The Worst Hard Time

Katherine and Fred Folkers ride the free train to the area that the government provides for potential homesteaders, and stake 640 acres near Boise City, Oklahoma plowing wheat after leaving rocky ground in Missouri. The couple are described as arriving “with very little” (46). Katherine Folkers is college-educated, and does not like No Man's Land. Fred Folkers plants a fruit orchard on his homestead, which is always his delight. They symbolize the new rich that High Plains' businessmen build country clubs and swimming pools for. By 1932, the Folkers are deep in debt from their new purchases bought in the height of the wheat boom. Fred Folkers turns to his jars of corn whiskey as he watches his fruit orchard die and his land become worthless. However, he recovers his money as wheat prices eventually rise. He works his land until his death in 1965. 

Hazel Lucas Shaw is the daughter of Carlie Lucas and first described as a “daring little girl with straw-colored hair” who gets on her tiptoes to peak out of a horse-drawn wagon (35).She is thrilled to be a part of her family's new adventure of homesteading a little south of Boisy City, Oklahoma. Hazel's father, Carlie Lucas, makes a fortune in wheat by 1917; however, just like all the other farmers, he goes broke from the wheat-price crash.

Hazel grows up and plays basketball in sateen bloomers at her high school, and marries her high school sweetheart, Charles Shaw. She and Charles live in Cincinnati, Ohio briefly, but return to the High Plains because they don't like city life. In this way, Shaw is depicted as starting over–another last-chancer. She returns to Boisy City and accepts a job as a school teacher, but instead of a salary, Shaw has to accept scrip (a promise to pay).She and her husband start a mortuary business, but by the time they open the business, nobody in the area can afford to pay for their services.

Egan describes Shaw as “believ[ing] in tomorrow perhaps more than any member of her extended family” (120). He describes Hazel as forcing herself to think positive thoughts: “She could will a positive day. The color would come back to life when the water returned. This drought could not last to 1933” (121). Shaw keeps her home sealed like a can and wears white gloves at the table in defiance of all the dust. She believes the grass and land will one day be restored. She remains hopeful until she loses her baby to dust pneumonia; within hours after, her beloved grandmother, Loumiza, dies. (She also finds an abandoned baby in a coffee-box across the street that also dies.)Shaw conducts a double funeral for her baby and grandmother on Black Sunday, the day of the worst black duster, and the funeral procession gets caught in the storm. Shaw then goes into a depression. She does not want to give up and leave the area, however, because she considers herself a pioneer, like her parents. Shaw does eventually leave Boisy City for the health of her new baby, and she never returns to the homestead.

Will Crawford is a close neighbor of Fred and Katherine Folkers, and a rarity of the prairie–a man so fat he has to have his overalls specially made. When he receives his overalls from the factory, there is a note attached to them, posted by a woman who was impressed with the size of the man who placed the order. The note reads: “Wanted, a real man, Sadie White, 419 Locust, Wichita, Kansas.” Crawford goes to Wichita and marries Sadie and brings her back to his dugout in Boisy City.

Bill Baker is the county agriculturalist for Boisy City, Oklahoma. He finds a child mummy in the area stuffed with cornhusks, pumpkin seeds and yucca fibers, which he claims is evidence farming has been successful in No Man's Land. He also interviews the long-term residents, the Lujan family sheep ranchers, trying to find out what the land was like before the cattle ranchers and farmers.

Egan portrays George Ehrlich as another last-chancer. Ehrlich is a German Russian who immigrates to America when he receives a draft notice from the Czar's army. (Boys seldom came back, if ever, from the army, and their families were not even sent the courtesy of a death notice.) Ehrlich represents one of the largest immigrant groups to populate the Dust Bowl. The German Russians come to America fleeing the Czar, who revoked all the privileges Catherine the Great gave them in 1872.

Egan describes Ehrlich's accent as “a very old style of German, with a sprinkling of Russian, spiced with the dialect of Texas-Oklahoma, where two syllables were never used when one would do” (60). He marries a Volga German Russian, builds a dugout on 160 acres of his homestead in Shattuck, Oklahoma, and raises cows and hogs, and wheat.

Ehrlich maintains his culture by going to a German church, keeping German food, and observing traditional male and female roles in his home. However, Ehrlich makes an effort to learn English by keeping a notebook in his back pocket and asking cowboys in the fields to spell the words out.

