The Antidote

The novel is set in the heart of the Dust Bowl—a disaster that crippled much of the Great Plains region during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl coincided with the economic collapse that came to be known as the Great Depression, with devastating effects. The factors that contributed to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s began decades earlier. Large migrations of Americans headed west to settle the plains in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This rush west was bolstered by the notion that Americans were destined by God to expand westward (a belief known as “Manifest Destiny”), and several government grants gave large acreage to Americans willing to take on the difficult task of cultivating the land. The land, however, was arid and not conducive to farming; this, coupled with inexperienced would-be farmers settling the land and a lack of knowledge about the climate, played a role in the eventual Dust Bowl. The first World War created a demand for corn, wheat, and other crops, and thus farmers set about transforming the native prairie grasses into grain farmland. A long period of unusually high rainfall fooled farmers into believing that the prairie lent itself to such crops.