The Worst Hard Time

On the forty-second page of “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” author Timothy Egan wrote (emphasis added):

Fruit crates, or planks nailed to stumps, did the job. After school, Hanzel had to do the janitor work and get the next day's kindling—dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

When the winds kicked up as always or a twitching sky threatened hail, she felt like she was back in the dugout, cramped and gasping for space. But when it was nice, she took the children outside and staged horse races. She taught them basketball. Once, she loaded up the players in a wagon and galloped off four miles to play another team. But the sky turned ugly, growled, and broke in a fit of hail. The Children started to cry. One horse panicked and bolted. Kids jumped from the wagon, hail storming down on them. Hazel Lucas leaped from the carriage seat to the back of the panicked horse, seized the bridle, and rode the horse to calm.

All the while, she wondered about a life far away, in one of the bustling cities of the Midwest, or just a place where the routine of a day was not so full of random death. The Kansas City Star arrived by mail in Boise City once a week, and Hazel got a sense of how fast America was moving: flappers, gangsters, and stunts—two men tried to play airborne tennis while standing, strapped, to the wings of a biplane. In Cimarron County, most people didn't even have electricity, and many still lived in earthen dugouts or soddies.

But no group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland wheat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States

More information about “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Amazon.com
• Powell's Books
• Barnes & Noble

(Houghton Mifflin Company, December 2005. Hardcover, 340 pages. ISBN: 061834697X; EAN: 9780618346974.)

Comments

[Discount Louis Vuitton]

Any system, including a universe, will tumble into its lowest energy state, like a ball bouncing down to the bottom of a valley.

[Tiffany & Co Outlet]

A sad thing about life is that when you meet someone who means a lot to you only to find out in the end that it was never bound to be and you just have to let go.