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

by Timothy Egan

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, 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, Egan 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 cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Book Club, Historical, Audiobook, Environment

340 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 2005

About the author

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of nine books, including THE WORST HARD TIME, which won the National Book Award. His latest book, A PILGRIMAGE TO ETERNITY, is a personal story, a journey over an ancient trail, and a history of Christianity. He also writes a biweekly opinion column for The New York Times. HIs book on the photographer Edward Curtis, SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER, won the Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction. His Irish-American book, THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN, was a New York Times bestseller. A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Seattle.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts , where static electricity made it painful to shake another man’s hand, where the only thing growing that a man or cow could eat was an unwelcome foreigner, the Russian thistle? How to explain fifty thousand or more houses abandoned throughout the Great Plains, never to hear a child’s laugh or a woman’s song inside their walls? How to explain nine million acres of farmland without a master? America was passing this land by. It’s day was done.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is far from public consciousness today, and that is a shame. There are lessons to be gleaned from that experience that apply directly to challenges of the 21st century. If we are not to be doomed to repeat the mistakes that were made before, it is critical that we know what happened then, how it came to be, and what might be done to prevent it, or things like it, from happening again.


Timothy Egan - image from Willamette.edu

Timothy Egan takes on that task in The Worst Hard Time. In an interview with Author Magazine Egan tells of seeing his son’s American History text and being appalled that the Dust Bowl had been relegated to a single paragraph. In another interview he says,

I want to see if history got it wrong. With the Dust Bowl, it wasn’t that history got it wrong, it’s just that they got a different take. Here’s the largest Diaspora in American history and our view of it is entirely from Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, where everyone left and went to California. Well, two thirds of the people didn’t leave.

His methodology is not to lay out a raft of facts and statistics, but to follow several families through the ordeal of the Dust Bowl years. He focuses on the area where Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas meet. He does get in the numbers but the human experience is how he makes the era emotionally accessible. Egan has a gift. He is a wonderful story teller, with a feel for portraying people. Egan’s time as a young man writing a novel (unpublished) helped him find his voice and it is in full throat here. I was reminded of excellent war books that paint a picture from the point of view of soldiers on the ground. Sebastian Junger’s War and The Good Soldiers by David Finkel are recent examples that pop to mind. Egan’s people cover a wide range, cowboys, farmers, schoolteachers, immigrants. The primary actors are supported by a cast that includes racists, unscrupulous politicians, town boosters, journalists, a forward-looking conservationist and the odd president or two. But he incorporates more than just a few points of human reference, bringing to his tale a sense of narrative arc, a perspective he brings to all his writing. In the Writers Workship interview he says, “I don’t want a phone book of episodic oral history. I’m looking for beginning, middle and end. I want things to happen. I want the reader to see change. All the things you want in fiction.”

Take a landscape that is prone to drought, a place that has almost no river water, a place where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain fast and relentlessly. Remove from that landscape the grass that has evolved over thousands of years to survive in such conditions, grass that fixes the soil to the ground. Throw in a government policy that promotes populating a place that had been called the American Desert well before the 1930s, giving land away to get people to settle there. Plow it under and plant as much grain as you can. The result? After decades of misguided land use, then several years of severe drought, the topsoil goes airborne and the wind becomes a vehicle for destruction on a biblical scale. This was an era when simply breathing was a life-threatening exercise, as thousands were affected by pneumonia caused by constant dust bombardments filling up their lungs. The Red Cross gave out thousands of face masks to help people fend off the flying dirt. They would be covered within an hour. Lives were extinguished by perennially awful conditions, and help was not a thing one could count on. Worldwide economic conditions contributed to the creation of the Dust Bowl, and did not aid in its recovery, but ignorance, greed, shortsightedness and damn foolishness were big players as well.

I was blown away by scenes that could have come from the time of plagues in Egypt, from a science fiction tale about surviving on a hostile new planet, or, worse, from a horror movie. Infestations of centipedes, clouds of locusts, Sunday community events centered on slaughtering rabbits by the thousand, trying to find one’s way from place to place through blinding clouds of soil, machinery failing because of the extreme static electricity in the air, rapidly forming dunes stopping traffic. It is a chilling tale. There are also heartening stories of communities banding together to help each other forestall foreclosures, and of an enlightened scientist determined to save the land from such callous disregard.

At the end of the book Egan looks at some of the present-day foolishness that is contributing to future catastrophes. He could have gone on for a lot more, but showed considerable restraint. That sort of perspective is in good supply these days in the work of serious writers. Michael Lewis, in The Big Short offers a pointed look at how short term gain crushing long term investment did serious damage not only to Wall Street firms but to the nation, and indeed the world. Jared Diamond’s Collapse looks at the damage to civilizations that a solely short-term perspective can have.

The Worst Hard Time is an outstanding book. The National Book Award people certainly thought so, bestowing on it their 2006 award for Best Nonfiction Book. Egan makes the time come alive, shows how the Dust Bowl came to be, looks at the impact it had on area residents, what was done to try to fix the problem, and sounds an alarm for us all to make sure we don’t repeat the errors of our past.


=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages

Egan’s columns for the New York Times


Interviews
——Houghton Mifflin - A conversation with Timothy Egan
——Duncan Entertainment - Landslide -- A Portrait of President Herbert Hoover - by Tracey Dorsey
——The Writer’s Workshop - Nature Bats Last: A Talk with Timothy Egan - by Nick O’Connell
—— Author Magazine - Timothy Egan Interview

Items of Interest
——There is an outstanding 1998 PBS documentary in their American Experience series on the 1930s, Surviving the Dust Bowl
——A seminal documentary from the time, The Plow That Broke the Plains
——A new (April 9, 2015) piece by Chris Megerian in the LA Times on how bad drought conditions are becoming in California, California faces 'Dust Bowl'-like conditions amid drought, says climate tracker

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book...a thorough history...but dry as a throat full of sawdust in the middle of the desert. That about sums it up, but of course I will continue to babble on for a few more paragraphs.

Before reading this book, I knew next to nothing about the Dust Bowl and the cataclysmic storms that occurred in the 1930‘s, primarily in the area of the U.S. known as the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma (see map):

If you're like me in this respect, than this book is a very worthwhile read, assuming you have at least a slight interest in the history of this period. Looking at the photos above and reading descriptions of the sky appearing as if a black curtain had been draped over the sky, an effect that could last days at a time, was a serious jaw falling with concomitant eye-bulge experience.

As the book chronicles, the dust storms were caused by decades of massive over-farming in the panhandles and surrounding areas without the use of wind erosion prevention techniques (e.g., crop rotation, cover crops and use of fallow fields). Add to this man-made component mother nature's contribution of a severe and prolonged drought and you have all the makings of a seriously horrific dust up.

The over-farming was the result of the momentous drop in commodity prices that followed the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The price of wheat, corn and other crops grown in the panhandles plummeted, forcing farmers to farm more and more land, more and more often, just to try and make ends meet. Unfortunately, this increased in the volume of these commodities, along with a sharp decrease in demand resulting from the Great Depression, caused the plummeting prices to move into crash mode, where they free fell further and faster than Brittany Spears reputation and self esteem.

It was the disastrous, crushing economic conditions facing these farmers that made the onset, the fierceness, and the prolonged nature of the “Dust Bowl” truly worthy of the title “The Worst Hard Time.” The author does a good job of laying out the facts in a very readable manner.  

