Name: The worst hard time
ISBN: 9780547347776

The worst hard time

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people who held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived - those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave - Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression."--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

dredmorbiusAug 2019

Wheat is the simple-starch-rich seed kernel of a hybridised grass.

Much of Texas lacks water -- generally West Texas, a line extending from roughly Austin. In the US generally, the 100th parallel divides the moister east from the drier west. Topsoils are also far poorer than further east.

There was an experiment conducted some years ago on dryland farming. It ended poorly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is an excellent telling of this:

https://books.google.com/books?id=np1RwDQfpjsC&pg=PP1#v=onep...

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zshrdluAug 2026

In a very different vein, I have read a number of books recently that feature a surprising amount of "scam and schemes":

- The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, about the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. A lot of people were scammed into settling the high plains by railroad salesmanship and other "real estate" scams.

- The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown. A book about the harrowing Donner Party. Scamming and scheming are what draw them out to that expedition.

- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. WW1 history but it boils down to the scheming of various men in the respective countries.

- The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, Daniel Yergin. The oil rush from America to the World. Scheming features prominently to say the least.

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mapmapSep 2017

A similar oversupply happened right before the Great Depression.

Wheat prices were dropping from too much supply partially attributed to newly expanded prairie farming in the US. But these farmers owed fixed costs on their mortgaged land. So to pay their expenses, they plowed up more prairie and grew more wheat. This compounded the supply problem. Eventually, as wheat piled up at railroad depots unable to be sold, farmers left the plowed prairie fallow and the topsoil blew away.

Source: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

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