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Timothy Egan

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl: A National Book Award Winner Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

by Timothy Egan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 6,278 ratings

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In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.

This e-book includes a sample chapter of THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN.

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September 1, 2006
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American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster.
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Yet most people living in the center of the Dust Bowl, about two thirds of the population in 1930, never left during that hard decade.
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. (Dec. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From 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.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine

A national correspondent on environmental issues for the New York Times, Timothy Egan describes a central plain that is as distinct and varied as the Rocky Mountains that buttress it to the west. "Linguistic flourishes" (San Francisco Chronicle) and an "authoritative voice" (Portland Oregonian), supported by Egans Pulitzer Prizewinning reportorial skills, make The Worst Hard Time an essential testament-cum-elegy to the price of human progress and the indomitable will of the American spirit. Reviewers are loath to throw around "masterpiece" lightly, but Egans book gets a couple of nods; the uniformity of the praise seems to affirm his heady accomplishment.

From Booklist

Following the fortunes of representative settlers of the southern Great Plains, Egan's narrative of the dust bowl during the Depression begins with the seeds of environmental disaster. The area was the last tract of the continental U.S. to be homesteaded, the last episode of open-land real-estate showmanship that enticed people to start over. "Settlement was a dare," writes Egan, a dare of plowing rain-sparse, blustery grassland. And briefly, around World War I's inflated grain prices, the dare paid off: towns materialized on the horizon, homesteaders such as Bam White moved in, cheered on by boosters like John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart Texan. "Every man a landlord" was the slogan of the era, a banner of optimism that eroded into despair due to dust storms of relentlessly increasing ferocity. In vivid fashion, Egan reports on the grit, the drifts, and the figures bent against the gusts. All the elements of the iconic dust bowl photographs come together in the author's evocative portrait of those who first prospered and then suffered during the 1930s drought. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A vivid and gritty piece of forgotten history.-- "USA Today"

About the Author

Patrick Lawlor, an award-winning narrator, is also an accomplished stage actor, director, and combat choreographer. He has worked extensively off Broadway and has been an actor and stuntman in both film and television. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many starred audio reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of four books and the recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Seattle.

From The Washington Post

Timothy Egan's searing history of the economic and ecological collapse of the southern Great Plains during the 1930s is an epic cautionary tale. Intertwining the stories of roughly a dozen individuals and families with a grim overview of the region-wide disaster, Egan's fluent narrative chronicles the terrifying consequences of a reckless hubris that in a few decades stripped the earth of prairie grass that for centuries had protected it from erosion. The American people and their government collaborated in transforming a sea of waving, waist-high bluestem -- described by William Clark on his expedition west with Meriwether Lewis in 1804 as "one of the most pleasing prospects I ever beheld" -- into a blasted landscape of abandoned farms surrounded by four-foot drifts of dust, scattered with dead farm animals and useless equipment.

They should have known better. In 1820, the explorer Stephen Long judged the plains "almost wholly uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture." Late-19th-century speculators tried establishing huge commercial ranches, but droughts and winter freezes killed so many cattle that they couldn't turn a reliable profit. Investors split up million-acre spreads into small parcels and advertised nationwide. Would-be farmers arrived en masse in the 1910s and '20s, buying windmills to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and tractors with plows to turn grassland into farmland on millions of acres in western Kansas, southeast Colorado, eastern New Mexico and the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle.

The local cowboys, whose work on the ranches had taught them what was sustainable, were appalled. "If they continued to break up the grass in such a fury the land would be no good to anyone," these men warned the homesteaders. But the sodbusters kept busting sod -- encouraged, a 1936 U.S. government report concluded, by "mistaken public policies . . . a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of war time demands which led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous."

The resulting catastrophe arrived in stages. Wheat prices collapsed right before the stock market crashed in 1929. An eight-year drought began in 1931; annual rainfall eventually dropped below 10 inches (20 was the bare minimum for farming without irrigation). On Jan. 21, 1932, "a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo." Stripped of grass, desiccated by drought, the ruined topsoil simply flew away in the high winds that for millennia had blown across the plains. Now they scoured it, carrying poisonous clouds hundreds of miles and dumping black grit onto streets, into homes and deep inside people's lungs. The U.S. Weather Bureau didn't yet have a name for this new weather phenomenon, but by 1933, when 70 of them stalked the Panhandle, they were called dust storms.