Thus, as a history book, this novel is excellent. It cogently lays out the history of the region, going back to its settlement by mostly German-Russian immigrants. It also gives a decent background of the situation in the rest of the U.S., and provides a good step by step progression of the events leading up to the beginning of the dust storms in the early 1930s.

So why only 3 stars? Mostly because I've been seriously spoiled by historical writers like David McCullough, Barbara Tuchman and Gordon Wood. These three (and several others that I am sure I am forgetting right now) write amazingly detailed histories, while at the same time providing such rich and engaging background and individual anecdotes that their histories come alive and you feel immersed in the period.

Odd as it sounds, I guess you could say that I was disappointed that I didn’t feel sacks of dust pouring into my mouth or the blinding sting of the storm ripping into my skin. I wanted Mr. Egan to throw me in the middle of Black Sunday and tell me to hold on for dear life.

Instead, I mostly got dryness (no pun). I got less than compelling personal stories and no real emotional evocation or dramatic tension. It was the story of the dust storms as done by CNN when what I really wanted was a stellar, kick-ass miniseries by HBO.

Granted, these criticisms are mostly the result of McCullough, Tuchman and Wood being such saucy bitches that they make everyone else look bad by comparison. That is probably unfair to Mr. Egan, but in the cut throat, sink or swim world of competitive history writing, I say tough mammaries, Mr. Egan. Sack up and step up your drama.

Still, a good, well-researched history about an intriguing and previously mysterious period, but a little too dry and textbook like to earn a 4th star from me.

3 0 stars. Recommended.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“[A] storm in May 1934 carried the windblown shards of the Great Plains over much of the nation. In Chicago, twelve million tons of dust fell. New York, Washington – even ships at sea, three hundred miles off the Atlantic coast – were blanketed in brown. Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Horses ran madly against the storms. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called ‘dust pneumonia.’ In desperation, some families gave away their children. The instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking someone’s hand could knock two people down, for the static electricity from the dusters was so strong…”
- Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

When you think of the Great Depression, any number of iconographic images might pop into your mind: a long line of unemployed men in suits and hats, hoping to get work; a sprawling Hooverville dotted with squalid shacks; or Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother, showing a weary pea picker in California, flanked by her children. These pictures are scenes of hopelessness, where hard work cannot save you, because there is no work to be found.

Then there are the photographs of the dusters. These still-captures of tremendous dust storms on the Great Plains are different than other visions of the Great Depression. They move far beyond mere economic miseries into the realm of sheer terror. Looking at them now brings to mind the pyroclastic flow of an erupting volcano, or the impenetrable veil on the edges of a nuclear explosion. Falling stock prices, rising joblessness, failed banks, and illiquidity are all natural parts of capitalism. The dust storms, though, were an unnatural feature of an upended world.

It is this aspect of the Great Depression – just one of its many hells – that is the focus of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time.

***

The best histories, at least in my mind, are able to strike a magical balance between the impersonal and the personal, between the context of large events, and the intimacy of how those events affected individuals. The Worst Hard Time is in that small category of books that manages to do these two different things, and to do them extremely well.

Egan follows approximately a dozen families in half a dozen states (Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas) comprising the so-called “Dust Bowl.” The cast of characters is large and covers a broad spectrum of perspectives. There are farmers, of course, but also cowboys, doctors, civic boosters, a young schoolteacher working for vouchers, and the occasional charlatan promising to make rain by sending dynamite into the clouds with balloons. Though it is a lot to keep track of at first, by the end, you feel that you know many of these characters personally. You marvel at their endurance, get frustrated by their stubbornness, and mourn their losses.

***

Simply telling human stories is not enough. They need to be placed into the vast web in order for us to understand their experiences. Egan does this by toggling between global facts – such as the millions of acres of grasslands torn up for wheat, and the millions of tons of dirt lifted into the air – and the impact those essentially ungraspable facts had on specific persons. The intertwining is incredibly seamless, the larger history and the family histories perfectly informing each other.

Fields were bare, scraped to hardpan in places, heaving in others. The skies carried soil from state to state. With no appreciable rain for two years, even deep wells were gasping to draw from the natural underground reservoir. One late winter day in 1933, a battalion of clouds massed over No Man’s land. At midday, the sun disappeared. Lights were turned on in town in order to see. The clouds dumped layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial assault that covered streets in Boise City, buried brown pockets of grass, and rolled over big Will Crawford’s dugout… Hazel Lucas Shaw watched the dust seep through the thinnest cracks in the walls of their rental house, spread over the china, into the bedroom, onto the sheets. When she woke in the morning, the only clean part of her pillow was the outline of her head…

The Worst Hard Time is two experiences in one. First, it is a great epic filled with novelistic details, the fruit of intense reportage. Second, it is a great history book, shored by hard facts and lucid explanations. I learned a lot, felt a lot, and got really thirsty.

***

Egan structures The Words Hard Time by dividing it into three big parts.

The first covers the years 1901 to 1930, the leadup to the Dust Bowl era. This is a tale of the vast difference between human time, which is relatively short, and geologic time, which is impossibly long. Generally speaking, the Great Plains does not get a lot of rainfall, but at the moment it filled with small farmers chasing the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, it was getting a bit more than average, leading to a lot of faulty assumptions. Enticed by promoters, these farmers began tearing out the grass, grass that had evolved to grow – even thrive – in dry conditions. Then the First World War caused a spike in wheat prices, and suddenly the farmers who already existed were joined by speculative farmers who tore out grass as fast as they could, replacing it with wheat. As with every bubble that ever existed, everyone assumed the good times would last forever.

The second part – from 1931-33 – follows the bubble’s burst. After delivering record wheat harvests, the prices started to fall. They fell so far that wheat was left to rot. Even as prices dropped, the rain did not. A drought began. Unlike other droughts, however, this one descended upon a Great Plains denuded of grass, the topsoil left exposed.

The final part, spanning 1934 to 1939, is the most gripping and painful. This lengthy section describes the consequences that come from tearing up grasslands in a low-moisture environment that is also subject to high winds. During these years, massive dust storms ravaged the Great Plains. One gigantic duster lifted 350 million tons of earth and delivered it as far away as New York City. Townspeople hired rainmakers while President Franklin D. Roosevelt devised a number of different programs – including contour farming, tree planting, and dust control districts – in order to reverse the damage done to the land. Unfortunately, as Egan points out, in many places the Great Plains has still not healed.

***

Egan ends The Worst Hard Time with an extremely short epilogue that I wish had been longer. I would have liked a bit more detail on the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, a facet of the Great Depression that could not be cured by the coming of the Second World War.

More than that, I would have appreciated Egan’s thoughts on what lessons from this era we are presently ignoring, if any. The story of the Dust Bowl seems to be the story of people seduced by a climatic aberration into living in a place that is not entirely suited for the purpose. In particular, I wonder about the American West, where extreme heat, wildfires, and a diminishing water supply appear ripe to supplant dust as the chief evil to human habitation.

