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Show Page 10 The Ogden Valley news Volume XXV Issue XIV August 15, 2019 The Worst Hard Time – A Book Review By Forrest Brown As an avid reader, I have reviewed a large amount of books in the last ten years. I’ve read some good stuff, but I have also read books about terrible wars, poverty, abuse, and despair. But I don’t think I have read a book quite like The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, which is the untold story of those who experienced and survived the great American Dust Bowl. Never in the history of the world has the environment terrorized a group of people like the dust storms did during the 1930s, which became known as the “Dirty Thirties.” Join as we review this epic story. The Dust Bowl primarily affected six states—Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. It covered an area of more than 450 miles long by 300 miles wide. It lasted from 1930 to 1936, and was aided by a relentlessness and severe drought that was occurring at the same time as the high winds. The drought had come in three waves—in 1934, 1936, and later in 1939. For many years prior to the dust bowl, farmers in this area had extensively engaged in deep plowing of the virgin top soil of the Great Plains. Unfortunately, this helped displace the native, deeprooted green grasses that normally trapped the top soil, held moisture, and prevented erosion. Due to the rapidly growing number of farmers and the increased mechanization of farm equipment, the tall grassland of the Great Plains was slowly, but surely, being turned into a perilous area ripe for destruction. The author begins this book by giving some background on the people who came to settle much of this area of the nation. He says that the Comanche were the first “Lords of the Plains. They migrated out of eastern Wyoming, Shoshone people who had lived in the upper Platte River drainage. With horses, the Comanche moved south, hunting and raiding over a huge swath of the southern plains, parts of present-day Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.” Then the white Anglo-Saxon people started coming in and settling in parts of western Oklahoma and in the northern panhandle of Texas. With this came the railroad, spurring the many small cities that sprang up, causing an increase of population. This increase in population and the over cultivation of the land was due, in large part, to the demand for prairie wheat. More and more farmers began to plant wheat because of the demands of feeding people across the globe and the accompanying rise in its value. The soil was disturbed, and along with the continued droughts, the Great Plains were ripe for a major disaster. The author displays a map (below) of the main areas that were affected by the dust storms. It affected an estimated one hundred million acres across six states. The almost constantly blowing dust forced tens of thousands of people to abandon their farms, unable to pay their mortgages or to grow their crops, and their livestock, such as cattle and horses, died by the thousands. Many of the families that were affected by the dust eventually moved to California and elsewhere, seeking a better life. The area in western Oklahoma became known as a “no-man’s land” because it became very difficult to grow crops and to raise livestock. The dust storms were relentless and drove many settlers off the land. Roads, at times, became unusable, and with record heat in the summer and the ever-present lack of rain, the region became almost uninhabitable. When many of the settlers came to this land, they plowed and cultivated much of it—growing mostly wheat to meet the high demand from the devastation of World War I. This pushed the price of a bushel of wheat to unheard of amounts, but it did not last long as the war ended and the droughts and dust quickly became a common occurrence. One of the unique things about this book was the author’s extensive detail of the lives of the people who lived through the dust bowl. Timothy Egan even won the National Book Award for this book. One such individual, who the authors describe throughout the book, is Bam White. Bam was part American Indian, and came to the high plains to find a better life for himself and his family. The author writes: In 1930, Bam White and his family lived in a little rental house, a place they could never seem to warm. The price was right, though, three dollars a month. At times, he told his boys, he still wanted to roam. It could have been the Indian blood stirring again. . . . The wanderer’s urge would not help a family now. There were no animals to follow—cattle or bison. Wasn’t much grass, either. Bam decided to find a house of his own, a place to get established, to give the family some certainty, some place to prove that when the horse died in Dalhart (Texas) it meant God was telling them to settle here . . . . Bam got by with odd jobs in the field, selling his turnips and skunk hides. Around noon on January 21, 1932, a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo. The winds had been fierce all day; clocked at sixty miles an hour when the curtain dropped over the Panhandle. The sky lost it customary white, and it turned brownish then gray as the thing lumbered around the edge of Amarillo, a city of 43,000. Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. The author’s ability to describe in full detail helps paint a vivid picture of what these people actually experienced as they tried to endure these horrific events. Time and time again for eight to nine years Mother Nature threw her worst at the early settlers of this section of the country. Below is another example of one of the earlier settlers who experienced a lot of suffer- ing and despair: Doc Dawson had money in the failed bank. He was approaching sixty and was worried about his future. Social Security did not yet exist. He had no pension. People owed him money from way back. Patients had offered him chickens, venison, and old cars. Usually, he waved it off. The Doc looked strong, but it had been a struggle to overcome his own infirmities. Bright’s disease. Tuberculosis. Asthma. He didn’t need much sleep, running from operation to operation. He trained himself to relax at intervals, nearly shutting his body down, and through this method he said he could go on without a normal man’s sleep. It was easier to do when his labors were not so physical. Since giving up the sanitarium, he had become a fulltime farmer. The work caught up with him. This book has helped me realize that people in the past have lived through much difficulty with things such as the droughts and the Dust Bowl in places such as the Great High Plains. Some of the settlers left and a few stayed and endured all the hardships that nature and the prairie hurled at them. Timothy Egan masterfully captured the ups and the downs that these early pioneers experienced. I hope you will read this thought-provoking book of the lives of a strong-willed people. BALLOON FESTIVAL cont. from page 1 Saturday 7 – 8 a.m. Balloon Launch 7 a.m. – 10 p.m. Artist & Crafts Booth/Food Vendors 7 – 11 a.m. Breakfast 9 – 9:45 a.m. Bowery-Digital Merchant Symposium Kick Off (bowery) 4:30 – 5:45 p.m. Stage – Dave Quackenbush 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. Evening Balloon Launch 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. Stage – Brothers of September 7:30 – 8 p.m. Stage - Deja Mitchel Dance Performance 8 – 10 p.m. Stage - Christian Mills Band 8:45 – 9:30 p.m. Balloon Glow Sunday 7 – 8 a.m. Balloon Launch 7 – noon Booth & Food Vendors 7 – 11 a.m. Breakfast Entrance to the festival is free, other than nominal fees for family games and food. Free shuttle rides provided by Powder Mountain Shuttle from Snowcrest Junior High and Powder Mountain parking lots. Bicycles can be ridden to the event and locked along the park’s chain-link fence. This event is made possible by a generous donation from Stage Sponsor Ogden Regional Medical Center, RAMP, Powder Mountain, Community Foundation of Ogden Valley, Mountain Luxury, Farmers Insurance/ Paul Persico, Water Wellness, Rise Broadband, Kala, and Legacy Sponsor Nordic Valley. Lodging sponsors include Basinview Lodging, Powder Mountain Escapes. Other supporting sponsors are Waypoint, Mountain Arts and Music, Zions Bank, and City Center Sound and Stage. For more information, please visit <www. ogdenvalleyballoonfestival.com> the Valley are just wonderful, and the visual connection to the balloon launch site adds a new synergy to this year’s event,” states Murphy. The return of the fundraiser breakfast for the Ogden Rescue Mission is back! Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, beginning at 7:00 a.m., a buffet breakfast will be served at Eden Park in memory of Gary Dowdy. All proceeds from the breakfast will be given to the Ogden Rescue Mission. Other food vendors include BBQ Chicken, BBQ meats, snacks and treats such as kettle corn, ice cream, and shaved ice, which will be available so bring those appetites! New to the event for 2019 is the Digital Merchant Series—bridging the gap between the local community & virtual world! This year the festival will team up with Michelle Robinson of the Bitcoin and Blockchain community to host the first experimental social event with an objective to educate the community on real life application of the up and rapidly coming digital currency technology. EDEN PARK ACTIVITY SCHEDULE Friday 7 – 8 a.m. Balloon Launch 7 – 11 a.m. Breakfast 4 – 10 p.m. Artist & Crafts Booth/Food Vendors 2:30 – 2:50 p.m. Crypto Kick Off 3 – 3:55 p.m. Bowery-Kala - Intro Digital Currency 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. Stage - Koreen Greenwood 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. Evening Balloon Launch 6:30 – 7:45 p.m. Stage - Mother of Mayhem 8 – 10:00 p.m. Stage - Penrose 8:45 – 9:30 p.m. Balloon Glow |