The Worst Hard Time: The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl

by Timothy Egan

Ebook, 2006

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Anyone who's read The Grapes of Wrath knows about the Dust Bowl — an area of the southern Great Plains that dried up and blew away during an extreme drought in the 1930s, leading to a mass exodus of former homesteaders, including Steinbeck's fictional Joad family.

Egan digs into this historical

period to trace the series of unfortunate events that led to the dreadful conditions of the Dust Bowl, and uses diaries, contemporary news accounts, and modern interviews with survivors to put a human face on a vast phenomenon. Even though the so-called natural disaster had largely man-made origins, it's impossible not to feel empathy and sorrow for the people who were caught in a hellscape where almost no rain fell for years and the land itself picked up and moved itself by the ton. The stories of "black blizzards" of dirt and dust, and the horrific medical conditions that the constantly blowing dust wrought on both human and beast, were heartbreaking. I can't imagine surviving such conditions, and many people didn't, but the ones who did were scarred forever, both physically and psychologically. A powerful tale of unintended consequences and the folly of trying to impose human will on nature.

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Description

History. Nonfiction. The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize�??winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived-those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave-Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Egan captures the very voice of the time-its grit, pathos, and abiding heroism-as only great history can. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American histo… (more)

Media reviews

New York Times

The Worst Hard Time," takes the shape of a classic disaster tale. We meet the central characters (the "nesters" who farmed around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles); dire warnings (against plowing) are voiced but ignored; and then all hell breaks loose. Ten-thousand-foot-high dust storms whip

across the landscape, choking people and animals, and eventually laying waste to one of the richest ecosystems on earth.
Racing at 50 miles an hour, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930's blasted paint off buildings; soil crushed trees, dented cars and drifted into 50-foot dunes. Tsunamis of grasshoppers devoured anything that drought, hail and tornadoes had spared. To the settlers, "it seemed on many days as if a curtain were being drawn across a vast stage at world's end." Families couldn't huddle together for warmth or love: the static electricity would knock them down. Children died of dust pneumonia, and livestock suffocated on dirt, their insides packed with soil. Women hung wet sheets in windows, taped doors and stuffed cracks with rags. None of this really worked. Housecleaning, in this era, was performed with a shovel.

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The New Yorker

On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl

was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.

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