Ehrlich and his family of nine children become prosperous during the wheat boom, but by 1934, their American dream is over. Their farm is worthless, and the family is starving. He loses his beloved and popular little boy, Georgie, and Ehrlich questions if he should have come to America. Roughly 303,000 German Russians migrated to the High Plains by the 1920s.

Borth, like Ehrlich, is a German Russian who came to America for a better life, but his daughter wears dresses made of chicken feed sacks, and two of his children are diagnosed with dust pneumonia. Borth was not able to realize the American dream, and Egan states Borth remembers Russia more fondly than America.

William H. D. Murray, known as “Alfalfa Bill,” is elected governor of Oklahoma in 1930 after scandals drive out the last two governors. He wins by a huge margin and his campaign slogan vilifies “Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons” (109).Murray claims that “anything could grow in Oklahoma,” and to show this, he allows people to have a vegetable garden on the grounds of the capitol building when he is governor (108).He uses the National guard twenty-seven times in office, once almost starting a war with Texas by sending the National Guard to back a toll bridge on the Red River. Murray appreciates “the old darkies,” and “hate[s] Jews” (109). He advocates taking water from the Ogallala Aquifer, the High Plain's natural underground water source. He runs for president in 1932, but loses to FDR. 

The Lujan family represents the early Hispanic presence on the High Plains. Juan Cruz and his brother, Francisco, ran a sheep ranch in Cimarron County before any cattlemen came, and lived through all the droughts of the 1890s without the problems of topsoil turning into dusters. Egan describes the family as one of the very earliest settlers in the area; the family “remembered the Comanche, the Kiowa, the boundless prairie chickens and pronghorn antelope, the big bison herds and the sea of grass–the whole intact, full-dimensional original High Plains” (123).

A college-educated wife of an Oklahoma farmer who writes “Letters of the Dustbowl,” chronicling the devastation in the Oklahoma panhandle.

Bam White plays a central role in The Worst Hard Time. He is described as having bowlegs and a handlebar mustache. He drives the plow in the famous FDR-government-sponsored film, The Plow that Broke the Plains, and Egan also describes Bam as “having a hard, sun-seared, dust chipped face” (253). He and his son, Melt White, are shamed for having Apache and Cherokee blood. Melt is described as having darker skin than his classmates.

Egan describes Bam White’s personality as a “tomorrow man” and last chancer (52).His greatest dream is to own his own shack (which he eventually does). Bam White loves horses, open skies and music. He owns an organ, which he refuses to sell even when his wagon breaks down on the road, and he plays the fiddle until his hands bleed, even when he is deathly ill. We see Bam White putting on a fresh shirt and getting ready for church when the Black Sunday duster hits, but there are no other references to him being religious.

Bam arrives near Dalhart, Texas in 1926 en route from Colorado to Littlefield, Texas, where he hopes to find ranch work. When his horse dies, he considers it an omen that he should settle in Dalhart. He finds a rental shack and starts growing turnips and selling skunk hides. He makes friends with long-time cowboys and ranchers like the James brothers. When he gets the lead role driving the plow in the documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, Bam believes that he was right about following his omen to stay in Dalhart.

Bam White's wife, Lizzie, does not like the area. Her greatest fear is starvation. When Bam dies, she leaves Dalhart, and she tries to convince her son, Melt, to do the same. Melt leaves but eventually returns to Dalhart.

Dr. George Waller (Doc) Dawson is described as a “tobacco-spitting, black-bearded man of the South,” who always wears a dark Stetson (28). He is constantly chewing tobacco even when he is doing surgery. He comes to the High Plains in 1907 to help his persistent respiratory problems. He also has Bright's disease and other illnesses. Dawson plans to start a ranch and live off investments, but he loses everything in a stock market collapse.

He refers to his wife, Willie Catherine, as the missus. She was voted the most beautiful woman at a Panhandle beauty contest. She has dark eyes, an aquiline nose, and a passion for literature. She is also the only person for miles who has the technical know-how to run a x-ray machine. George Dawson's dream is to close the sanitarium and live off cotton farming. When a Catholic-sponsored hospital opens in Dalhart in 1929, the Dawsons sell the sanitarium they opened in 1912 and invest in land in the area. However, the Dawsons suffer the same financial ruin as everyone in the town when their cotton and other crops don't grow. Dawson ends up managing the soup kitchen funded by Dick Coon. He dies in Dalhart with his Last Man's Club card in his wallet.

