Drought is not what happens to the Southern High Plains. Drought is what the Southern High Plains is - the terms on which the country is held.
The Long Drought reads four droughts on one place as one continuous condition the country has been teaching whoever would stay long enough to learn. From a ranch on the west edge of the Southern High Plains in Pueblo County, Colorado, Leonard Meyer carries a century of the country's teaching across four movements: the ground before the plow; the Dust Bowl read through the ranchers who stayed; the Filthy Fifties, longer than the 1930s in the counties that felt it and less remembered because no dust reached New York; and the changed country of the pumping era, the wildfires, and the drought being written into now.
The record runs on two categories, marked on the page as used. Primary - letters, day books, range diaries, county newspapers, federal and state hydrological and agricultural records, WPA transcripts, survivor testimony collected before it was gone. Recorded oral history - ranchers who worked the 1950s and spoke to state historical societies and university archives before they died.
This is not a history of the Dust Bowl. That history has been written, and written well, and this book leaves it on the shelf where it belongs. What is on the shelf is the event. The Long Drought is after what the event was one lesson from.
Historian's care in a rancher's cadence. The Fourth Pillar volume of the American System Series - the producing class ranching arid land west of the 100th meridian - companion, on the ranch scale, to Headgate on water policy and The Emptied Republic on demographic collapse.