The Worst Hard Time

Egan focuses on the changing lifestyle of the American cowboys on the High Plains in these chapters. He tells how the nature-loving cowboys, who once rode along wide open spaces and slept on soft bluestem grass, have transitioned to men who walk outdoors in fear of the weather. Egan contrasts the challenges of their past to the life-menacing threat of the new black dusters: “They had lived through grass fires that rolled over the prairie like devil's breath and witnessed [...] the Cimarron River swelled up and raged through the country. More than once, blizzards killed off half their herd” (181). But there was no way even these tough cowboys could fight the dusters.

Bam White no longer dreams of being hired on a ranch because he knows most of the ranches have blown away. Another Dalhart area resident, Andy James, comes from a “proud family” who established a ranch only second in size to the famous XIT ranch (181). Egan tells how “Andy hated what the farmers had done, rearing up this good earth. He hated the nesters for [...] prospecting for wheat like drunken miners in a gold rush, and then for walking away from it and letting it blow” (183).

The cowboys and ranchers in Dalhart are fed up with watching their grasslands disappear. A group of 150 people (mostly cowboys and ranchers) hold a meeting in the town courthouse. At the meeting, they elect Andy James to write a letter to Hugh Bennett telling Bennett Dalhart was ready for him to come and restore the soil. Egan echoes the sentiment of Andy James as he writes the letter: “Yes, it was not a cowboy's way to depend on somebody else, especially the government. But this was their only hope, this soil conservation idea that Big Hugh Bennett was trying to get people to agree on” (182).

The two philosophies—one that believes land should be protected, and the other philosophy, which thinks land is just a commodity—surface again in these three chapters. The two different ideas are contrasted this time in the character of Hugh Bennett and the United States Congress. Egan tells how Bennett “worked Congress,” spending long hours trying to convince them to create a soil conservation agency that would protect the nation's soil for generations to come, but Congress still thinks that soil conservation is not important and doesn’t budge from their position (226). Bennett checks with the country's weather stations, and he hears of a storm that should hit near the Senate room, where Bennett is scheduled to presents his charts and soil conservation testimony. After finding out when the storm would hit D.C., Bennett delays his presentation several days “want[ing] Congress to get another taste [of a duster like the one that had coated the Statue of Liberty with topsoil]” (227).When Bennett calculates when the storm will hit D.C., he then reschedules his presentation. In the Senate room, one of Bennett's aide's whispers in Bennett’s ear that the storm should arrive in about an hour, so Bennett lengthens his lecture with “more on Pliny and Jefferson, jokes about his own farm,” and comments like “did [I] mention—yes, again—that an inch of topsoil can blow away in an hour, but it takes a thousand years to restore it?” (228). The duster darkens the room, and after the storm hits, Congress finally agrees to create and fund Bennett’s new soil conservation agency.

Within these chapters, Egan also presents more reasons people didn't leave the Dust Bowl during the 1930s. Egan explains how the Bam White family “were stuck, like other last chancers. Bam was old, in a place where the years could dent a man well before his time was up. What could a gnarled cowboy do in a broken land?” (218) Another reason Egan cites that people stay is that they believe the land is all they have. This is true of Don Hartwell, the diarist in later chapters, but Egan also tells another story in these chapters about a reporter who finds a “shoe-less and hollow-eyed” lone woman shoveling dirt from a walkway (237). The mail in Baca County, Colorado, where the woman lives, has been delayed for weeks because the trains haven't been able to get through due to the weather. She grabs the reporter, asking for any news of the outside world. In their conversation the reporter asks her why she doesn't just leave. The woman replies that “the land was all she had; she thought she would die in a city, not knowing anyone, unsure how to feed herself” (237).

In the introductory section, “Live Through This,” Egan says he thinks some people may have stayed just out of stubbornness. In these chapters, Egan presents Ezra Lowery and his insistence on staying in the Dust Bowl. He tells how Lowery's family is living off canned thistles and yucca roots. The Lowery's daughter starts the school year with mumps on one side of her body, then the other side, and is quarantined not only for the mumps but also measles. The family experiences several suffocating storms during this time, and they have to temporarily leave the homestead when their daughter also catches scarlet fever. The Lowerys return on Black Sunday, the day of the worst duster of the era. However, Ezra Lowery still refuses to leave: “We may have to eat rattlesnake [...] but I'm not leaving,” Lowery says (234).