The Worst Hard Time

This chapter revolves around the late 1930s and the concluding stories of Egan's featured characters in Dalhart, Texas.

By 1937, Dalhart County has the largest and most exemplary soil conservation demonstration in the country, but the town experiences another serious black duster in 1938. Many farmers think they are being plagued when one more unexpected disaster occurs: 23,000 grasshoppers per acre destroy all of Dalhart’s new plantings after a brief, hopeful rain. The Dalhart farmers call the National Guard, and they burn, poison, and crush the insects with tractors. The vast number of grasshoppers was attributed to the dying off of birds and snakes in the area that usually kill the grasshoppers. After the grasshoppers are killed, the area is plagued with more dust storms.

Dalhart has no economy now except the money circulating from the government conservation core workers. Even “Uncle” Dick Coon is hurting. In an effort to boost the town's spirits, Coon hosts a free barbeque for the ex-XIT cowboys. He gives his treasured C-note to a strange cowboy who wanders into the town looking for work, and Coon dies penniless in a hotel in Houston.

Bam White and his family are forced to accept government food and clothes after the grasshoppers completely destroy his land. White suffers from severe stomach pains, but refuses to go to the doctor. He plays his fiddle until his hands bleed, hoping to feel better, but White dies undiagnosed and the government takes his shack, leaving his wife penniless.

John McCarty protests Alexandre Hogue's famous oil painting, Drought Survivors, featured in Life magazine. The painting's image of “two dead cows face-planted into a drift” becomes a national symbol of the devastation on the High Plains (283). McCarty thinks the painting is so humiliating that he sends a committee to try to buy the painting, and he plans to burn it at one of his Last Man's Club's meetings over drinks. Actions like these make it even more shocking to the citizens of town when one day they hear the latest news: John McCarty, the town's loudest cheerleader and morale booster, creator and founder of the Last Man's Club, is leaving Dalhart for a better job in Amarillo, Texas.

“Doc” Dawson quits managing Dick Coon's soup kitchen, and tries to work his land one last time, but finally gives up. He keeps a little doctor's office, but a strong wind blows the door open and it takes two people all day to shovel out the huge sand dune. Dawson dies in Dalhart of a brain hemorrhage with his Last Man's Club card in his wallet.

Egan shifts back to Don Hartwell's diary entries in Inavale, Nebraska. Hartwell’s writings in this chapter focus on the area's continual heat and drought. Egan also mentions a tree cut down in 1936, which reveals twenty droughts in the Nebraska area over the previous 748 years. Hartwell borrows seed from a friend on the condition that he'll pay it back with the crop or money, but the bank eventually forecloses on his home.

In this chapter, Egan implies there that the era is causing the breakdown of human relationships. Hartwell writes, “Practically no one comes here now [...] They have vanished like last year's crop of turnips (300).Hartwell writes of a friend that turned on him, “becoming cold, as impersonal as an election notice on a telegraph pole” (295). He also writes of the breakup of his twenty-five-year marriage, when his wife leaves him because she has found stable work in Denver. Both Hartwell's diary and the chapter end with a poem Hartwell wrote, which was found attached to the last page of his diary. He attributes the idea of the following poem to Eleanor Chafee, a woman from Edgewood, New Jersey [with no further information]:

We had a crystal moment

Snatched from the hands of time,

A golden, singing moment

Made for love and rhyme.

What if it shattered in our hands

As crystal moments must?

Better than earthen hours

Changing to lifeless dust. (302)

The book ends with President Roosevelt's visit to Amarillo, Texas. The president chooses to speak in this city because it is the center of his Dust Bowl recovery operation. A crowd of roughly 100,000 people (over double the population of the Amarillo) attend Roosevelt's speech. The people of the Southern Plains summon 2,500 musicians to play for the president, the “single largest marching band ever assembled on American soil” (303).Roosevelt stops his convertible car in the parade and salutes the seamstresses who sewed the 49-foot-long-by-29-foot-high American flag (the biggest flag known to the world at this time).Then something happens Southern Plains residents never dreamed of: it rains. The rain had started lightly, after FDR's train had arrived in Amarillo, but during the parade, it starts to downpour, bleeding the red, white and blue of the huge flag into purple water on the streets.“No one even brought an umbrella," Egan writes (306).

FDR smiles, saying he believes the rain is a good omen. He praises the farmers in his speech, and he receives thunderous cheers and applause. One response to FDR's speech is “Yes, sir, Mr. President–we're not all dead […] Damn straight. Tell it to the world!” (307).

According to Egan, “The High Plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl”(309). His final comments discuss the updates on the state of the land and cities, the progress of government projects, and the people discussed throughout the book.

The Comanche, the American Indian tribe that once dominated the High Plains, now live on a small reservation near Lawton, Oklahoma. One of the three newly-created national grasslands run by the United States Forest Service in the Dust Bowl is named the Comanche National Grassland.

“On the plains, the farm population has [now] shrunk by more than 80 percent,” Egan writes, and thus has left very few old-time farmers like Fred Folkers, who worked his land until his death in 1965. Folkers passed his land to his children, who live on the homestead in the Oklahoma panhandle (as of 2005). Bam White's son, Melt White, lives in Dalhart, on land adjoined to part of the old XIT ranch. Melt owns horses and considers himself a cowboy “by trade and inclination,” but he makes his living as a house painter and paper hanger (311). Hazel Lucas Shaw finally left Boisy City, Oklahoma, although she told her grandchildren she missed it. Ike Osteen, however, still lives not far from his family's old dugout. Osteen often sorts through a his “living museum” of his former life in his beloved Baca County, Colorado (312). Dalhart never recovered its population after the exodus of the 1930s, and Inavale, Nebraska, the home of Don Hartwell, is now a ghost town.

Egan concludes his work with the success and failures of FDRs New Deal policies that were created to assist the people in the Dust Bowl. Most of FDR's shelterbelt of trees have disappeared (and often ripped down by farmers planting grain). The subsidies that FDR created to help individual family farms are still in place, but Egan explains how the subsidies have now become a “payoff to corporate farms growing crops that are already in oversupply, pushing small operators out of business” and thus reducing the number of small family-owned farms (310). Although some dusters returned briefly in the 1950s, Egan claims the dusters known to High Plains residents in the 1930s, which scattered over eight million tons of airborne topsoil, have never returned. An extensive study conducted by Hansen and Libecap, in 2004, concludes the reason the former dusters never returned was due to Operation Dustbowl, and the soil conservation districts Hugh Bennett had put in place.