McCarty is described as looking like a young Orson Wells: “dark-haired, intense and athletic, with a silver tongue that translated even better on paper” (55). In 1929, at twenty-eight years old, he buys the Dalhart Texan, and becomes the editor and publisher. Once a week, his column appears, and the Dalhart Texan becomes the most influential newspaper on the Texas Panhandle. He is involved in all community affairs and becomes president of the Dalhart Chamber of Commerce. Egan writes that McCarty “felt personally responsible for Dalhart's future” (56).

Egan portrays McCarty as Dalhart's biggest cheerleader and morale booster. After Black Sunday, he prints articles that make the dust storms in neighboring areas look much more dangerous than any storm that comes to Dalhart. He even writes an article about how he personally enjoys a storm and suggests that Dalhart citizens do the same.

McCarty is depicted not only as a community leader, but also as a whistleblower. When McCarty realizes that Dalhart’s local brothel is thriving while his newspaper is sinking, McCarty tries to print an expose on the brothel. However, his efforts are thwarted as customers refuse to go along with his article of exposing them.

McCarty’s defining personality characteristic is his fight. He resents any publicity that makes his town look beaten down. McCarty thinks it's humiliating when some residents of Dalhart send a telegram to FDR asking for jobs. He forms the Last Man Club, composed of Dalhart citizens who promise to stay in the area. He tries to buy a famous painting that depicts the High Plains as a wasteland, which McCarty plans to burn it over toasts at the Last Man Club. He refers to the club's members as elite Spartans. Ironically, McCarty, after boosting the town for years, is the one who eventually leaves Dalhart for a better job in Amarillo while Dick Coon, Doc Dawson, Bam White, and others stay in the area.

When Bam White's horse dies and he's wandering around Dalhart in the first chapter of the book, White quickly finds out what everybody in the town knows: Dick Coon owns the town. Coon owns the DeSoto Hotel, the Mission Theatre, and almost every business on the town's main street of Denrock.

Dick Coon is described as a “well-fed gentleman […] with his cards in one hand and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other” (30). Coon's parents were often broke, and he lost his casino and everything in the Galveston hurricane of 1900. He starts over by buying a tract of the XIT ranch, but later finds out the bigger money is in town construction, and that is when he starts buying and building in Dalhart.

Egan portrays Coon as not only rich, but generous. When poverty strikes Dalhart, Coon quietly finances the town's humanitarian projects, such as donating a DeSoto hotel room for a shoe drive, and opening a soup kitchen (run by Doc Dawson).When he realizes Dalhart's spirits are declining, Coon sponsors a big barbeque for everyone in the town. Later on, as the town becomes poverty stricken, Coon buys foreclosed land, and even the pool tables from the local bar owned by the Dinwiddies. However, the majority of his properties have mortgages and his tenants become unable to make payments. Coon dies sick and penniless in a Houston hotel room.

At the beginning of World War I, Andy James's family owns the biggest working cattle ranch left in the Texas panhandle. However, when the High Plains area becomes overstocked with cattle, beef prices start falling just as the wheat prices do. James is forced by bankruptcy to sell off a big section of his ranch. James is a cowboy and rancher by heart and family heritage, and he does not attempt to farm. When his ranch doesn't make a profit, he drills for oil instead, without success. James plays an essential role in the history of Dalhart, Texas; 150 citizens gather at a meeting and elect James to write the letter to Hugh Bennett in FDR's Interior Department telling Bennett that the town is ready and willing to accept Bennett’s soil conservation project.

Levi Herzstein and his family, the only Jews in Dalhart, own a clothier shop with locations in Boise City, Dalhart, and Clayton, New Mexico. The business is novel because it offers ready-to-wear clothes. (People of this era usually just bought bolts of material and sewed their own clothes.) Egan refers to buying clothes from the Herzsteins as a luxury. The Herzsteins are representative of the many merchants in the Dust Bowl who are unable to survive financially, no matter how competent they are. The family also serves as an example of how merchants fall victim to gangs during this era. “Black Jack” Ketchum robs the Herzstein's store, and takes all their money and most of the store's merchandise. Afterwards, Hertzstein, seeks justice by organizing a posse. Hertzstein overtakes Ketchum, and he surrenders. However, when Hertzstein reaches to take his gun, Ketchum kills him.

