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

A national enterprise reporter for New York Times, Timothy Egan possesses a keen talent for capturing the qualities of the places and events he writes about that has garnered him several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.

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.

Contents

Introduction: Live Through This 1

I • PROMISE: The Great Plowup, 1901–1930

1. The Wanderer 13 2. No Man’s Land 32 3. Creating Dalhart 52 4. High Plains Deutsch 59 5. Last of the Great Plowup 73

II • BETRAYAL, 1931–1933

6. First Wave 91 7. A Darkening 103 8. In a Dry Land 115 9. New Leader, New Deal 128 10. Big Blows 136

III • BLOWUP, 1934–1939

11. Triage 145 12. The Long Darkness 155 13. The Struggle for Air 171 14. Showdown in Dalhart 176 15. Duster’s Eve 193 16. Black Sunday 198 17. A Call to Arms 222 18. Goings 236 19. Witnesses 242 20. The Saddest Land 254 21. Verdict 265 22. Cornhusker II 273 23. The Last Men 279 24. Cornhusker III 293 25. Rain 303

Epilogue 309 Notes and Sources 315 Acknowledgments 328 Index 331