Egan, a New York Times reporter, offers dramatic descriptions of the storms that vividly recreate their apocalyptic fury. He really excels, however, in capturing the human suffering they inflicted: Hazel Lucas Shaw's infant daughter and grandmother dying of "dust pneumonia" on the same day; Gustav Borth hiding behind his shed so his family would not see him weeping over the debts he could not pay; Caroline Henderson dreaming of rain but waking to "another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred." Egan also paints an unforgettable picture of a society in "terminal disorder": banks closed, stores bankrupt, people bartering eggs for shoes, hospitals that could not be reached on roads impassable with dust. In 1935, the year that Associated Press reporter Bob Geiger attached the phrase "Dust Bowl" to this desolate region, 850 million tons of topsoil blew off the plains. One hundred million acres were badly eroded; nearly half were "essentially destroyed." A quarter of a million people fled the Dust Bowl during the 1930s.

But most residents stayed, anchored by an indomitable attachment to their blighted homeland that provides Egan's frightening account with one of its two rays of hope. The other comes from the improvised, heroic efforts by New Deal officials to implement policies that would alleviate the crisis and prevent its recurrence. Preeminent here is Hugh Bennett, head of FDR's Soil Conservation Service, whose visionary efforts to restore the prairie and encourage farmers to "think beyond their fence lines" led to the three national grasslands that the Forest Service today maintains in the region. On the other hand, Egan points out in his epilogue, federal subsidies intended to help families stay on the land have become "a payoff to corporate farms growing crops that are already in oversupply" -- and watering them with water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer "eight times faster than nature can refill it."

Will we ever learn? Egan draws no final conclusions, letting readers judge for themselves from the wealth of admonitory facts and evocative details skillfully assembled in this sobering, heart-wrenching book.