The townspeople of Dalhart pay Tex Thornton 500 dollars to blast nitroglycerin and TNT into the clouds, in order to create rain. He appears in several places in the book, and always in the role of rainmaker. 

Readers are told Osteen comes from a pioneering family:“His father had followed the old Santa Fe Trail in 1909, the year Congress tried to induce settlement [in the] [...] western half of the Great Plains (4). Ike's parents “were following a rumor: there was supposed to be a dam going up on the Cimarron River [...]that needed hired hands (4). When the Osteens (Ike’s parents) arrived at the dam, however, they were told there were no jobs, so they decided to homestead 320 acres nearby in Baca County, Colorado. In Chapter 13, Osteen is seen as one of the few children in the High Plains that decides to continue school. He reappears in Chapter 16 experiencing Black Sunday, and in Chapter 10, when he graduates from high school as salutatorian of his class. Egan tells how Osteen returns home, to live out the final days of his life not far from his family's old dugout in Baca County, Colorado. 

Egan compares Clark's personality to “seltzer water,” and describes her as a person who likes to laugh (6). She is the daughter of Louise Walton, a former Broadway dancer and actress who moves to Baca County after doctors tell her to go west to get fresher air. In Egan's interview with Clark, she sits with an oxygen tank because she has been diagnosed with dust pneumonia. Clark tells how, at her school, they conducted dust drills. She shares her experience of Black Sunday:“‘It was like I was caught in a whirlpool […] All of a sudden it got completely dark. I couldn't see a thing’” (8).

Hugh Bennett is described as a big man with an “earthly populism” (134). He is also described as an “imposing figure, notes stuffed in his pockets, hair uncombed, blue edges bulging, his glasses coming on and off” (226). Bennett is the son of a North Carolina cotton planter, who taught Hugh at an early age that the earth was a living organism, and not just a commodity. As a little boy, Bennett used to ride to school using a fertilizer sack as a saddle.

Bennett is highly educated and clever. He attends graduate school at the University of North Carolina and studies international soil cultures. He also earns a graduate degree in Chemistry. He travels across the country making formal speeches bad-mouthing the American people and government for destroying the nation’s soil. Egan states that many people thought Bennett was a quack because he made such bold claims and defended his claims so aggressively. Bennett exposes his old employer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for printing false information in bulletins. The boldness of his personality comes out again when Bennett writes the Great Plains Drought Committee report paying no attention to political correctness or sensitivity to saving the reputation of the government, the entity paying him to write the report. Instead, Bennett shames the government for misleading the people for pushing the Homestead Acts, which encouraged the over-plowing of the Dust Bowl.

Although FDR hires him to lead, Operation Dust Bowl, he gives no guarantees his plan will work. He also realizes Congress will not fund his agency. To this end, Bennett figures out a plan to work around their attitude by waiting for the duster to hit D.C. at the same time he presents his case for his new agency before Congress.

Bennett has unusual foresight. He realizes that Americans might abuse the land again unless they are correctly guided, and that is why he wants FDR and Congress to agree to his new soil conservation agency. His agency is the only grassroots operation of FDR’s New Deal that still exists today (as the National Resources Conservation Service). 

Stryker is the head of FDR’s photo unit. FDR has Stryker make documentary films, which FDR thinks might help his second-term campaign (since many of his actions were declared unconstitutional). Stryker’s department the hires Pare Lorentz to shoot The Plow that Broke the Plains. The unit proves to be a large contribution to FDR’s New Deal.

Stryker, the head of the photography unit under FDR, hires Lorentz to shoot a documentary with his idea and version of the devastation of the Dust Bowl. At the time Stryker hires Lorentz, Lorentz has yet to make a film, and he has been turned down by Hollywood in the past. However, Lorentz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains, becomes a historic documentary of this era. It was shot on location in Dalhart, Texas and stars Bam White.

Pile is an influential writer of the period who tours the Great Plains and records its devastation.