Five decades before the Dust Bowl ravaged southwestern Nebraska, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado, the High Plains experienced a similar pattern of settlement boom and drought bust. David Wishart, a preeminent Great Plains scholar, provides a compelling expose of how apocryphal precipitation fantasies (such as "rain follows the plow") in the mid-1880s lured tens of thousands of poor migrants to a region that then had the ironic nickname of the Rainbelt. One look at the photo of a forlorn abandoned schoolhouse on the cover of this slender monograph makes it clear that this is a tragedy of how settlers were lured into a promised land but met a place where their dreams "blew away like tumbleweeds" (p. ⅹⅲ).
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