Reviewed by Wendy Smith
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 The Wanderer They had been on the road for six days, a clan of five bouncing along in a tired wagon, when Bam White woke to some bad news. One of his horses was dead. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a flat tire, except this was the winter of 1926. The Whites had no money. They were moving from the high desert chill of Las Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas, south of Amarillo, to start anew. Bam White was a ranch hand, a lover of horses and empty skies, at a time when the cowboy was becoming a museum piece in Texas and an icon in Hollywood. Within a year, Charles Lindbergh would cross the ocean in his monoplane, and a white man in blackface would speak from the screen of a motion picture show. The great ranches had been fenced, platted, subdivided, upturned, and were going out to city builders, oil drillers, and sodbusters. The least-populated part of Texas was open for business and riding high in the Roaring Twenties. Overnight, new towns were rising, bustling with banks, opera houses, electric streetlights, and restaurants serving seafood sent by train from Galveston.With his handlebar mustache, bowlegs, and raisin-skinned face, Bam White was a man high- centered in the wrong century. The plan was to get to Littlefield, where the winters were not as bad as Colorado, and see if one of the new fancy- pantsers might need a ranch hand with a quick mind. Word was, a family could always pick cotton as well. Now they were stuck in No Man's Land, a long strip of geographic afterthought in the far western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle, just a sneeze from Texas. After sunrise, Bam White had a talk with his remaining horses. He checked their hooves, which were worn and uneven, and looked into their eyes, trying to find a measure of his animals. They felt bony to the touch, emaciated by the march south and dwindling rations of feed. The family was not yet halfway into their exodus. Ahead were 209 miles of road over the high, dry roof of Texas, across the Canadian river, bypassing dozens of budding Panhandle hamlets: Wildorado, Lazbuddie, Flagg, Earth, Circle, Muleshoe, Progress, Circle Back. If you all can give me another two or three days, White told his horses, we'll rest you good. Get me to Amarillo, at least. Bam's wife, Lizzie, hated the feel of No Man's Land. The chill, hurried along by the wind, made it impossible to stay warm. The land was so threadbare. It was here that the Great Plains tilted, barely susceptible to most eyes, rising to nearly a mile above sea level at the western edge. The family considered dumping the organ, their prized possession. They could sell it in Boise City and make just enough to pick up another horse. They asked around: ten dollars was the going rate for an heirloom organ not enough to buy a horse. Anyway, Bam White could not bring himself to give it up. Some of the best memories, through the hardest of years, came with music pumped from that box. They would push on to Texas, twenty miles away, moving a lot slower. After burying their dead horse, they headed south. Through No Man's Land, the family wheeled past fields that had just been turned, the grass upside down. People in sputtering cars roared by, honking, hooting at the cowboy family in the horse-drawn wagon, churning up dust in their faces. The children kept asking if they were getting any closer to Texas and if it would look different from this long strip of Oklahoma. They seldom saw a tree in Cimarron County. There wasn't even grass for the horse team; the sod that hadn't been turned was frozen and brown. Windmills broke the plain, next to dugouts and sod houses and still-forming villages. Resting for a long spell at midday, the children played around a buffalo wallow, the ground mashed. Cimarron is a Mexican hybrid word, descended from the Apache who spent many nights in these same buffalo wallows. It means "wanderer." A few miles to the southeast, archaeologists were just starting to sort through a lost village, a place where natives, seven hundred years earlier, built a small urban complex near the Canadian River, the only reliable running water in the region. People had lived there for nearly two centuries and left only a few cryptic clues as to how they survived. When Francisco Vsquez de Coronado marched through the High Plains in 1541, trailing cattle, soldiers, and priests in pursuit of precious metals, he found only a handful of villages along the Arkansas River, the homes made of intertwined grass, and certainly no cities of gold as he was expecting. His entrada was a bust. Indians on foot passed through, following bison. Some of Bam White's distant forefathers the Querechos, ancestors of the Apache may have been among them. The Spanish brought horses, which had the same effect on the Plains Indian economy as railroads did on Anglo villages in the Midwest. The tribes grew bigger and more powerful, and were able to travel vast distances to hunt and trade. For most of the 1700s, the Apache dominated the Panhandle. Then came the Comanche, the Lords of the Plains. They migrated out of eastern Wyoming, Shoshone people who had lived in the upper Platte River drainage. With horses, the Comanche moved south, hunting and raiding over a huge swath of the southern plains, parts of present-day Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. At their peak in the mid-1700s, they numbered about twenty thousand. To the few whites who saw them in the days before homesteading, the Comanche looked like they sprang fully formed from the prairie grass. "They are the most extraordinary horsemen that I have seen yet in all my travels," said the artist George Catlin, who accompanied the cavalry on a reconnaissance mission to the southern plains in 1834. The Comanche were polygamous, which pleased many a fur trader adopted into the tribe. Naked, a Comanche woman was a mural unto herself, with a range of narrative tattoos all over her body. From afar, the Indians communicated with hand signals, part of a sign language developed to get around the wind's theft of their shouts. The Comanche bred horses and mules the most reliable currency of the 1800s and traded them with California-bound gold-seekers and Santa Febound merchants. In between, they fought Texans. The Comanche hated Texans more than any other group of people. Starting around 1840, the Texas Rangers were organized by the Republic of Texas to go after the Indians. A mounted Comanche was the most effective warrior of the plains. The Comanche were difficult targets but even better on offense. Years of hunting bison from horses at full speed gave them skills that made for an initial advantage over the Rangers. Once engaged in battle, they charged with a great, rhythmic whoop like a football cheer. After a raid and some rest, they would charge again, this time wearing their stolen booty, even women's dresses and bonnets. They were proud after killing Texans. "They made sorrow come into our camps, and we went out like buffalo bulls when the cows are attacked," said Comanche leader Ten Bears in 1867. "When we found them we killed them, and their scalps hang in our lodges. The white women cried, and our women laughed. The Comanches are not weak and blind like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old." The Comanche buried their dead soldiers on a hill, if they could find one, and then killed the warriors" horses as well. Bison gave them just about everything they needed: clothes, shelter, tools, and of course a protein source that could be dried, smoked, and stewed. Some tepees required twenty bison skins, stretched and stitched together, and weighed 250 pounds, which was light enough to be portable. The animal stomachs were dried and used as food containers or water holders. Even tendons were put to good use, as bowstrings. To supplement the diet, there were wild plums, grapes, and currants growing in spring-fed creases of the .atland, and antelope, sage grouse, wild turkeys, and prairie chickens, though many Comanche thought it was unclean to eat a bird. The tribe had an agreement signed by the president of the United States and ratified by Congress, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, which promised the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, and other tribes hunting rights to much of the Great American Desert, the area south of the Arkansas River. At the time, there was no more disparaged piece of ground in the coast- to-coast vision of manifest destiny. The nesters and sodbusters pouring into the postCivil War West could have the wetter parts of the plains, east of the one-hundredth meridian and beyond the Texas Caprock Escarpment. To the Indians would go the land that nobody wanted: the arid grasslands in the west. Early on, Comanchero traders called the heart of this area "el Llano Estacado" the Staked Plains. It got its name because it was so flat and featureless that people drove stakes into the ground to provide guidance; otherwise, a person could get lost in the eternity of flat. The Staked Plains were reserved for the natives who hunted bison. At the treaty signing,Ten Bears tried to explain why Indians could love the High Plains. "I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls . . . The white man has taken the country we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die." Within a few years of the signing, Anglo hunters invaded the treaty land. They killed bison by the millions, stockpiling hides and horns for a lucrative trade back east. Seven million pounds of bison tongues were shipped out of Dodge City, Kansas, in a single two-year period, 18721873, a time when one government agent estimated the killing at twenty-five million. Bones, bleaching in the sun in great piles at railroad terminals, were used for fertilizer, selling for up to ten dollars a ton. Among the gluttons for killing was a professional buffalo hunter named Tom Nixon, who said he had once killed 120 animals in forty minutes. Texans ignored the Medi...