***

Ultimately, the creation of the Dust Bowl was the result of a concatenation of factors. Some factors, such as the wind, the heat, and the drought, simply cannot be controlled. But others – specifically the peculiarly-human mode of profit-oriented thinking, in which the well-being of future generations is exchanged for the money to be made in one’s own lifetime – are manageable, with some effort. We are always told how important it is to “change the world.” But in some crucial instances, it is best to leave the world alone.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

”BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY —BRING CLUBS”

Don’t judge, the rabbits were a menace to their livelihood. These folks were plagued by jackrabbits, grasshoppers and endless dust. Clubbing some rabbits at felt like they were fighting back while they lost everything.

It is hard to say which is worse the steady constant destruction ever-present dust from four drought waves in ten years, or the more intense black blizzards which only lasted hours or days.

Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a raincloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard—a black blizzard, they called it—with an edge like steel wool.

There was enough static electricity in one to knock a person unconscious, short out car engines, and cause blue flames to erupt from metal fences. It would fell alive, like a monster.


Egan gives a good background. The lure of inexpensive land—image enhanced by land speculators. The dramatic rise in wheat prices and a surge in production.

In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardanelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, though the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family farmer but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

The economic boom and increased population.

”The uncertainties of 1919 were over,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most insightful chronicler of the hubris of the 1920s. “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”

Wheat prices began to drop after the war. The stock market crashed in 1929, and the first of the four droughts was in 1930-1931.

”Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains."
—Robert Geiger, a reporter for the Associated Press, 1935

Not to be dismissive of Midwesterners potential for mayhem, but don’t think of them as a rioting mob. They were starving, and President Hoover didn’t believe in government assistance.
I wish there was more on recovery and prevention. Or maybe, I wish there was more recovery and preventative measures. Tapping the Ogallala Aquifer for irrigation isn’t a long-term solution.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and superbly written account of the environmental tragedy that affected millions of Americans. Mr Egan presents the reasons behind the Dust Bowl and tells stories of farmers whose lives were shattered by a phenomenon they did not fully comprehend at that time. Truly, it is hard for me to imagine all suffering that was induced by the way the land was changed from grazing areas to farming fields. Those brave people survived years of dust and winds at the time when the Great Depression added to their misery.
A terrific read!

[Jessaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain…
Yeeow! Aye-yip-aye-yo-ee-ay!”

~~written by Rogers and Hammerstein

Moving to Oklahoma

“You are going to look for a home in Oklahoma?” By the look on her face, and the tone in her voice, I knew that my friend was thinking of flat land, the dust bowl and tornadoes. We were thinking of green hills, lakes, rivers, and freedom from tornadoes as had been promised of Tahlequah, OK.

After all, Tahlequah had been blessed by the Indians to never have a tornado. It helps to live in a valley surrounded by hills that they call mountains. And whenever I hear a tornado warning, it helps to think of the blessing.

Well, the realtors never told us about the bugs: the ticks, the chiggers, nor the mosquitoes. We learned about those on our own after moving here. I got around 200 chiggers bites one year. I was a mess. Then we both came down with tick fever. We were really sick. And yet, here we live in the city limits. Now we just hope to never get Nile Fever.

I-40, No Man’s Land and the Cross of Jesus

In October of 2006, we drove from San Diego County through LA on the 215 to Barstow, and then we got on to the I-40 freeway heading to Oklahoma. Going thorugh the panhandle of Texas we only saw desolate, barren land.

Somewhere along this route the town of Groom, TX popped up. They had put a VERY large cross of Jesus on a piece of their barren, flat land. You can see it from the freeway. That was all they had to offer to the land. Perhaps, Jesus protects it from another Dust Bowl, which I learned later, had originated in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and had spread out somewhat to include parts Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Nebraska.

We pulled off the highway at Groom and drove past The Cross of Jesus and found their livestock yard. We pulled into its drive way and parked. Then we let our dog, Mocha, out of the car, and we got out too and stretched our legs. The ground was covered with cow pies, which Mocha loved and began eating. She was having so much fun, but we weren’t, so we all got back into the car, drove past The Cross again and headed east to Oklahoma.

We drove though Oklahoma just south of Oklahoma’s own panhandle, again, desolation. How could anyone live here? Back in the pioneer days they called the Panhandle, No Man’s Land, and it touched Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Some places still are No Man’s Land, as far as I could tell.

As we continued on I-40 the flat land was green and sometimes there were small rolling hills. We could live here if it weren’t for the tornadoes, but this time of year it was pretty. Finally, we made it to East Oklahoma and drove up 82 through Vian to Tahlequah. I was in awe. It was hilly and beautiful with lakes and rivers. It is part of the Ozark Mountains, so the map says. Some say that it is only the foothills, but when we drove through the Ozarks in later years, I could not see any difference. It is amazing how those living in the Ozarks can make molehills into mountains.

The Big Dust Comma

The Dust Bowl was mainly in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and moved out into a circle to include parts of Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico. It was only a small section of these areas, but its effects were felt far and wide. On a map it looks like a coma facing in the opposite direction, not a bowl shape at all.

The Panhandles were lands that no one wanted; they were the last lands to sell. They were cheap. And I will admit it, if we could afford it we would be living in Cayucos or Morro Bay, CA., but only because we miss the ocean and wish we didn’t live in the humidity with all of the bugs.

The Sacred Sweetgrass

The nesters, as they called the farmer’s in the Great Plains areas, dug up the sod--the buffalo grass, along with its wild flowers. (You can see what the prairies once looked like it you visit nature preserves that were created after the Dust Bowl ended. We have been to one of those nature preserves in Nebraska and in August the flowers were still blooming along with the buffalo grass or sweetgrass, as it is also called. It was beautiful.)

But who could live in any of this prairie land where all you can see is flat land and blue skies all day and every day, except when it rains and there are tornadoes, or when snow is on the ground? And if you are traveling, as we were, it would take you a few days to find any change in the terrain. The pioneers had it better, they saw prairie grasses and flowers, but all we saw were corn and soybean fields in Nebraska and Kansas. It was not inviting.

What is inviting is the sweetgrass, because it smells so wonderland. I brought a braid of it home one year when we had taken a trip east and had visited the Seminole Indian reservation. I placed it on my desk, and it scented the air around my desk for a few years. Then one day when we were driving from Tahlequah to Tulsa on i-82, I smelled it out our car window for I had memorized the scent. A rich rancher had fields of it for his cattle. It filled the air with such sweetness that I later bought some from an online nursery, $5 for three sprouts of grass. I wanted to do our own yard in it, but it would cost too much to fill a half acre, which is why I guessed the rancher out on I-82 was rich. Instead, I planted the three grass spouts in one of my flower beds and let them grow. I never trimmed them. They have grown into maybe 20 clumps over the years.

The Indians believe that sweetgrass is sacred. That is true; it is. It is too bad that the nesters didn’t realize this, for in killing the sod, the sweetgrass, they killed the land and themselves. The land in the panhandles has never fully recovered, and it never will. Some of the land is still sterile.

Killers of the Flowers and the Sweetgrass Sod

The nesters knew little of farming, so they removed all of the sod to make way for crops. For years those crops thrived, but then a drought came, and it lasted for years. If they had only known to make furrows in the land so the winds could not pick up the land in sheets and deposit it elsewhere. Still, you needed water to grow crops, and that they didn’t have. You also needed that sod.

