The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Dust Bowl Survivors

In The Worst Hard Time, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Timothy Egan has blended historical documents, newspaper accounts, diaries, and personal interviews into a harrowing account of life in the High Plains during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. The result is a compelling, usually readable, but sometimes tedious, account of man's use and abuse of the environment. At the same time, it is an uplifting and extraordinary tale of human survival.

The time chronicled in Egan's book is roughly the period from 1900 to 1939. The physical setting is primarily along an axis running from Springfield, Colorado, to Boise City in Oklahoma's aptly named No Man's Land, and to Dalhart in the Texas panhandle. This was a rain-scarce region which for hundreds of years had been covered by self-sustaining native grasslands, traversed only by buffalo and the Comanche and Apache who chased after them. In the late 1800s, attempts were made to introduce the cattle industry to the region and despite some early success it eventually failed and the ranchers and cowboys, like the Native Americans before them, became minor figures in the region. Replacing them during the first decades of the 20^th century were the dirt farmers who are the main subject of The Worst Hard Time.

Encouraged by Federal and state governments, agronomists, profiteers and charlatans, new homesteaders were lured to the High Plains by the promises of free land, quick wealth, and the idea that the practice of dry farming would turn the arid land into an Eden. The belief "that rain would follow the plow" was accepted as gospel by the new settlers. And, for a while, it appeared that all the government officials, experts, and crooks were right. The demand for wheat during World War I created a boom in the region. Farmers saw a substantial increase in their standard of living and towns blossomed almost overnight. Surprisingly, demand continued into the post-war years and, aided by advanced mechanized farming and an unprecedented and misleading period of rainy weather, millions of new acres were plowed under. Then the dream ended with the Great Depression. By 1931, wheat demand had dropped, most of the High Plain's natural ground cover had been destroyed, and drought had replaced the rains. The result was the famed dust storms, or "black blizzards", beginning in 1932 and reaching their peak, but not ending, on April 14, 1935, with "Black Sunday". That day a colossal dust storm swept through nearly a thousand miles from the Dakotas southward to Texas removing millions of tons of topsoil as it did.

Egan's story suffers from a few weaknesses. The book can be tedious at times especially those parts where he gives the reader statistic after statistic, or discusses the Federal government's attempts to end the devastation which it had helped create, or when he repeats for the umpteenth time that it was man who caused the calamity. Then there are a few characters whose stories are given a beginning and middle before the author sets them adrift without the reader finding out what became of them. Toward the end of the book, Egan deviates from the Springfield-Boise City-Dalhart axis and spends three chapters with excerpts from a diary kept by a Nebraska farmer. Why the author suddenly and incongruously takes a path that leads several hundred miles from the center of his story is unclear. While the farmer's remarks are interesting they don't really add anything new to what the reader has already learned.

However, these are minor criticisms as Egan compensates for them by giving the reader some true sense as to what day-to-day life was like for the one-third of the Dust Bowl's population who stayed or tried to stay. What Steinbeck did in fiction for the "okies", Egan has done in non-fiction for the "dusters". Like The Grapes of Wrath, the author leaves us with many unforgettable people. Among them is the young school teacher and housewife, Hazel Lucas Shaw, who defied the never-ending dust by cleaning her house each day while wearing white gloves and was determined to become pregnant so that she could bring "new life" to the area. She and her husband, Charles, eventually conceded defeat and moved after "dust pneumonia" claimed the life of their one year-old daughter. Then there are: Ike Osteen who left Springfield briefly to fight in World War II before returning, and Jeanne Clark, who never left and to this day still carries the emotional and physical scars of the dust years; Bam White, an ex-cowboy who refused to leave because of his attachment to the land, attributed, he said, to his Apache and Cherokee ancestry; "Doc" George Waller Dawson, a sanitarium owner, who gave up his life-long dream of farming to run a relief shelter and soup kitchen; and, Uncle Dick Coon who had survived the 1906 Galveston hurricane to become a wealthy Dalhart entrepreneur and would die penniless in 1938. Unknown to anyone, he had given all his money away to help the needy and "his" town stay alive.

One feature that all these people, and others who fought for survival in the dust years, had in common was their love of the land that many of them had been born and raised on. It is to Timothy Egan's credit that he is able to bring out these feelings of love in The Worst Hard Time.