The Worst Hard Time Themes

Historians often use the 1890 census to mark the end of westward expansion—the year in which the dream of Manifest Destiny was fulfilled, and the United States ceded no additional land to homesteaders. However, in The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan notes that historians often forget about the settlement of the southern Great Plains—the region comprised of what are now the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, western Kansas, southwestern Nebraska, southeastern Colorado, and northeastern New…

As a boy, Melt White was treated as though he did not belong. Children teased him for his dark skin, “which seemed too full of the sun.” When he finally learned about his Cherokee and Apache heritage, his aunt warned him to keep it a secret. Melt was a “cowboy” who was also “an Indian.” His internal strife was symbolic of the historical discord between Anglo Texans (that is, white Texans) and the tribes they…

When news of the stock market crash of 1929 arrived in the Southern Plains, people did not think much of it. Stock trading was an activity far removed the simpler, rural life of the High Plains. People associated the workings of Wall Street with “city slickers.” When the rural folks went to the movies, they saw newsreels of the breadlines in major cities and images of apple vendors on every street corner. They may have…

The Southern Plains were fertile, but wheat farmers had been overzealous. Some, particularly former cowboys and the few indigenous people who remained, thought that the land was designed only for grazing and small subsistence farming—what the indigenous tribes had practiced. The plow had allowed farmers to plant countless acres of wheat, but it also led to soil erosion. By the time the dust storms arrived, which the prairie people interpreted as the land’s revenge for…