The first dust storms came with the drought in 1930 and lasted for 6 years. When the storms grew in size and made it all the way to Washington D.C., even landing on the President’s desk, he took notice. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know already, because it was in all the news, even in letters to the White House. But Roosevelt finally sat up in his chair, dusted off his desk, and thought about helping the starving and dying farmers.

The people had been choking on the dust. It got into their lungs and into their stomachs. “Dust pneumonia” is what they called it when it killed them. Children were to die often before the adults. Many animals, that were left out during the dust storms, were dead by morning. When you read about it, it can make you sick at heart, and it can make you angry because help didn’t come fast.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds

Some people even had to live on tumbleweeds because that was all that was left. Some added dandelions to their meals. They even salted the tumbleweeds and fed them to their cattle. I can’t imagine that tumbleweed tasted like anything other than, well, I don’t know. If I ever see one again I will find out.

I have loved tumbleweeds since my youth. The Sons of the Pioneers made them famous with their song, Tumbling Tumbleweeds:

“See them tumbling down,
Pledging their love to the ground!
Lonely, but free, I'll be found,
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”

I remember this record playing on the jutebox when I was dancing with my father at his bar/restaurant in Santa Maria, CA. This was sometime in the early 50s. I used to sing it often.

Now that I have read this book, this song takes on new meaning. I can’t help but think that some of the survivors of the Dust Bowl didn’t appreciate the song, especially when tumbleweeds were all that some had left to eat. And then to think that it was recorded and played on the radio back in 1934 when the Dust Bowl was taking away lives.

We had tumbleweeds on our land in Creston, CA. We used to see them along the roads too, and sometimes they would take flight. I didn’t see them in Creston when we visited this summer or I would have brought one home to keep. Instead we saw grape vineyards for our old farmhouse was gone, as were our neighbor’s homes. All vineyards. The vineyards are taking up all the water in Paso Robles and Creston. Rancher’s wells are going dry. Their own aquifer is drying up. Man will never learn.

The Land They Loved

Many left their land during the Dust Bowl, moved into nearby towns or completely away from the Dust Bowl. Many went to California, but then Californians put up signs saying, “You are not welcome. There is no work here.” Those that left were the lucky ones, unless their lungs gave out on them in later years. But some didn’t want to leave their land, even when their children were dying. They loved it that much.

They taped wet sheets over their doors and windows. They filled cracks with rags, but the dust blew in, and when storms came and went, they shoveled the dust out their doors. They wore masks when they were outdoors, but they had to change them every hour. Next their houses filled up with bugs that also wanted shelter.

Some who left the land died on the way out when a dust storm came and buried them and their cars. No wonder some didn’t leave, it could mean their death, but the love of land can keep you in place also. Still, who could love this land now? Dreams die hard.

The top soil moved on faster than the people could leave. Somewhere, maybe, it left a gold mine of top soil, and if it had blown West, I would say that it blew into Fresno, CA where the fertile land literally feels like flour. Loam. My herbs that I moved from Creston to Fresno grew larger and faster than they ever had in Creston. It was dream soil. But even Fresno was dying because they built homes and the town over the rich loam, taking away crop land.

The Hero Who Saved Us All

Roosevelt took action in 1936 by sending a soil conservationist to the Dust Bowl to teach people about furrowing. Then he planted millions of trees that were not appreciated by some farmers who dug them up. Most of the trees died during the droughts over the years, but there are a few left to this day. Only a few. The idea was to stop the winds from tearing up land. I suppose the trees were to be a wind break.

So Roosevelt became their hero. He sent them money to buy food and pay for their mortgages. He had many big ideas that I loved. Only now our government is trying to take it all away. Just wait and see.

At the end of the 30s the nesters began finding water, lots of water, for they had dug down to the Ogallala Aquifer that stretches out over the Midwest. It now feeds the American people with the crops that they have planted. The Midwest is now the Wheat, Corn and Soybean Belt of America. In 50 years the aquifer will be dry, and in some areas the water has already dried up. And now fracking is taking up the water, polluting the land and causing earthquakes. What will they do then? What will we all do?


:

[H (no longer expecting notifications) Balikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

This happend less than a century ago and affected millions of Americans and yet it doesn't find much room in most histories of the USA. We know more about those who left the "Dust Bowl" than those who stuck it out. Egan's well-documented recounting is engaging, enlightening and, in many ways, shocking.

4.5*

I expected that Ken Burns would take this history to another level, but I can't say that he improves upon Egan's narrative.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a fair amount of history and I usually enjoy it, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a history book that was quite the page-turner this one was. What I knew before about the 1930s drought in the American Dust Bowl was this: there was an agriculture-destroying drought in and around Texas and Oklahoma during the Great Depression that made the economic devastation there even worse. What I learned here, through the personal stories of the people and towns affected, was that the Dust Bowl was a man-made disaster of the first order, an environmental catastrophe due largely to human error, ignorance and greed. The climatic conditions of the prairies were just not suited to intensive agriculture, a fact that was roundly ignored . The zeal of the homesteaders who settled the great grasslands of the Midwest may have appeared at the time to be fulfilling the American destiny of westward expansion and progress through the virtuous traits of industry and capitalistic success as they planted bumper crops of wheat in response to high demand for grain. But the farming practices launched with such enthusiasm in the early part of the century would bring destruction that proved impossible to control or repair. Ecosystems are delicate things. There are valuable lessons to be learned here. (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". . . etc.)

Descriptions of weather-related events throughout the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles in that era are almost unbelievable. Thousands of tons of dirt went airborne on a regular basis. Often it sounds like something out of a sci-fi book set on another planet, or a story of post-apocalyptic climate change, with barren landscapes unable to sustain any crops or vegetation. Cattle would go blind and die with their stomachs full of dirt; babies succumbed to “dirt pneumonia.” The regional economy, aggravated by the more general financial crises that caused and were then sustained by the Depression, tanked completely. There was no economy. Many lived by barter and in sod houses. Even if the houses were not made of sod, they were full of dirt absolutely all of the time from the constant heavy dust storms, despite every attempt to seal doors and windows with damp cloth and tape. Summer ground temperatures in the summer could reach 150 degrees. Static electricity from the dust storms would stall a moving car or knock a man down if he touched another person.

And yet, people stayed, reluctant to leave what they knew just to end up in a bread line in a cold anonymous city somewhere.

I was on the phone to my mother a couple of times, looking for details about her grandparents who had lived near Amarillo. Her mother got out of there young and came to California in the ‘20s, so she missed this episode in Texas history. And my mom was too young in the '30s to have been told about the distant family’s hardships. (All she knows is, she thinks her grandfather had some sort of leather goods business, saddles and harnesses, perhaps, but he was “not very successful,” which I think would have been par for that particular course.)

Egan uses the life stories of several different families to illustrate the hardships common in both farms and towns. There are some heart-breaking tales: a family trying to bury both a baby and a grandmother on the day of a tremendously brutal dust storm (“Black Sunday 1935”), diary excerpts of a older, childless farmer on the Kansas-Nebraska border, his alfalfa crop dead, on the verge of losing his last horses, alone and separated from his wife who has had to take a job in the city.

