The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl / by Timothy Egan

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How could a natural disaster be man-made? Yet the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930's was just that. For many in the great plains states, most notably Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the Dust Bowl was not just a difficulty, like the financial woes others faced because of the country's economic depression. It was a catastrophe of epic scale, akin to some sort of biblical plague, begetting wide-scale damage, destruction and death in over 100 million acres, much of it centered in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Many of the mostly farmers and their families, lots of them recent immigrants, simply up and left in the wake of the "Black Blizzard" even with nowhere to go. More than a few, like the Joads of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, traveled west to California where life was little better (and in more than a few cases, worse), though at least the air was breathable.

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But for those who stayed behind, life was not unlike hell on earth. The 'earth' itself quite literally turned against the farmers who were more or less deceived into cultivating the less-accommodating soil of the region. Seduced originally into buying land not accustomed to growing greener, more arable crops, the settlers had to learn the truth the hard way. Following decades of errant farming, defective crop rotations and years of famine and drought, the ruined topsoil caught up in the wind until a mass of flurrying dust, like mountains, blurred everything in its wake, terminating all organic life and causing epic amounts of ecological and agricultural damage.

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Author Egan does a good job of illuminating this not necessarily neglected, but perhaps less-scrutinized niche of American history. When most people think of the Dust Bowl, they think of drought, of windstorms and of families traveling westward wearing worn, haggard clothes and looking downcast in despair. But few even consider the plight of those who stayed, a forgotten collection of doomed souls--entire families and communities--left without any protection, sustenance or adequate relief. Thrust into starvation or made deathly ill by the dust itself, through "dust pneumonia", the region and the people consumed by the disaster would never be the same. (978.032 EGAN)