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

by Timothy Egan

Folkers bought an International 22-36 tractor, a Case combine, and a one-way plow—a twelve-foot Grand Detour. The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass. But for now it was a technological miracle.

This is interesting, it’s an anitechnology story Maybe ai doomers should be more interested in this type of story?

“Polygamy would be of great use in increasing the population,” Catherine offered, a suggestion the Germans never followed up on until some of them joined the Mormon church a century later. Dozens of villages sprang up in the middle and lower Volga. They were obsessive about keeping dirt from the house; cleanliness was the highest of virtues.

Oh man cleanliness is so German

A SEARCH FOR SKUNK HIDES sent Bam White wandering around the High Plains in the year that Americans threw out their president.

This book is not very kind to Hoover lol

Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget. It was designed for poor grain growers, one foot in foreclosure, near starvation, pounded by dirt. And plenty of farmers were starving.

This is why we have farming subsidies

Near the town of Hays, where Germans from Russia had settled fifty years earlier, a small boy who had been playing in the fields with a friend dashed for home. He got lost in the midday blackness; confused, he circled back. The next day he was found dead. He had suffocated, half a mile from home.

This book is so sad

But they were stuck, like other Last Chancers.

Were they really stuck? Want more examination of this People in North Korea are stuck

The men were, in many cases, drunken, or ingrown religious fanatics who were worse to live with and deal with even than the drunks.”

lol

massive brain hemorrhage killed Dr. G. Waller Dawson. Going through his belongings, his son John found a tattered, crumbled card inside the Doc’s wallet. It was his Last Man Club card, signifying Dawson as the fourth person to join, with his familiar doctor’s signature attached to the pledge that he would be the last man to leave the High Plains and that he would always be loyal to

Last Man Club card is really interesting Maybe something similar for BP?

Today is just common hell, death and destruction to every growing thing. A dry, deadly S.W. wind, a dead clear sky & a vicious blazing sun make up the picture of destruction. God in his infinite wisdom might have made a more discouraging place than Webster Co, Nebr., but so far as I know God never did.

lol