The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Dust Bowl Survivors

In The Worst Hard Time, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Timothy Egan has blended historical documents, newspaper accounts, diaries, and personal interviews into a harrowing account of life in the High Plains during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. The result is a compelling, usually readable, but sometimes tedious, account of man's use and abuse of the environment. At the same time, it is an uplifting and extraordinary tale of human survival.

The time chronicled in Egan's book is roughly the period from 1900 to 1939. The physical setting is primarily along an axis running from Springfield, Colorado, to Boise City in Oklahoma's aptly named No Man's Land, and to Dalhart in the Texas panhandle. This was a rain-scarce region which for hundreds of years had been covered by self-sustaining native grasslands, traversed only by buffalo and the Comanche and Apache who chased after them. In the late 1800s, attempts were made to introduce the cattle industry to the region and despite some early success it eventually failed and the ranchers and cowboys, like the Native Americans before them, became minor figures in the region. Replacing them during the first decades of the 20^th century were the dirt farmers who are the main subject of The Worst Hard Time.