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

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

Timothy Egan

Mariner Books (September 1, 2006)

In short: A well written story with so much visceral detail you can feel the "predatory dust" of the "black blizzards" in this extraordinary tale of survival during "the worst hard time" in our nation's history.

Untold or not, this book certainly puts flesh on the bones of the Dust Bowl and, peripherally, the Great Depression. Egan tells of the families that stayed behind, less familiar to us, perhaps, than those who moved on, a la "The Grapes of Wrath".

"One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that - a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike's mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground....Ike Osteen's life spans the flu epidemic of 1918, the worst depression in American history and a world war that ripped apart the globe. Nothing compares to the black dusters of the 1930's, he says, a time when the simplest thing in life - taking a breath - was a threat."

Those of us in the modern, Western, entertained, comfort culture of today have no idea of hard times. No relation I'm sure to the Ike Osteen of above, but I wonder how today's Joel Osteen would spin Ike's story to be "your best life now"?

Egan intersperses the portraits of these hardy families with so much visceral detail you can feel the "predatory dust" of the "black blizzards".

"...the only clean part of her pillow was the outline of her head."

This was a time of no air conditioners, no electricity for some, and forecasting of weather with no satellite pictures from above, thus closer to reporting of the weather than any future prediction of what was coming.

"Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains...When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat...The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away...Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand."

The catastrophe is almost overwhelming at times. Death from dust pneumonia, no rain for eight years in some places, "snusters" (snow mixed with dust), vision lost when caught in a storm, and clouds of grasshoppers that destroyed any crops that happened to grow during that time. People who were smart enough to save lost it all in the banking collapse (no FDIC insurance at that time) and entire towns went broke, thus shutting down all city services.

This is a well written, extraordinary tale of survival that you will not soon forget and should be read by all today as a reminder of true hard times.

Rating: Hardback