The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Dec 18, 2011 jess rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012, audiobook-d

I have lived in Oklahoma and Texas, although never in the Dust Bowl regions, and I have heard that this book is awesome so I picked it up for my historic non-fiction of the 2012 reading challenge. I can't say exactly that I enjoyed reading it because it's so depressing and disheartening, but it is an incredible read. Even though I took Oklahoma history in junior high, the magnitude of daily life and circumstances of the Dust Bowl never seemed real to me until this book. It is easy to be paralyze I have lived in Oklahoma and Texas, although never in the Dust Bowl regions, and I have heard that this book is awesome so I picked it up for my historic non-fiction of the 2012 reading challenge. I can't say exactly that I enjoyed reading it because it's so depressing and disheartening, but it is an incredible read. Even though I took Oklahoma history in junior high, the magnitude of daily life and circumstances of the Dust Bowl never seemed real to me until this book. It is easy to be paralyzed by both heart-wrenching compassion and complete disdain for humanity when reading this book.

The Worst Hard Time is a powerful, disturbing narrative of the greatest/first man-made environmental disaster that the United States had to deal with. Eagan uses interviews, diaries, newspapers and supporting documents to piece together daily life of families and communities on the High Plains during the 1930s. He guides us through the days of cowboys and million-acre ranches like the XIT. We meet ranchers from the Llano Estacado and nesters who moved to No Man's Land during the wheat boom years of the 1920s to produce record-breaking crops of wheat.

Pride goeth before the fall. So then there's the downfall of it all - the grass is destroyed and the ecosystem with it. The soil lifts into the air in sheets. Record-breaking drought years follow record-breaking drought years. Plagues of grasshoppers follow dust storms, and for years, families subsist on canned tumbleweed and wild rabbits. Cattle and horses lay down in the fields and die, their stomachs too full of dust for food to pass through. There's the Depression and a world war on the horizon, distracting America from the Dust Bowl. A perfect storm of dust and poverty stretches across ten states, carrying away millions of acres of the best topsoil humans ever had the pleasure to destroy. Children and elderly people die constantly of dust pneumonia, suffocated by silica dust trapped in their lungs. A lot of people bury their children. The government comes with FDR's New Deal plans, Shelter Belts of trees and Soil Conservation Districts, but it is difficult for the Spartans of the High Plains to take the help and guidance of east coast bureaucrats. The desperation and hopelessness are tangible and raw in the surviving interviews, letters and diaries.

It is amazing to experience the work of human greed, arrogance and hubris in conjunction with a good drought.

I especially loved the story of Tex Thornton. Tex convinced the good people of Dalhart, TX to pay an astronomical sum of money (in adjusted modern dollars, it would be $1 million) to fire rocket-powered explosives into the clouds to bring rain. As you can imagine, he was unsuccessful but managed to leave town with the money. Is there a movie about this dude? What a crackpot swindler.

This book has a lot of characters (maybe a dozen?) that it follows and it was difficult for me to keep all of the characters straight when they have cowboy names like Bam and Tex and there are multiple Hazels, but that's pretty much my only complaint. It's highly readable, emotional non-fiction, considering the dry material (I can't help myself).

Sidenote: This book is responsible for my new obsession with the prairie chicken. Why are they so cute!?! And so extremely endangered!