Summary

Introduction – Live Through This

The land in the southern plains was scary… it was empty like a ghost house. People felt lost there. There was nothing. Not a tree anywhere on the flat land that didn’t even have a bump much less a hill. It scared Coronado looking for the cities of gold, the Anglo traders heading to Santa Fe and even the Comanche. The terrain was unfriendly to strangers. It held no promise to give anything back. Towns only popped up occasionally. Some old shacks were literally buried in the sand. Old abandoned fence posts and structures dot the land.

The greatest grassland in the world had been turned upside down for most of a decade. It covered parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The transition took place when there was 25 percent unemployment. The crisis...