This is a wonderful piece of research and scholarship, told in an engaging manner that brings these experiences to life, a great tribute to the memories of those who lived through it.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized”
- Hugh Bennett, quoted in Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time



A couple years ago I read Egan's book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (read in 2015). Egan is fantastic at exploring disasters and the public policy response. His talent is excavating these disasters using primary sources (diaries, etc). He, like John McPhee, has the ability to weave a story about people and place. McPhee is usually concerned with the here and now. Egan likes the past. McPhee likes geology. Egan likes disasters. Reading this, I also thought of David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood (read in 2016) and Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (read in 2009) and A Crack in the Edge of the World (read in 2009).

Who knew, years ago, I would be so drawn to the historical disaster genre? These big events are monsters, myths. They quickly develop their own icon status. Who hasn't heard of the dust bowl or seen those photos of Okies covered in dust? Egan does a great job of balancing the human with the historical, the cause with the effect.

It does make you wonder if we really learned much from the Dust Bowl and draught of the 1930s? I think of Oklahoma and Texas and their hostility towards the federal government (despite the fact that again and again the federal government seems to send them more than they take). I think of fracking, water usage in the South West, global warming, antibiotics and livestock. It seems as if expediency and the hope of quick money paired with our nation's inability to think long-term or act strategically (if strategy costs money or restrains behavior AT ALL) will consistently push us towards environmental disasters.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhausting
Sobering
Depressing
Instructive
Haunting
Interesting
Timely
Grinding
Surprising
Painful
Important

Now, what's up with the subtitle? If it were really "The Untold Story," wouldn't it just be a book full of blank pages? Shouldn't it be "The Previously Untold Story"? And why don't publishers ever ask me for my opinions on these things? This calls for some serious pouting.
You should still read the book though. Outstanding research and thorough presentation with lessons for us in our 21st-Century short-sighted resource exploitation mode.

[Justin Tate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot has been written about the Dust Bowl, but this book seems to be considered the most-definitive account. It provides great drama which effectively captures the darkened skies and mass destruction of a dust storm. After a while, of course, one can only describe rolling dust in so many ways before it starts to get repetitive. Egan does find a number of personal stories to humanize the dire situation and expand perspective.

That said, I think a lot of Black, Jewish, Native and other populations will raise an eyebrow at the book's title and be disappointed in the lack of diversity in the stories. I get that the Dust Bowl and Great Depression was really hard on white farmers, but other than a single sentence here and there, you might completely forget anyone else existed.

This book is so white that racial slurs are cleaned up when directly quoting historical documents. I get it, I don't like hearing these words either, but scrubbing them out of history is not the solution. If the point of these brief sections is to show how Black Americans had it even worse, then reducing the factor of racism is not helpful.

As a historian myself, I also totally understand how difficult it is to tell every story. History is vast, vast, and without the space of 10,000 pages, there's no way Egan could have captured every angle, every perspective. But more diversity would've helped, and made the book more engaging.

Fortunately, lacking qualities in The Worst Hard Time mean there's plenty of room for more books to be written on the Dust Bowl. If there's any scholars out there working on one, keep it up -- I can't wait to read your work!

[Diana Higgins · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have about a week to read this for book club and I've got a lot of books in progress that I hate to set aside, so we'll see how this goes...

UPDATE: I gave up! I must be the only person on the planet who didn't like this book. I found the writing to be overblown, over-the-top, even silly at times.

The way it was organized didn't work for me. He'd introduce a person or family and I'd start to get interested, and then he'd abandon them and go back to large, sweeping passages about "the land" which made me start to nod off.

Had he chosen one person or family to tell the story through, it could have been fascinating. Especially if he'd told it straight and without the grating phrasing.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you read The Worst Hard Time please have copious amounts of cool water or lemonade at your side. This true, brutal story of the Dust Bowl will have you reaching for--and appreciating--water like no other story you've ever read. In fact, like me, you may even stand in the next rain shower looking skyward, face slathered in wetness, bending your mind to understand the environmental apocalypse that struck our heartland 3 generations ago.

Timothy Egan's book is an example of why I like non-fiction, especially topics about which I've previously been unlearned. If there was a test of knowledge about the Dust Bowl, I feel Egan has taken me from a score of 10 to around 70. After 70, the score toward 100 rises geometrically, so don't expect The Worst Hard Time, one book, to make you an expert. However, Egan provides a range of issues (agronomy, policy, culture, trade) allowing you to hold your end of a discussion at a cocktail party.

Egan's tone is a bit melodramatic, but holy cow, how better to connect with a readership than recounting the Dust Bowl experience through the lives of several different families at the epicenter of the disaster? To witness the downward spiral, the depravity, of the human condition, it really underscores the human toll from 1932-1938. Had this occured in a sparsely populated area, or a third world country, it may have been a footnote in a government report. Instead, the American hegira to Dust Bowl country was promoted by the government, sustained by commodities speculation, facilitated by the ingress of the railroad, and magnified by the hubris of the early plains farmer.

From a notes section, you know Egan has done his homework. He's interviewed witnesses, combed through Congressional testimony, poured over weather data, pictures, and diaries, and from this pile has laced together several family portraits of daily life on the plains. There's nothing spectacular about the writing, but he's nicely captured the gravitas through character narration.

Here are major points I've learned:

- Dust Bowl boundaries were much smaller than I thought. I assumed you could overlay the boundaries onto the Great Plains or tornado alley or most parts of the Louisiana Purchase. No. The Dust Bowl was the shape of a lightbulb scribed over the panhandle of Texas/Oklahoma, outstate Kansas, SE Colorado, and south-central Nebraska, although it's effects were felt throughout the plains, and in several instances as far as the east coast.
- The primary, academically-accepted, Congressionally-reported cause of the Dust bowl was the plowing under of native, drought-resistant grasses, which had accumulated a mere 3 inches of topsoil over several thousand years, for the wide scale planting of, primarily, wheat. Secondary reasons were a strong drought cycle, absense of high plains growing techniques, cheap land, the arrival of mechanized farming practices, political pressure to homestead these areas, unsustainable food commodities speculation, and an ingrown belief in American manifest destiny. "Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation..." (p 267).
- Growth of farming within the Dust Bowl boundaries is eerily similar to the real estate bubble 80 years later. In the late 1920's, land was cheap, qualifying for loans was easy (even easier for farm properties), and towns sprang up as quickly and as absurdly as today's McMansions in USA's exurbias.
- The concomitant Great Depression destroyed worldwide grain prices, but the Dust Bowlers didn't seem to suffer any worse than average Americans in other parts of the country, or at least that's not how Egan portrayed the circumstances.
- Astonishingly, folks in the heart of the Dust Bowl did not move: of the "221,000 people [who:] would move to California, most of them from AR, OK, and TX...only 16,000 came from the actual Dust Bowl" (p 235). These people simply hunkered down and rode it out for 5 years. Amazing. Why?
- The word 'duster.' Lost to my generation, it described a windstorm that picked up dirt, the consistency of talcum powder, and lashed it at near-hurricane strength at everything in range. The most impressive pictures are those of solid walls of roiled earth barreling down on puny crossroad towns. In 1937, the high dirt mark, 134 dusters wracked the Southern Plains. Some of these lasted for days. Black Sunday (14 Apr '35) was the absolute worst, a Biblical duster of moving earth, responsible for most of the storm pictures you're probably aware of from that time.

