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

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl - Book review

THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

BY TIMOTHY EGAN HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 2006, 330 PAGES, $28.00

On Sunday, April 14, 1935, from large sections of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, an estimated 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil rose to a height of several thousand feet and began its journey eastward, "a ragged-topped formation covering the horizon as it rolled across the land like moving mountains" Traveling at speeds of up to 60 mph, this huge "black blizzard" dumped 6,000 tons of dirt on Chicago; fell like snow over Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.; and moved on into the Atlantic, where it covered ships as far offshore as 300 miles. This was Black Sunday, the worst in a series of dusters during the "dirty thirties" Meteorologists have rated the storms the number-one weather event of the 20th century, and historians have termed them the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster in history--truly The Worst Hard Time.

Why did families settle in the and western half of the Great Plains--land described as "the flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least-arable part of the United States"? The government and the media of the day undoubtedly played major roles in "selling" the land to unsuspecting settlers. Congress encouraged settlement of "the last frontier in public domain" and, in 1909, passed the Homestead Act, a desperate move offering inexpensive land and attractive incentives for settlement. Newspaper editors, bankers, politicians, and speculators distributed fliers, broadsides, and brochures advertising "the most alluring body of unoccupied land" in the country, and the government termed it "the last frontier of agriculture" Brochures described areas with paved, tree-lined streets, clean water, and railroads but, when the settlers arrived, they found only stakes in buffalo grass.

People came, though--by the thousands. Civil War refugees, field hands, ranchers, Norwegian farmers, and hundreds of German Russians who had been "adrift for centuries"--all wanted to own their own land. Moreover, people stayed. Egan presents the "untold" story of "nesters" who, having lived through the black dusters of the dirty thirties and the deadening Depression, stayed behind. Nearly two-thirds of the population of the Dust Bowl never left. Egan interviewed survivors--many now in their 90s--and researched their diaries, letters, and personal histories. They...