From AudioFile

The best history books thrill us by telling their story as if the outcome were not assured. This is one of those books. Convincingly read by Patrick Lawlor, Egan's book renders the environmental ravages and human drama of the 1930s' Dust Bowl in fascinating detail. Egan blends a myriad of individual stories with the political record to create a tale of greed, stupidity, heroism, and perseverance that keeps one from touching the stop button. Lawlor's somewhat nasal voice sounds right for the era, and he reads the straight history passages with energy and clarity. He also imbues the many individual voices, including those who appear but once, with enlightening character. This is a must-listen. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004H1UOSG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; Reprint edition (September 1, 2006)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2006
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7810 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 353 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 061834697X

Best Sellers Rank: #49,573 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Depression History of the U.S.
- #7 in Natural Disasters (Kindle Store)
- #12 in History of Mid-Atlantic U.S.

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Timothy Egan

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TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of ten books, including the forthcoming, A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND, which will be released on April 4. His book on the Dust Bowl, THE WORST HARD TIME, won a National Book Award for nonfiction. His book on photographer Edward Curtis, SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER, was awarded the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. He's also written several New York Times' bestsellers, including THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN and THE BIG BURN. He's a third-generation Westerner.

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John P. Jones III

And the wind hits heavy on the border line...

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2009

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Timothy Egan relates that it was a son of Kansas, Roy Emerson Stryker, who came up with the idea of creating a record of American decay for the files of the Farm Security Administration, and "...the government photo unit proved to be one of the lasting and most popular contributions of the New Deal..." Americans familiar with their history have the images taken by Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression as part of their cultural baggage, and Egan expands that to the work of Arthur Rothstein, and others, who were just out of college, and told to stay in the "field", and get to know the people. The images of the immense ecological disaster that was dubbed "the Dust Bowl" are not properly honored with even the word "haunting."

Egan has written a magnificent, heart-breaking history of the "the Dust Bowl" area during the `30's. Much of the specific history was new to me, and thus confirmed Truman's dictum that there is nothing new in the world except the history that you did not know. I had recently re-read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which Egan briefly touches upon, pointing out correctly that Tom Joad and his family came from eastern Oklahoma, whereas the true dust bowl encompassed only western Oklahoma. I felt Egan's one map, outlining where the area of the dust bowl was, most illuminating. Both Steinbeck's and Egan's books are damning indictments of so-called "market forces" unleashed without an overall structure of prudent rules set by society, as administered by the government. Egan did however cover the impudent rules that society and the government advocated, which encouraged the settlement and farming of the land west of the 100th meridian which was the root cause of the dust bowl.

Egan tells the story of the worst hard times through the eyes of those who experienced it, via interviews with them, or their children, accompanied by surviving diaries and the newspaper stories of the day. He doesn't say how or why he selected certain people, but I felt that they were a representative sampling, from Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Of the stories that were particularly memorable, I found the ones of the "Volga Germans" who settled in Shattuck, OK. They had been recruited by Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (who was actually German) to settle on the Volga river. They were given incentives to do so, like exemption from conscription. When these were removed, 150 years later, by Czar Alexander II, they left in mass, and settled in the USA. The epicenter of Egan's stories, and no doubt research, seemed to be Dalhart, Texas, in the northwest corner of the panhandle. The author starts his book with the story of Bam White, part Indian, whose horses could not carry his family any further south into Texas, so he had to stop in Delhart. Bam was in the most famous movie made about the dust bowl, and was shunned by much of the population of the area for this role. Another very memorable character from Delhart was the indominable promoter and newspaper editor, John L McCarty. He was a founding member of the "Last Man Club," pledging that they would never leave, a pledge that he broke, when "he got a better deal." I also found the stories of set in the Oklahoma panhandle, which was once called "no man's land" also quite illuminating.

