Quotes from Timothy Egan

Hear, hear! Thereafter, the Klan and the private militias would make common cause. The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks. But instead of love your neighbor, these Klansmen hated many a neighbor. At

The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass.

He works twelve hours a day, with some of the world's stupidest animals, placed in an environment that is foreign to their native ground. He might as well be raising chickens in Rockefeller Center.

The preacher said Madge's spirit belonged to Irvington, and Irvington must be there for her memory: "Let us not forget that in coming here today we have not fulfilled our obligations of friendship," he said. In the days, weeks, and years ahead, the family "will need us as never before

You would think that one of the largest perennial streams in the American Southwest, brought to life by a wilderness holding deep snows in its higher reaches, would be full of life. But the Gila River is all but dead. And so is the forest. Much of it looks devastated. There used to be wolves, grizzly bears, Merriam's elk, beavers, black-footed ferrets, and river otters here. Most of them exist, now, only on the cracked pottery of the long-vanished Mogollon.

waiting on line

The drought was in its fourth year, and it was the worst in at least a generation's time. But long dry periods were as much a part of the Great Plains as the grass itself. What was different in 1935 was that the land was naked. If the prairie had been held in place by adequate ground cover—grass, or even the matted sprouts of wheat emerging from winter dormancy—the land could never have peeled away as it did, with great strips of earth thrown to the sky.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us," Leopold wrote later. "When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.

long months of despondency I could

Cowboys are like bears and mountain lions," the Border Country poet Drum Hadley, a rancher himself, has said. "They need a certain range, a certain critical mass of land, on which to exist.

It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children.

Sitting Bull had predicted the land would get its revenge on whites who forced the Indians off the grasslands. He saw doom from the sky. During this drought, his nephew, One Bull, tried to reverse Sitting Bull's prophecy.

layers? "Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.

Suicide is not a crime in Indiana," said Holmes dismissively. "Therefore, to be an accessory before or after the fact would be no crime in Indiana.

More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637—an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget.

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.

Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming.

When Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, it marked the first time any nation had created such a unit.

Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land," said the new president, Herbert Hoover, who took office in 1929. He

The black man that sympathized, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathized, worked, plotted and fought against it

Though he was still reticent about encouraging a massive exodus, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7028, granting federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads over the previous seventy-three years. The executive order was a stunning reversal of everything the government had done with the public domain since the founding of the republic.

Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.

at the end of 1922, nearly one in four residents had taken an oath to a cryptic organization dedicated to the dehumanization of fellow citizens. A majority would soon elect a Klansman as their mayor.