I award 3 stars for a solid book, but nothing spectacular besides the topic. I'd have awarded another star if Egan devoted a chapter solely to the science of what happened. Would recommend this book to anyone who's ignorant of what happened in 'No Man's Land' in the 1930s.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone living in the west and for all politicians. The author does a fine job of telling the story of the Dust Bowl era, why it happened (natural forces and human actions), and where we stand today. It's clear to see that adding climate change to the mix requires us to develop stronger conservation policies & practices if we want to avoid such a catastrophe happening again. With the population we have in this area now, I can't imagine the suffering or how we would recover. The old photographs included in this book are truly worth a thousand words!

[Taury · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is a non-fiction book about the Depression/Dust bowl era. Such a very sad time in our Nation’s history. Before WW2 so many suffering, out of work and hungry. Trying to get ahead and doing things in normal times they would never do.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars to a book about the Dust Bowl - who would've thought it? Egan does an amazing job of combining the varied causes, and the related perspectives, of the drouth that savaged the plains throughout the 1930s. Not only was it an amazing read, made personal through the stories of a handful of families in the Texas / Oklahoma panhandle, I learned about one of the most influential and far-reaching incidents in our country's history. And the parallels to the environmental, governmental, political, and individual issues that we are facing today is rather breathtaking. If you didn't receive an inspiring history education, read this book.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Egan’s account of environmental disaster and personal hardship follows the lives of farm families and townspeople who lived through the dust bowl of the 1930s. Drawn by a last chance to have their own place homesteaders settled into the semi-arid plains of Western Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. They plowed under the native grass, planted wheat and for a few years prospered. Demand spiked due to WWI and the farmers planted all the land they could. This led to persistent overproduction and dramatically falling prices leaving the farmers in poverty. The Great Depression followed which precluded finding decent jobs elsewhere. Then the rains stopped in the region’s normal cycle of periodic drought, but the farmers unaware of such cycles were caught by surprise.

The people who settled this marginal land were an independent and hardy stock. Their reaction was to dig in and hang on hoping a climate they did not understand would change. It didn’t and their unsustainable farming practices turned the once pristine grassland into a devilish sea of sand and dust. With the original grass cover removed the soil was picked up by the ever-present strong plains winds and carried as far as the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. There were 5 million acres in the dust bowl. The farmers lost 480 tons of soil per acre. Only too late did they recognize the long lasting destruction they had wrought. Their top soil was gone leaving a hard unproductive surface. The rains picked up again in the 1940s and subsequently with intensive restoration efforts some areas were returned to grassland, but many sections were permanently devastated.

This sad lesson of environmental disaster has not prevented further degradation of the land. The author notes in the epilogue that subsidized cotton farming supported by deep wells is rapidly draining the underlying aquifer. Once the aquifer, which was filled by ancient melting glaciers, is depleted, the region will have no reliable source of water. Egan’s book is more than an account of the land; it is a chronicle of a remarkable people. The book is filled with heartfelt personal stories of dust bowl families who suffered incredible hardships. One can only be astonished at how or why they stuck it out through years of extreme deprivation and dust induced illness that shortened their lives and too often killed their children. Well worth reading both as a story of human survival and an environmental lesson.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time there was a country where speculation ran rampant, environmental disaster loomed, and foreclosures and job loss dominated the economy. It was the Great Depression, v1.0.

Timothy Egan's book has an unusual perspective. It is about those who *stayed* in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle during the dust bowl. It is the story of government supported land speculation gone horribly wrong. The farmers uprooted a fragile grass ecology and destroyed 1000s of years of topsoil. Raging dust storms left people dying of "dust pneumonia" and cattle with stomachs so choked with dirt that they died of starvation. It is also the story of an attempt to deal with an economic disaster that was unprecedented in scale and completely unexpected.

It is a compellingly told story and, unfortunately, disturbingly familiar.

[happy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this narrative, Mr. Egan has written a superb account of what life was like on the high planes of the Texas Panhandle during what is probably the worst ecological disaster in US history – The Dust Bowl. At the center of the story is the people of Dalhart, Texas in the extreme northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle and the epicenter of the disaster. The author looks at all sections of the society, from the town fathers to those people in trouble who were just passing through.

I would guess what most Americans know of the Dust Bowl comes from John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath or the movie made from that novel. That is the story of those who were beaten and left the high plains, Mr. Egan tells the story of those who stayed.

In telling the story of Dalhart, the author tells the story of how it came to be. He traces the history of the area from the Comanche Indians, for whom the area around Dalhart was in the heart of their homeland, through the great cattle ranches of the 1870s and ’80s. Finally, when the cattle boom went bust in the ‘90s and the ranches broken up, the author tells the story of the gov’t attempts to populate the area with homesteaders. The main problem with homesteading that area is that there is not enough rain fall for a diverse agricultural base. About the only thing that would grow there was grass and by extension wheat.

As the homesteaders arrived, Mr. Egan looks at what the wheat farming did to the buffalo grass prairie - it destroyed it. Still at the rates of cultivation in the early 20th century, not much damage was being done. Then came the Great War and the demand and more importantly the price of wheat sky rocketed. At the same time the area underwent more than a decade of way above average rainfall, encouraging even more wheat production and more plowing under of the buffalo grass. At one point the author states that a farmer could get $4/bushel for wheat that cost him $0.70 to produce, and a wheat farmer could net $8K - $10K a year when the income for an average American was around $2K. Also wheat farming didn't require any special knowledge – anyone could do it, if one was willing to put in the work.

The author then explains what happened when the price of wheat crashed in the late ‘20s and the farmers could not sell it for the cost of production They plowed more ground and planted more wheat – not surprisingly the price of wheat did not recover. By 1930/31 there was so much wheat produced that it couldn’t be sold and was just dumped on the ground and rotted. In many case farmers went as much a 5 yrs without selling a crop At the same time as the price crash, the area went into a long term drought. As the rain didn’t come and the wheat prices didn’t rise, much of the acreage devoted to wheat went unplanted. Due to the farming practices of the day, the dirt was left exposed to the constant wind. That wind picked up the exposed soil and blew from here to there and back again.

The author does an exceptional job of telling what life was like during the dust storms. He describes the dust that got into everything – no matter what was tried it could not be kept out of homes or bodies. With the dust storms came extreme static electricity. It was so bad that people attached chains to the axles of their vehicles so they would stay grounded and not short out and stall while driving. He describes the drifts of dirt that literally closed railroads and highways because they got so deep. Also during the storms, visibility became so limited, a person couldn't go to the outhouse with out loosing ones way. His description of the Great Palm Sunday dust storm of 1935 is absolutely horrifying.

Another aspect of the Dust Bowl that Mr. Egan does a good job with is the health problems it engendered. Probably the most dangerous being “Dust Pneumonia” when the dust got into the lungs and could not be expelled by coughing. This was especially lethal to the very young and very old.

Throughout the narrative are the stories of the people of Dalhart and the surrounding areas and their struggle to stay in their homes, put food on the table and keep their way of life going. Mr. Egan tells some very moving and often sad vignettes of people who made northwest Texas their home.

Also, while telling the story, Mr. Egan relates some of the endemic racism of the time. From the relatively minor, ie “Negros” had to leave town by sundown or be subject to arrest for vagrancy – to the out-n-out systemic racism of the government. For an example the Governor of Oklahoma at the time, had proposed a state constitution when OK was being considered for statehood that actually codified the separation of the races. It was taken out much to his displeasure. His views hadn’t mellowed in the 20 yrs since OK became a state. This is a very sobering read and examples are scattered throughout the second half of the book.