I read a few of the 1-star reviews, found their criticism of little merit. One did not like the endless stories about the dust storms, which I found a strength of the book. Egan explained well the whole trajectory of the area's residents from hope and defiance through resignation and defeat. As Egan says on p 242: "The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine, on harvest day, from victory stands."

Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was the catalyst for a trip to Garden City, Kansas a year ago, to see the feedlots there. Pollan declares that afterwards it would take "a supreme act of forgetting to ever eat meat again." On the way, I drove through Dalhart, and on the way back, I drove through Boise City, OK (named, as Egan points out, after the French word, "bois," for woods, of which there are none except in the fevered imagination of the real estate promoters.) I stopped in Keys, OK, and photographed the still extant devastation, the abandoned houses, and shuttered businesses. Egan's book will force a return trip, now that he has helped me "see" what I was oblivious too the last time.

On last year's trip it was quite apparent that both the panhandles of OK and TX continue to struggle, yet the area around Garden City, KS seemed relatively prosperous. Sadly, Egan explains some of this in his epilogue: "So cotton growing, siphoning from the Ogallala (underground reservoir) get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart. The aquifer is declining at a rate of 1.1 million acre-feet a day... In parts of the Texas Panhandle, hydrologists say, the water will be gone by 2010."

Plus ca change...

Egan's book certainly deserves the National Book Award. An excellent, informative read.

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Kindle Customer

Great Look at history

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2023

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This is a great look at the dust bowl many of us have forgotten. Interesting way both the progressive and conservative elements disagreed just as we do today and always come down on what benefits us now. Gives you much to think a bout. Great read I like this author.

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lewbrika

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2024

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After hearing about the author (on NPR) I purchased this book some years ago. (Prior to the read I had little to NO knowledge about the period of time around the American Dust Bowl, other than Grapes of Wrath (out of context) by John Steinbeck. This was one of the most enlightening books I've ever read about an historical era. It was one of the Best "history" books I've read. Well researched, wonderful data, first person accounts and interviews, AND Most importantly (beyond the information I learned), It was NOT boring! Most books about history are dull, lifeless volumes filled with names of people, dates, wars, treaties, etc, etc. ad infinitem. Though this book had names and dates and events, it was written in such a way to not only enlighten the reader regarding the events and time period in history but made it interesting. I could barely put the book down. It read much more like an interesting novel. The characters being not only the people of the time who lived through it, but our country and it's history, and the land and the true necessity to care for our environment Excellent read. HIGHLY recommend.
I purchased this copy for my cousin for his birthday. I know he'll enjoy the read.

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Emreadsnstuff

An absolute must read!

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2012

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This is the second time. I have read this incredible book. I bought it when it was first released, and now, during THESE times, I felt the need to read it again. It was available to read on my Kindle, so that made it an even easier decision.
Timothy Egan brings to ...life?...a stunning and heart wrenching account of this period in America's history that has left me shaking my head in disbelief to this day. Mr. Egan managed to find one of the few survivors of this devastating decade, someone who was THERE. Many diaries and newspaper articles are included as well, but the writer's skill really lets us know how horrific this time was.
One can almost feel and see the dust storms that, after a couple of years, were a DAILY occurrence. When I say "dust storm" that may conjure up and little twister weaving through the plains. Oh, no. These storms were massive, huge, and deadly. People who had moved to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas; to get a new start on life, and farm, to have something they could call THEIRS; well, I cannot imagine their suffering. I admire many of them for staying, but why did they? This area was called "No Man's Land", and that is exactly what it was .Banks refused to loan money to those who wanted to go there and farm. But never fear! The Homestead Act came along, and large tracts of land could be purchased for pennies. That land was not worth even that, but people bought it. This book goes into amazing detail about this time, you won't want to put it down.
Egan writes the book with some main characters we get to know, then winds their nightmare story throughout the book, people come, people go, people choose to stay...
When Herbert Hoover was president, at the beginning, farmers and their families did OK...too much wheat was grown, WW I had ended, and it "wasn't needed." But it was! No one would buy the wheat, so when Hoover was asked to help these people and buy some wheat, he said no. Unbelievable.
Then, land that should never have been farmed in the first place turned on everyone and everything, rolling in from the southwest, so eerie and mind boggling that the National Weather Service had no name for it! Sadly, it was not a fluke, and things would only get worse.
These massive "Dusters" as they came to be called, would arrive at any time of the day, one could not predict when, but they came. EVERY DAY. They were huge, dark, and horrific. Poor helpless animals died where they stood. People and their cars and houses had to be dug out of them. EVERY DAY for.....years! The Dustbowl covered 100 million acres, an area the size of Pennsylvania was ruined, and yet, only a third of the people left!
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, he LISTENED. He begged people to stop trying to farm this land, and he sent an Agronomists and every expert you can imagine to this area: and what they discovered was not good news. Their report was given to the president, who felt so much for these people, and did what little he could to help. The land had been "farmed out", and it seems MAN was the cause of this catastrophe, not the weather. Man. The millions of Bison who had once roamed this area were now almost extinct. That was, of course, man's doing. So, with the Indians gone and the buffalo grass turned over by the "farmers", the soil poorly tilled or left abandoned, it was basically useless.
You will not believe the trials these people who chose to stay endured. I kept thinking, "and we are complaint NOW?" The tenacity of the homesteaders, men and women, and their children, and their suffering and grief is heart wrenching.
Personal accounts written by people who were there, gave me insight into what we would now consider absolutely intolerable.
I would write more, but I'll let the reader discover how centipedes, spiders, dust, hunger, and worse, shaped the lives of the people in this area. This book should be on reading lists in high school. We today, have NO idea about this. Well, I didn't.
Note: this is NOT a book about the Great Depression, even though these were Depression years. It's a book about men and women and land, and what happens when people decide to "make up their minds", and learn horrible lessons. Excellent, informative, and wonderfully written.

