This is the book I am giving. I am very excited to be able to hand this book to people and tell them about it. Many people  especially young people do not know about the Dust Bowl and the worst hard time. Despite the problems, the 1930s is my favorite time period. Although known as the “dirty 30s” because of the dirt from the frequent dust storms, there were many good things about that time period. It was a simpler time and people pulled together to save their families and their land.

Timothy Egan’s book is about the dust bowl and tells the story of the people or “nesters” who farmed the  around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. They were given plenty of warnings against farming and plowing in this area but ignored them all.
Rain is scarce in the plains
and it stopped raining in 1931. Wheat farmers tried plowing more and more but when wheat prices crashed they left their fields, and without any natural anchors for the soil, the soil calcified and started to blow. These farmers and their families saw their land destroyed by ten-thousand-foot-high dust storms that overtook the landscape causing illness and death to people and animals.

Housekeeping became almost impossible to do. The dust took over and women hung wet sheets in the windows to try and keep it out. Black clouds of grasshoppers took over and ate anything that was left in the fields. Many children died of pneumonia, livestock died as they had no water and they were full of the dust. Not only did the High Plains feel the effects of bad farming but many times the blackened clouds reached all the way to the  East Coast effecting New York City and Washington, D.C.

Egan’s book leads up to April 14, 1935 an unusual day for spring 1935 the sky blue and the sun warm. People were glad to see the sun shine and sky blue, so they shoveled out their houses and tried to clean up. “Then, with only a few minutes’ warning, “the mother of all dusters” swooped out of the north, “the air snapping like gunfire.” The day that is now known as Black Sunday had arrived. April 14, 1935 saw the air so thick with blackness people were lost and could not breath. The fear of being buried alive gripped many.

This is a thrilling story of man’s ignorance about how to farm, the devastation nature can cause and how it can effect many people. It is also a story of the families on the High Plains, some who made it through the storms and some who didn’t. In 1935 Roosevelt established the Soil Conservation Service. As a result, irrigation began and trees were planted. When the rains fell again and wheat prices began to rise in the 1940′s farmers began to plow again and ripped out many of the trees.

Read the book, it goes into a lot of detail about that time period and the people who survived and those who did not.