Timothy Egan

The last episode ended with a warning.

Journalist Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time, closed the book's account of the 1930s Dust Bowl with a look forward.

Writing in 2006, Egan noted that the aquifer beneath families like the Gerritsens was being drawn down eight times faster than it could refill.

The truer picture is that there's no single number.

It's pretty low anyway.

When I am on the plains feeling deliciously infinitesimal in the vastness, I think of the Dust Bowl, and I think of author Timothy Egan.

He wrote The Worst Hard Time.

And the way they'd see these storms typically was you could be sitting on the flat edge of Colorado just, you know, a few miles east of Denver and look at the Rockies, and you see the long range of the Rocky Mountains.

For now, that water just waited, locked away beneath the land.

As journalist Timothy Egan details in his book, The Worst Hard Time, the people who roamed this stretch of the southern plains for the longest period were the Comanche, who, with their Kiowa allies, dominated the area south of the Arkansas River.

To the Comanche, this was hunting ground, home to bison herds so vast that it could take days for them to pass a single point.

Some of the flattest stretches of the southern plains earned a reputation for disorienting travelers.

Wheat acreage in some counties increased tenfold in less than ten years.

The wager being made was that the wet years would continue, the price of wheat would keep climbing, and the roots holding the land together could be replaced by whatever a farmer chose to plant instead.

In his book The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan opens his account of the era with one of the men making that wager.

Bam White was a cowboy traveling from Las Animas, Colorado, to West Texas in search of ranch work when he arrived in the Panhandle town of Dalhart in nineteen twenty-six.

Mm-hmm.

And this is written by, uh, a man named Timothy Egan, who is really just a fantastic narrative nonfiction writer, who knows how to make a s- a nonfiction story move on the page in the way that a novel does.

And this is a true story of a man named D.C. Stephenson, who was a politician in Indiana, uh, at a time when, uh, when something was happening that many of us do not realize, which is the second coming of the KKK, the second coming of the Klan, in which, uh, the Klan n- grew, was resurrected.

Um, you know, a- after the Civil War, we have the birth of the Klan.