as she had been years earlier. In contrast, John Steinbeck gained much of his understanding of Great Depression conditions in Oklahoma second hand, through reading reports by federal aid workers like Babb and Collins and from his experience delivering food and aid to California migrants from the Southern Plains. The two novels share strikingly similar imagery, so if you enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath, you'll likely also enjoy Whose Names Are Unknown.]

The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

[Steinbeck scholar David M. Wrobel wrote that "the John Steinbeck/Sanora Babb story sounds like a classic smash-and-grab: celebrated California author steals the material of unknown Oklahoma writer, resulting in his financial success and her failure to get her work published...Steinbeck absorbed field information from many sources, primarily Tom Collins and Eric H. Thomsen, regional director of the federal migrant camp program in California, who accompanied Steinbeck on missions of mercy...if Steinbeck read Babb’s extensive notes as carefully as he did the reports of Collins, he would certainly have found them useful. His interaction with Collins and Thomsen — and their influence on the writing of The Grapes of Wrath — is documented because Steinbeck acknowledged both. Sanora Babb went unmentioned."]

Writer Timothy Egan calls the Dust Bowl, "a classic tale of human beings pushing too hard against nature, and nature pushing back."

[To justify itself to Congress and the American public, TVA painted a dim picture of the farms it was going to flood and residents of the South. In films, books, and speeches, TVA pointed to poor farming practices and erosion as the chief culprits in the region’s poverty. Poverty and environmental problems in the South had more to do with lumber and mining industries, which extracted natural resources before abandoning the mountains. But TVA depicted the valleys as “wasted land, wasted people,” as if Southern farmers themselves were to blame.]

When Eleanor Roosevelt visited California in 1940 and saw squatter camps and the model government camps and was asked by a reporter if The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated, she answered unequivocally, “I never have thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” Steinbeck wrote to thank her for remarks: “I have been called a liar so constantly that sometimes I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research.”

[With a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, TVA devoted just $8,000 and 13 staffers to resettlement efforts. Almost as many tenants as landowners were evicted by TVA, and for this class of “adversely affected” farmers, the agency assumed even less obligation. “It is the very necessity of the tenants having to go which will make them find their own solution to their difficulties,” wrote one TVA staff member.]

Anyway, no, I don't like Steinbeck, and I don't enjoy reading about the Dust Bowl.

[Damning the Valley by Wayne Moore, America's Forgotten History Of Mexican-American 'Repatriation' an interview with Francisco Balderrama]