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jbg

Amazing

Reviewed in Canada on April 3, 2022

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I was surprised and loved the amount of history in this book, there was way more to this then just talking about dust storms. It was a book I couldn’t put down and well written. You won’t be disappointed.

T R

A must read

Reviewed in Germany on July 30, 2019

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We are fantastically ignorant when it comes to nature. We think we can do whatever the hell we like. This is proof that we can’t, shouldn’t and mustn’t.

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michael gilligan

Brilliant book, and goes into great detail

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2015

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Brilliant book ,and goes into great detail ,especially with the diaries of those who suffered . About a people who went to new lands in the hope of making a new and fresh start . But with a lack of farming knowledge of the area ,,some greed , ending up in a man made disaster .Native American Indians who had been thrown off their lands ,after another broken treaty ,had managed this land for thousands of years ,and knew the weather and natural cycles and were able to adapt .The knew breed of farmer was doomed ,once the first sod was turned over ,and on top of this greed set in with a lot of them ,when the Government encouraged them to grow as much grain as possible during the first world war . When things went belly up ,after borrowing from banks for machinery ,cars, houses, etc, disaster followed with the Dust Bowl of the 30's .People couldn't pay back ,,banks collapsed all over the area ,and evictions . It seems we still haven't learnt from the past ,with banks collapsing and evictions all over and no respect for nature . A book ,very well written ,with food for thought ..

2 people found this helpful

lucas

and "The Worst Hard Time" gave me an interesting

Reviewed in Canada on October 4, 2017

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A fairly enjoyable book. I was interested in the era and learning more about The Dust Bowl, and "The Worst Hard Time" gave me an interesting, if not redundant glimpse into the day to day life of homesteaders in the Panhandle.

The conditions and circumstances of the people in the Panhandle during the 30s are pretty grim and Timothy Egan doesn't shy away from that. Usually I am not too bothered by a depressing read, but this one was non-stop. When you thought things couldn't get worse - they always did.

Overall, I enjoyed the characters and content of the book more than the authors writing style. I found Egan repetitive and heavy handed in spots, though he can tell a story quite well.

R Helen

Really interestng!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2018

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In this story of the great Dust Bowl that hit the midwest in the 1930s, Timothy Egan follows the lives of a few families as they cope with this unprecedented weather situation. Unfortunately, he doesn't follow through on all of them, so with some families, we're left wondering what became of them. But his descriptions are amazing and it becomes very clear that this is not just a lot of dust that made it hard to grow anything. The problem was far greater. The dust was so thick that people actually choked and died from it. Many came down with dust pneumonia with fatal results. The static electricity could knock a man over and the spiders that came with were of biblical proportions.

Eagan also spends a fair share of the book determining how this great tragedy came about. Droughts had always been a natural part of this area in America, but nothing like the dust had ever been seen before. The conclusion: Man himself created this phenomenon by farming the land at such a rate that it was impossible for it to recover. Even to this day, parts of it haven't. But whatever recovery has been made, we can thank FDR and his renewal concepts through the New Deal.

It's a fascinating book and I would highly recommend it.

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl: A National Book Award Winner Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

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