These chapters of TWHT have been very emotional. The stories about what people had to live through and how much they struggled daily was heart-wrenching for me. The people who stayed had to be resilient and incredibly stubborn - they were truly living through the worst of the hard times. Although many did not want to abandon what they’d know for most of their lives, in reality, they really didn’t have many options to turn to. People held onto the memories of the good days to see them through each nightmarish day.

As a U.S. history teacher, this era is one of the components of my curriculum so I knew facts and some stories about the time period. I knew of the pain and suffering that people in the Plains went through during the Depression and Dust Bowl era; this book has opened my eyes to the level of suffering that people struggled through. Reading the first-hand accounts has left me grieving for these people and these communities in a way I did not think I would be doing. The stories of death, suffering, and loss has shaped how I will be teaching this era in the future.

I think that often times during our readings of history we tend to forget that the events in history happen to real people. I appreciated that the Worst Hard Time provides us with a lot of real life experiences of the people who through their resilience and wherewith-all helped them survive one of the most horrible situations in the 20th century. These valuable insights helped provide me with material that I could bring in to my U.S History class and help provide a touch of reality to a class that is often seen as disconnected from their own lived experiences. 

I thought the story of Hazel Shaw's struggles was a way of condensing all the experiences into one example. The time spent teaching for nothing but scrip, then having the stores choose not to honor it. The ongoing fight to keep little Ruth Nell healthy and then losing her. The death of Grandma Lou. The impossibility of the funeral procession even making it to the cemetery and having to turn back and try another day. "All the things in No Man's Land, the landmarks of Hazel's life, had lost their meaning." (p.233)

The people who stayed in the high plains during the Dust Bowl were desperate, in constant danger and hopeless.  They came to the region full of hopes and it looked promising in the beginning.  Then circumstances dashed their hopes and dreams.  They had come to the area because they were promised tree ined streets buth those streets were soon covered in layers of grit.  Their American dreams became nightmares on a Biblical scale.

For example, Caroline Henderson, a Holyoke graduate when precious few women did that, wrote Letters from the Dust Bowl for the Atlantic Monthly.  Her descriptions of their everyday lives made me ashamed of how much I complained about wearing masks during Covid.  At least we didn't have to put Vaseline in our noses or sweep "ripples" of grit from our kitchens.

Poor Hazel Shaw faced having another baby after losing Ruth Neil and her Grandma Lou on the same day.  The story of Ruth Neil's birth and then her burial and Grandma Lou's painted such a vivid picture.  Then poor Hazel was sealed into her house and still wasn't safe.  In the end she left with her "dignity intact."

Doc Dawson's son, John, was startled and angry when he returned in the mid-30s to what had been his home.  His father, however, help tight to the idea that things would soon be better even with his health failing and his money gone.  The younger Dawson believed the people had done this to themselves.  "The nesters who had chased away the cowboys, the real estate promoters, the people who subdivided the XIT and Dawson's own father who carved up his own little piece of the panhandle only to have it become a collection point for tumbleweeds." were party to the destruction of the plains.

Then Roosevelt was elected President.  He sent Hugh Bennett to investigate.  Bennett blieved the plains could be saved.  He used his scientific know-how, his determination and Roosevelt's backing to make progress toward ending the misery.  Congress was slow to believe things were as bad as they were.  Bennett's report made it clear that things had to change.  They no longer could cling to the belief that nature was solely to blame and that nature alone would repair the plains.  Man played a major role in this disaster and had to take a role in repairing it.

Before reading these books my knowledge of the Dust Bowl was limited to the mention of it in history classes and the black and white photos i had seen.  Learning about these individuals brought mental images to my mind that I can not erase.  As sad as these stories were they remind us that the human spirit is capable of great things and that Americans before us survived much worse than we have.  There is hope yet.

I would describe the people who stayed in the high plains as stuck. It’s the first word that comes to my mind. Many people stayed because they had nowhere else to go while some stayed because they had no money or vehicle to leave. Some stayed with hope in their heart that things would get better any day. These stories helped me to begin to understand the hardships they endured. They put a face to name, if you will. We all know people suffered but now we hear in greater detail how they suffered and what it was like. While I read, I couldn’t help but to imagine myself in their shoes and to contemplate what choices I would have made.
- Shannon M.

It still blows my mind that these events took place just 100 years ago. Reading Don Hartwell's journal entries and then the production of The Plow That Broke The Plains made it even more harrowing. Not to downplay the former but having visuals of what the Great Plains looked like during the natural disaster really drives the point home. It was also interesting to learn that The Plow was the most successful government-produced film during American peacetime. Having first-hand accounts as well as governmental artifacts gives 21st century readers a better understanding of the Dust Bowl's impact on American society as a whole. 

The bravery--the idea of isolation and working and working for so little/no yield--is overwhelming. I think from my reading of novels about the era: The Grapes of Wrath and The Four Winds: my mind saw most of the people leave. The reality, so many were stuck, either financially or emotionally. I had heard from a friend about his own mother's experiences of the era and knew that some stayed; he told me that she would sweep every day before and after school--the extent of this statement was not appreciated until reading this book. (Nor could I ever appreciate the scope completely. 

(Have you read Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds? Well worth it--and gave me a greater understanding of the hardships of what the "Okies" experienced when they did find the California border and the camps. 

One wants to describe those who stayed in the high plains during the Dust Bowl as foolish, but there’s more to it than that.  I read the diary of Don Hartwell and think about how he grew up on the same farm he was living on and reluctant to leave.  His reluctance to leave had more to do with a seeming reminiscence and love of the past.  His farm is both all he’s known and slowly turning into something alien and hellish.  The phrase “better to keep the devil you know than meet one you don’t” comes to mind.  People who had lived their lives in the high plains were familiar with it and while the Dust Bowl brought a hellish experience they might not have ever known to that extent, they dreamed of life returning to times they remembered as good – and they feared the hardship of leaving only to find even more hardship in different ways.  They were used to the unpredictability of life on the high plains.  They were not used to life in the areas they might have fled to and did not know what they might get themselves into.

