“The Worst Hard Time – The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl,” by
Timothy Eagan is the story of the people of the Dust Bowl. “The Worst Hard Time” tells the story of the
citizens of the area and their struggle to fight a very vicious mutated nature that man helped create and
each person that lived in the region had to make an important and hard decision to either give up on the
land and leave or to stay and deal with the vicious dust storms of the region. Each man and woman faced
the challenge of a lifetime – challenges that they would have never imagined or taken on if their backs
hadn’t been against the wall. Much of the region of the High Plains that would one day be tagged with the
pejorative, “The Dust Bowl” was grassland. The grass was very rich and fertile and the grass was the
main source of food for the giant buffaloes that roamed the land. The grass was also short and dense
which helped keep the earth in place even thru the droughts which were not that uncommon for that
region. The summer temperatures in the region could reach very high levels it was not uncommon for the
temperatures to reach as high as 120 degrees and also the very hot temperatures made it that much more
unbearable for the people who lived in the region when there was a drought involved.
When the drought of the early 1930s struck the area, a phenomenon known as a dust storm began to
become a more frequent event. When the first dust storms started to hit the area they were considered by
the people to be more annoying then threatening. As the dust storms got worse the ranchers who owned
the land started to see their profits disappear and so they then decided to leave the area and they sold the
land to crop farmers. But the grass in that region had never been farm land before so when you combined
the drought, the heat and the wind it made for a very bad situation. Although there were other contributing
factors, the thousands of farmers...