The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Edition 001)

...since I was born in the late 60's yet here in 2008 I wanted to know about the folks that survived during that period of time, how they lived and why it had all happened. Timothy made this real and "touchable" for me. Your heart breaks for these people, it's a very moving tribute. I came away grateful for everything in my life.

Through the striated layers of heartbreak that Tim Egan exposes in this chronicle of the '30s Dust Bowl, it's hard not to wonder why. Why did a sizeable population gravitate to America's high plains in the first place? Why did so many stay in the face of crushing catastrophe? Could no one see the folly in ripping up millions of square miles of prairie with only the vaguest sense of how how to transform it into arable farmland? This story is less about natural disaster than Greek tragedy. Not a page goes by without an example of hubris so glaring it makes the burgeoning horror seem inevitable.

Egan weaves together the territory's history and the personal stories of its settlers with grim effect, punctuating a terrible irony. For all the strength and decency of the characters profiled here, they are victims of something that could have been avoided. The Dust Bowl was a man made event, the triumph of hope over reason.

Egan made a point in this work of detailing only the stories of people who stayed in the High Plains long after the devastating dust storms had reduced their lives to ruin. It's an interesting authorial choice, because he never quite gets to the answer of why they stayed, but in the process of trying, he offers engrossing portraits of characters whose motivations can't be explained by usual human logic. These were people who committed, who stuck. They believed.

In the beginning they came, like anyone in the American epic, to better themselves. In Dalhart, Texas, the center of the storm, we meet Bam White, a transient with a young family looking to settle and find some stability; Hazel Lucas, a young teacher with the simple goal of marrying and raising a family in a wholesome place; Doc Dawson, the tobacco spitting proprietor of the area santitarium; and a score of other colorful, guileless souls whose cheerful resolve gives the place a tragic optimism. No one, not even the dubious, displaced Native Americans in the area, could have foretold what fate had in store for this innocent crew.

Egan doesn't flinch from the bruality at the core of life on the plains. The fight for survival is never pretty, but part of the pathos in this tale lies in the absurdity of man's attempt to conquer nature when nature won't cooperate. "BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY-BRING CLUBS", was a sign posted regularly around Dalhart as the residents tried to eject one particular furry menace by wholesale slaughter. The futility of this approach, and the fury of nature's revenge, becomes apparent toward the end of the book when, after attack after attack by dust storms of biblibical proportions, the Old Testament comes to terrfiying life. From out of nowhere, another black cloud forms over the devastated homesteads, but this one is different, undulating against the sky, alive, with millions and millions of grasshoppers, who settle on anything green and living, and leave death in their wake.

This is the coda to the story of the violence that man inflicted on the High Plains, a reminder of humanity's puny state. But somehow, the story of the surivors is less one of learning than enduring. Perhaps there will always be times with endurance is the Best Last Chance.

Save for the descriptions of dust and dirt, which get a little tiring, this book is a great read. His writing style is very readable and his research and understanding of the material is obvious. It is a good lesson for these times we live in. Perhaps we could use some of the wisdom of those times to understand what we need to do to cure our environmental and economic ills.

It's tough to imagine a more moving book--on ANY subject--than this one. Of course, this effort is depressing. History usually is. Mr. Egan weaves together the historical bedrock of the Dust Bowl, the immediate causes, and their legacy. He exclaims how Lewis and Clark came to the Plains and found an immense grassland more lush than Jefferson could have imagined. In an eyeblink of history, white society destroyed it.

First to go (as usual) were the Indians, in the final chapter of Removal. Then, down went wheat prices as the post-war grain glut compelled farmers to plant still more acres to compensate for plumetting prices. All the while, carpet-bag farmers (and even the locals) employed archaic planting methods, rather than TJ's contour sowing. Meanwhile, back at the bank, the fat cats were blowing everyone's deposits on Wall Street (bankers loathe reading history). Finally came the drought, the heat, and the winds--all of which are, historically, normal on the Southern Plains. The rest is, well, history.

A final important element Egan stresses was that in mid Dust Bowl, FDR implemented the payment-in-kind policy to reduce acreage and drive up prices--the seminal form of the West's aggy subsidy policy which has since become such an unmanageable beast. All in all, Egan's book is more than a mere Dust Bowl classic. It merits shelf space next to the best works on the Depression.

Hurricanes come and go along America's Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Property and lives are destroyed, but often rebuilt. There's some comfort in knowing that indefatigable Mother Nature caused the damage.

But in the plains and panhandles of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, an unprecented and unyielding natural disaster, rooted in the uprooting of native grasses in the name of progress, blew dirt into peoples' lives for almost the full decade of the '30s, killing thousands, ruining countless businesses, and emptying towns. It came to be known as the Dust Bowl, and Timothy Egan's book "The Worst Hard Times" tells the story via the recollections of a few octa- and nonagenarians who were there and lived through it.

Egan's narratives built around these recollections are heartbreaking. I could only read two chapters at a time without getting choked up emotionally as the denizens of the area, living in sod houses coughed up dirt, buried young children who'd died of dust pneumonia, and lived lives of grueling poverty. The Irish potato famine is the only agricultural disaster that I've read about that could top it. When the grasshoppers come calling, another outcome of the destruction of an ecosystem, the effect becomes biblical.

Part two of the story which recounts the federal government's effort to alleviate the disaster, is necessarily less compelling. Egan brings the story back to a more personal level in the last few chapters by sharing the diary of a Nebraska farmer who struggles to maintain a life with his wife.

A broader aspect of the tale is the lesson about understanding the fragility of ecosystems and showing respect for natural habitats developed over thousands of years.

"The Worst Hard Time" ranks with "Isaak's Storm" about the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveson, TX, as the best history books I've read about American natural disasters. The involvement of people who lived to tell the tale makes Egan's book even more compelling.

Highly recommended to all readers, although a little depressing for teenagers who aren't history buffs.