I also think about how much courage it took for many who settled the Dust Bowl areas to do that in the first place.  It was a barren grassland that they were told could not support farming, but they were given means and methods to tackle it and many sunk all their hard work, funds, and sanity in staking a claim on the land.  When things didn’t turn out as expected – when they were met with hardship they could not have anticipated – it had to be hard to start all over again.  Even if they had the funds to start over, mustering up the courage and will to move and start fresh in a new place they would have to fight to stake a place in had to be daunting.

Ultimately, I think rather highly of these people.  I can see the general folly of trying to turn desolate grassland into farmland, certainly, I see the folly of destroying the environment for profit, but beyond that, I also see average people who simply wanted the freedom to live and be happy.  Don Hartwell’s diaries hit rather hard, especially listening to entries where he reminisces about things from his childhood on the same farm.  How hard it must have been for those who had grown up in the area during the good times to have to try and survive during the hard times due to poor decisions made by others.  How isolating and difficult it must have felt to have a land you loved enough to pour your hard work and energy into turn against you and become inhospitable.  How hard it must have been to lose your home.  So while logic says that the people who stayed and did not leave ought to be labeled as fools, I can’t help but pity them and find in them characteristics of brave, determined, caring, and ultimately resilient people who weathered one of the worst storms in American history.

As for how these individual stories compare with my larger understanding of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, I find that these individual stories have completely recontextualized my understanding of these events.  As I have previously stated, the Dust Bowl has often been taught as some natural disaster that befell those living in the American Midwest, but it is obvious now that a lot of it was a man-made disaster, fueled, as Timothy Egan says, by man’s hubris – fueled by American belief in Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism.  In many ways those that suffered in the Dust Bowl were the creators of their own hellish experience.

Additionally, I recently began making new connections between the period of American Imperialism and World War I, and I now have new connections to make between the geopolitical tensions of World War I and the Great Depression.  We have long seen that America experienced a post-war boom following World War I – it is what allowed the 1920s to roar so loud – but it has been so interesting to see how the boom of wheat prices during the war bottomed out afterwards and how that impacted American agriculture – how the boom had caused people to start monocropping for profit and how that drive toward profit caused people to monocrop the life out of the soil, which in turn made the situation that much more dire when the bottom fell out of the wheat prices.  I’ve long associated the Great Depression with the speculation on Wall Street, but it’s obvious that speculation in the agricultural sector also contributed – but the agricultural speculation did much more real-world, long-term damage to the environment that had much longer-lasting impacts.  I also tend to think more of cities when I think of the Great Depression – after all, in my family we have long said that life didn’t change much for our relatives that went through it because they just kept subsistence living as they always had.  When I would think of rural areas suffering in the Great Depression it was previously the experience of those in the Dust Bowl that came to mind due to the WPA photograph projects, but it was always in the sense that, while there was a Great Depression going on, there had also been this natural disaster that occurred in a strange coincidence of fate.  After reading these books, it’s clear that there was no coincidence between the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War I.  And, while these books have made the human suffering of these events much more obvious, they have also shown the very fallible human nature of the creation and connection of these events as well.

The Depression and Dust Bowl are not areas of American history that I have studied in depth prior to reading these books. I suppose I had a general idea of the scope of the hardship people faced in the Great Plains, but not a concrete historical understanding of the daily experience of people- especially those who stayed. (I do remember reading Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust in middle school, but that was more of a historical fiction take. Nevertheless, it was an intensely emotional book). Mainly, my impressions of the Dust Bowl particularly have been based on images, like "Migrant Mother" for example.

Reading The Worst Hard Time has really highlighted the toll of human suffering during the Dust Bowl. One anecdote that stood out to me was the child that was abandoned in a coffee box on the church steps, saved at the last minute by Hazel Shaw. Only to then find out that the infant's health was so negatively impacted by the dust and weather, that it died a few days later of dust pneumonia. (Eagan, 170) This is just one small example of the scope of human suffering during this time.  

This is not a time period that I have taught, but it has always fascinated me.  Growing up, it seemed like an event that happened so long ago and could not happen again because of all of our ‘advancements’.  Even while reading this, I kept being reminded that this is a time period when innovation was in full swing, and not all that long ago.  

The reality is, the people of this time period had more bravery than most.  They endured losses that many of us would consider unimaginable.  In thinking even just about the loss of animals and livelihood, many of us would break.  I had a very difficult time reading about the rabbit deaths.  I also cannot imagine dealing with the black widows.  All of that is minor when you add in the fact that the dust was poisoning everyone, and the land seemed to be a total loss.  

One of the things that I enjoyed most about these books was the ability to connect the stories with real life.  Even in watching a movie over the time, it is easy to gloss over the real humans that survived.  When we begin to think about it from that perspective, would any of us be willing to leave everything we know and give up our claim to land and home?  If we did decide to do so, where would we go?  It is so much easier to make assumptions when you are not the one living in the moment.  So, why did everyone choose to endure rather than leave?

I believe one of the biggest reasons many stayed was fear of the unknown. There was no guarantee that things would be better somewhere else.  Picking up and moving is difficult when you have no food and no money.  Another reason for staying was resiliency.  The belief that things were about to turn around and go back to ‘normal’ had many playing a waiting game.  Because of this, I think some held out hope until it was too late.  Once family members became sick and roads became impassable, the option to leave became even more difficult.  Knowing all of this, it is still difficult for us to fully understand all of the thoughts that went into making the difficult decision to stay or leave.