Mr. Egan also looks at what the Federal Gov’t did to help. This ranged from almost no help from the Hoover administration, who felt that the Dust Bowl farmers had made wrong economic choices and therefore not the responsibility of the gov't, to FDR who began the price support system guaranteeing a market for wheat. FDR's interior department that was also trying to buy up abandoned farms and replant them with native grasses. This plan ran into great resistance in congress until the Interior Secretary timed his testimony before congress on the same day as the remains of a dust storm fell on Washington DC – he got his money. That program grew into the National Grasslands. The author also includes a small post script on what the area is like today and the fact that some of the areas have never really recovered.

I found that a very enlightening read and definitely 5 stars – I highly recommend this one

[David Eppenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't normally pay much attention to the title of a book. The title's primary purpose to me is to catch my attention when I'm in a book store browsing. After it catches my eye I immediately resort to the GR scan feature to learn what GR members have to say about the book. In the final analysis what I remember about a book is what's behind the title. Frequently, when speaking about a book I've read with a friend I will be completely unable to recall the title. This book and its title are entirely different. I can't recall a more appropriately titled book than this one, "The Worst Hard Time".

My parents were children of the of the Depression. During my childhood they told us stories of how that national tragedy affected their childhoods and that of their friends and neighbors. We all probably have read stories and seen photos of the Depression and many of us have read "The Grapes of Wrath" or seen the movie. This book is not about any of that. This book is not about the people that fled the Dust Bowl. This book is about the people that stayed and attempted to exist on next to nothing, literally. Pride and independence prevented them from seeking aid until things went beyond desperate, way beyond. What is also remarkable about this book is to read it now in a time when we live among people that for selfish and political reasons are adamant in their rejection of science and in climate change. The book makes clear that after the government finally addressed the crisis following FDR's election that the cause of the Dust Bowl was man and his ignorance and his greed. Sadly, the people that need to read this history never will as it fails to affirm what they wish to believe and profit by. What this book does affirm is the consequences of man's ignorance and greed when dealing with the forces of nature. To this day the area afflicted by these vices of man has not healed.

The author's story spans primarily the '30's but he delivers a necessary background to set up his story and the lives of those he uses to illustrate the scope of the Dust Bowl tragedy. In his telling of this history he employs the lives of several local residents in and around the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. The stories of these people really humanizes the narrative and magnifies its impact. While weather reports, crops statistics, land cultivation data etc are all helpful and put a scale on the disaster it's reading about the daily lives of people that lived through it that give this book its wow factor. The impact this disaster had on the health of the people living there was something that I never considered. I always thought the limit of the tragedy was in the fertility of the soil blowing away. I did not know that these winds were an almost daily occurrence and that breathable air was a precious commodity and "dust pneumonia" was a virulent killer. Who would ever think a person walking or working outside could be suddenly caught in one of these dust storms and suffocate to death. That the detrimental affect of the Dust Bowl on the health of residents was something that would have required a career of coal mining yet these folks were being afflicted within a few years. This is an extremely compelling history whose worth today is enormous and we should all learn about the Worst Hard Time. I highly recommend this book.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pstscript: My husband is now reading this book and so of course we are talking about it. Well, I have discovered at least two errors, and this gets me worried. What other facts have I absorbed as true and perhaps are false? I am left with an unpleasant feeling. Error number one is on page 26-27. There it says that Native Americans were not American citizens in 1926. I wanted to know when they were allowed to become American citizens. What did I find? They were given citizenship in 1924. What? Something is wrong! The other error my husband pointed out to me. On page 94-95 it says:

"As the ranks of the jobless grew, they took to the rails, going from town to town, dodging Rock Island bulls in the south, the Burlington Northern bulls in the other direction, swapping stories about places where the sun shined and a man might still get paid for a day's work. Two million Americans were living as nomads."

The Burlington Northern railroad line began in the 1970s, not the 30s!

Review: The scope of the book is so wide - you get everything from the immigration policies of Catherine the Great to the tales of the Volga Russian Germans who settled in Oklahoma to FDR's New Deal. History is discussed in such a manner that you thoroughly understand why and what has happened to cause the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Parts read like horror fiction. On the negative side: sometimes all the facts and dates and prices and statistics become overly heavy.

Overall a very sad episode of American history. The whole book is very sombre in tone, but what can you expect!

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly readable history of the American Dust Bowl in the southern Great Plains in the “Dirty Thirties,” what led to it, and how the people living in the region survived it. By focusing on the people that stayed, and following the stories of several families, the author shows the depths of suffering experienced in this dark period. A few of the challenges, in addition to lethal dust storms that recurred for almost a decade, included “dust pneumonia,” plagues of insects, static electricity, drought, poverty, starvation, and foreclosure. It shows what can happen when the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature is disrupted. It covers the governmental response and attempts to revitalize the area, including Hugh Bennett’s soil conservation efforts. Egan has captured a vivid snapshot of a time-period, and the courage, fortitude, and anguish of the people who lived through it. Recommended to readers of non-fiction, especially those interested in the 1930’s or environmental history.

[Pete Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like the worst hard read. Actually, it's not a bad book; he really captures the unrelenting grimness of the topic. The resulting experience, however, is just that: unrelenting grimness. The dustbowl was way worse than I realized; however, I knew this half-way through, and spent the rest of the book wondering, like its subjects, when it would end.
Well written, yet excruciating.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is a very immersive and fascinating account of the great dust bowl that plagued the great plains during the 1930's. He tells the story of the people that stayed and survived this plague based on interviews and records of people who were in their 80s and 90s but who still remembered the awful years of the Dust Bowl. At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres with its epicenter on the southern plains of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Huge dust storms raged for much of the 1930s because farmers had plowed millions of acres of grassland to grow mostly wheat. Then when multi-year droughts hit, the land was left fallow with the topsoil swept up by the wind. "There'd be days, you couldn't see your hand in front a' your face," said one man who was a boy at the time. Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called "dust pneumonia." In desperation, some families gave away their children. Hugging a loved one or shaking hands could knock two people down because the static electricity from the dusters was so strong. The simplest thing in life, taking a breath, was a threat.



Egan provides a history of the area leading up to the Dust Bowl including the Comanche and their reliance on the buffalo. When they were driven from the land and the buffalo were all slaughtered, the cowboys used the grassland for cattle. One of the largest cattle ranches in the country, the XIT, was once located in what would become the dust bowl of the 30s. Then the homesteaders came at the urging of the government to grow crops on land that should have never been plowed.

The book goes on to tell the story of various families that lived mostly in the panhandles of Oklahoma, "No Man's Land", and Texas, and Baca County, Colorado. Some of these families refused to leave always hoping for a better year and a return to normal. But with the Depression going on at this time and no relief from drought, the dust storms kept coming and the families could barely survive. There were many people who did leave as related in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath but the farmers Steinbeck wrote about were mostly from further east in Oklahoma and were ruined by the collapse of the economy. The people who left during the dust storms were called "Exodusters" and lived further west. Egan's book focuses on the people who stayed, "for lack of money or lack of sense."

