The stubbornest Americans: A tale of the farmers who refused to flee the Dust Bowl.

• Author: Graybill, Andrew R.
• Position: On Political Books - The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great America Dust Bowl - Book review

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

By Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin, $28.00

For several days just after Christmas 2005, a series of wildfires raged in Oklahoma and northern Texas. Caused by a devastating combination of strong, dry winds and the worst drought to hit the region in half a century, the fires claimed five lives, consumed dozens of homes, and literally wiped several communities off the map before being brought under control early in the new year. Though area residents are no strangers to hardship--they've been hit by devastating tornadoes and price fluctuations on the oil market--the holiday timing of the blazes must have seemed especially cruel.

The Worst Hard Time, journalist Timothy Egan's new book, recalls another period of adversity on the southern Plains: the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In contrast to the recent wildfires, however, the difficulties of that earlier event spanned an entire decade and killed off not merely small towns, but also entire counties in parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. More than a quarter of a million people eventually deserted the region, some moving merely to less hard-hit areas within the affected states, while others trudged westward to the supposed promised land of California, where they hoped to find work in fields and orchards. Their migrations, of course, survive in the writings of novelist John Steinbeck and the iconic images taken by photographer Dorothea Lange.

Unlike Lange and Steinbeck, however, Egan focuses on those who stayed behind, either because of their determination to endure or their utter lack of opportunities elsewhere. Many of them took great pride in their decisions to remain in the Dust Bowl, such as the editor of the local newspaper in Dalhart, Texas, who founded the Last Man Club during the direst years of catastrophe. The organization distributed membership cards that began, "Barring Acts of God or unforeseen personal tragedy or family illness, I pledge myself to be the Last Man to leave this country...." (As it happened, the editor himself wound up abandoning Dalhart in the late 1930s, although he decamped only to Amarillo--some 80 miles to the south--and not, say, to the West Coast). It is precisely Egan's attention to those who remained when others fled that makes The Worst Hard Time such a welcome addition to the extensive literature about the Dust Bowl.

Although Egan supplies the...