Frank H. (perryfran) reviewed on 8/13/2025 + 1278 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is a very immersive and fascinating account of the great dust bowl that plagued the great plains during the 1930's. He tells the story of the people that stayed and survived this plague based on interviews and records of people who were in their 80s and 90s but who still remembered the awful years of the Dust Bowl. At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres with its epicenter on the southern plains of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Huge dust storms raged for much of the 1930s because farmers had plowed millions of acres of grassland to grow mostly wheat. Then when multi-year droughts hit, the land was left fallow with the topsoil swept up by the wind. "There'd be days, you couldn't see your hand in front a' your face," said one man who was a boy at the time. Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called "dust pneumonia." In desperation, some families gave away their children. Hugging a loved one or shaking hands could knock two people down because the static electricity from the dusters was so strong. The simplest thing in life, taking a breath, was a threat.

Egan provides a history of the area leading up to the Dust Bowl including the Comanche and their reliance on the buffalo. When they were driven from the land and the buffalo were all slaughtered, the cowboys used the grassland for cattle. One of the largest cattle ranches in the country, the XIT, was once located in what would become the dust bowl of the 30s. Then the homesteaders came at the urging of the government to grow crops on land that should have never been plowed.

The book goes on to tell the story of various families that lived mostly in the panhandles of Oklahoma, "No Man's Land", and Texas, and Baca County, Colorado. Some of these families refused to leave always hoping for a better year and a return to normal. But with the Depression going on at this time and no relief from drought, the dust storms kept coming and the families could barely survive. There were many people who did leave as related in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath but the farmers Steinbeck wrote about were mostly from further east in Oklahoma and were ruined by the collapse of the economy. The people who left during the dust storms were called "Exodusters" and lived further west. Egan's book focuses on the people who stayed, "for lack of money or lack of sense."

This was overall a very hard hitting look at probably the greatest eco-disaster in history. It was full of pathos and poignancy and a very compelling read that I would recommend.

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