trump's highway runs through dust bowl. so apt.

[butters]

a longer article but worth reading right through

most the kids grow up and those that make college rarely return to a dying boise.
the town just next door, that embraced diversity, is growing and thriving.

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-tru...testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Boise City, which is closer to Denver than to the state capital in Oklahoma City, was founded in a swindle. In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company published a brochure advertising 3,000 lots for sale in a town of paved roads, tree-lined streets and handsome buildings, supplied with water from an artesian well. The brochure claimed that "King Corn and King Cotton grow side by side, yielding in excess of forty-five bushels of corn and a bale of cotton per acre."

By the force of American knowhow and bootstrapping, this Great American Desert would, the developers claimed, become the latest stage of Manifest Destiny. Only 30 years later, this area became the epicenter for what the environmental historian Donald Wooster has called "one of the three worst ecological blunders in history."

*

By 1940, 43 percent of Cimarron County's residents had fled. The capitalistic urge to break the land and squeeze profits from wheat farms with little precipitation had destroyed the natural vegetation that kept the thin topsoil in place. Once a drought hit, northern winds turned cold fronts into black blizzards.

*

Today, the Dust Bowl is remembered as a terrible aberration that paired the dire economic conditions of the Depression with a rare drought. According to most environmental historians, however, it was a manmade ecological disaster that reflected an American desire to take risks, consume natural resources and ignore the advice of experts. An object lesson for our times of coronavirus and climate change if there ever was one.

 

[rae121452]

well, damn! i was hoping (t-word)'s highway would run through death valley.

 

[YDB95]

I've been to Guymon. It is indeed the only sign of life for quite a ways around that neck of the woods.

 

[pecksniff]

Why is this called "Trump's Highway"?

 

[YDB95]

Why is this called "Trump's Highway"?

The state of Oklahoma officially gave that name to a stretch of highway in the panhandle. Which I have to admit is pretty fitting in a region that voted over 90% for Trump (remember we are not talking about very many people here...).

 

[butters]

Why is this called "Trump's Highway"?

if you'd have checked the link...headlines

Road to nowhere: Oklahoma's Donald J. Trump Highway runs through the desolate Dust Bowl

 

[Lazaran]

.
The Highway to Hell obviously.

Another reason to NEVER go to Oklahoma; Sooner OR later.

*chuckles*

 

[YDB95]

.

Another reason to NEVER go to Oklahoma; Sooner OR later.

I see what you did there!
Oddly enough, the panhandle is the only part of OK I have been to. I love oddities on the map like that, and I was on my way to Texas anyway.
If it's true about Guymon embracing diversity and growing, it'll be interesting to see if the area grows any more politically competitive with time. It can't really get any more red than it already is.

 

[butters]

I see what you did there!
Oddly enough, the panhandle is the only part of OK I have been to. I love oddities on the map like that, and I was on my way to Texas anyway.
If it's true about Guymon embracing diversity and growing, it'll be interesting to see if the area grows any more politically competitive with time. It can't really get any more red than it already is.

looks like guymon is doing okay

Cimarron County could very well be the most conservative county in the entire nation. In a statistic that resembles an election return from Russia, Trump captured 92% of the vote here. Joe Biden got a total of 70 votes in the entire county.

Almost every conversation about Boise City's precarious existence eventually turns, not to Trump's highway, but to the neighboring town of Guymon, which is growing at the fastest clip since the pre-Dust Bowl days. Guymon's revival began when Seaboard Foods built a pork processing plant there in 1996. (More recently, half the plant's workers contracted COVID.)

Tangee Cayton recalled teaching students of dozens of nationalities, from Ethiopian to Guatemalan, in Guymon's public schools. With a population of about 13,000, Guymon now has loft apartments and Latin-fusion restaurants; Boise City, with less than one-tenth that many residents, has No Man's Land Beef Jerky and Cimmy, a life-size Apatosaurus of rusted iron. Cimmy, along with the World War II bombing plaque, make for eccentric roadside Americana, but there's little hope for the long-term viability of the town.