This was overall a very hard hitting look at probably the greatest eco-disaster in history. It was full of pathos and poignancy and a very compelling read that I would recommend.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have had this book on my To-Read list for a while now. I first discovered it browsing Kindle's Prime library offerings, and so I borrowed it (and there it sat for probably a good 2 years, because apparently there are no due dates lol). But, when I actually got around to reading this, I borrowed the audiobook from a different library. So, this was a dual lendsies, flipsies/flopsies situation as I would kind of jump into the ebook as I listened occasionally. But I'm glad that I did, because in the book, there are a lot of images and pictures taken, and it really adds a lot to the magnitude of this catastrophe.

We have all grown up hearing about the Dust Bowl, and about the Great Depression, but this book really brought both to life in a way I just had not appreciated before... though I'll be honest, I feel like I almost have more questions now than I did going in. I love the personal, put a face and a name on the people enduring the horrors of this area and era, aspect of this book, but I do find myself wanting a bit more in terms of the studies around the causes and impacts of the Dust Bowl.

For instance, it seems clear to me that the Great Depression was a major contributing factor to the Dust Bowl - people were planting huge swaths of wheat and corn and then they couldn't sell it. So it was being planted, the ground tore up, and then it was just left to rot if it couldn't be used (and the massive quantities that they were producing just... could not be used.) So eventually, it became difficult to even plant crops, and then the fallow fields, ruined soil, and droughts, and wind all just started escalating each other.

But what I don't know is whether the Dust Bowl itself would have always happened, without the Great Depression factoring in. And I am very curious about this. I know that the way that we decimated the native grasses and animals (and people, let's be honest) from the plains, and started mono-culturing crops, were ruinous. That is obvious to me, but I wonder... if crop prices and demand had stayed steady, would we have seen anything like the Dust Bowl? Or would it have more likely been a steady decline with the kind of endless debate that we see around climate change that we see now? I think that's probably very likely, but I would love more info around the science of the causes of the Dust Bowl, and more information about the methods that were used to recover from it, and prevent a future recurrence.

This was a very heartbreaking book to read, though that was lessened somewhat by the audiobook reader trying to do the voices and, in my opinion, making a mockery of the people he's representing. I really dislike that, and I would MUCH rather have him just read their words in his own voice than try to sound like someone else extremely poorly - whether that's a farmer, a woman, a child, or FDR. Just... STOP.

Anyway, I would definitely recommend the book if you're curious about this topic.

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most amazing thing about this book was that it read like a story. A lot of non-fiction books recapping moments in history tend to read like school books. Every once and a while highlighting a story then listing dry facts. Timothy Egan did not do that. Every word, while informative, is rich and enticing, keeping you hooked.

Another thing Egan did really well was keeping thing easy to understand. There were a few moments where I was a little lost, but for the most part everything was clear and allowed me to fall into this strange world that actually existed less than 80 years ago.

One thing that drew me into this book was that this was about my grandparents generation. They weren't in the Dust Bowl, but a fair share of this book is about the Depression itself, and that effected everyone in the country. The fact that this massive drought occured at the same time of the Depression is almost unbelievable. But even if you don't have any personal ties to the Depression or the Dustbowl, this book will still have something that grabs at you.

In a way the fact that it almost reads like a novel kind of hurts the truthfulness of the book. It detaches you in a way and you have to keep reminding yourself that this was real, this did really happen, people suffered and died even. Egan does ground you in the end with an update of what's going on today. The book wakes you up that man can't do anything he wants to the earth. The earth is a very delicate creature that needs to maintain a balance that man can't control.

This book is left as a reminder of what happened as the people who lived it are now reaching the end of their long journey. This book is an honor to them, sharing their story with everyone. Pick up this book and hear their memories, as cheesey as it sounds it's worthwhile.

[Chris D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the whys and wherefores of the circumstances and the people and personalities of the dust bowl region of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado. Egan takes us into the lives of farmers, ranchers, teachers and businessmen who moved into this area with such high hopes and how they came so completely changed during the decade of the 1930's.

We learn how the flim flam man took these people with oh so many promises and how the government worsened the situation in the panhandle sections of Texas and Oklahoma in the late 20's and early 30's. I really enjoyed Egan's discussion of how governmental policies evolved during this period as the Roosevelt administration searched for solution or at least to make life in the Dust Bowl sustainable.

It is a sad book in many ways but one to me that is a very important one to read and understand.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew almost nothing about the Dust Bowl. This book was revelation after revelation about the events that led to this environmental disaster. The Plains were home for hundreds of years to Native American tribes. On my only visit to St. Louis I went to the Cahokia Mounds, a site that originated over 1000 years ago. https://cahokiamounds.org/ There were similar sites in Alabama, Oklahoma, and other central states.

The Homestead Act was the beginning of the forces that brought about the ecological disaster that destroyed farming and indeed life in the southern plains. The Dust Bowl impacted Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and the western Oklahoma panhandle.
Signed into law in May 1862, the Homestead Act opened up settlement in the western United States, allowing any American, including freed slaves, to put in a claim for up to 160 free acres of federal land. By the end of the Civil War, 15,000 homestead claims had been established, and more followed in the postwar years. Eventually, 1.6 million individual claims would be approved; nearly ten percent of all government held property for a total of 420,000 square miles of territory.

Homesteaders moved west, driving Plains tribes into extinction, and/or exile, and destroying the buffalo. In order to farm, they tore up the grasslands that were native to the area, and planted wheat. Topsoil blew away, and erosion ensued. The worldwide wheat market collapsed in the early 1930's- the failure of the US economy was a major element in creating the Dust Bowl. Then nature intervened with a series of droughts over several years. This book describes in detail how it was human intervention, and destruction of the natural ecology that led to the Dust Bowl.

The suffering of humans and animals living through these dust storms was beyond my imagination. Animals died because their lungs and stomachs were packed with dust. Humans developed "dust pneumonia" and babies were very vulnerable. Silicosis also developed in a couple of short years, felling seemingly healthy adults. The government under FDR and the New Deal intervened, and gratitude towards FDR still survives in some quarters.

Egan writes fascinating history with significant humanity. He has become one of my favorite non-fiction authors.

[Sandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now matter how bad things get today, it’s hard to imagine that times will ever be harder than the 1930’s throughout the Great Plains. You undoubtedly have heard of the Dust Bowl, a series of dust storms that swept the plains during the Great Depression. I had heard of it, and I’ve read the quintessential novel about the era, The Grapes of Wrath. However, until reading this book, I had no idea of just how terrible it was. I didn’t know just how long it had lasted or how frequent the dust storms were. I had no sense of their magnitude. In following the lives of several individuals and families living through the Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan brings the era to horrific life.

Normally, I’d say that top-notch fiction can do a better job than non-fiction histories of depicting what it’s like to actually live through certain circumstances. However, that is not the case with the Dust Bowl. If I were to read a novel about a similar event, there’s no way I’d believe it. I’ve never read a novel that had any event that was as terrible as the Black Blizzard of that era. And, the people in Egan’s book suffered through storm after storm after storm for nearly a decade. It’s mind-boggling. Egan does a great job of conveying the history without bogging the reader down in minutia.

Patrick Lawlor was a terrific choice for a narrator. He’s got a very down-home voice that sounds like he could have been there. His reading keeps the book interesting, unlike many non-fiction audiobooks. Egan’s narrative style really helps in keeping the story interesting. He keeps in mind that history is a story, not just a collection of facts and figures.