In the 1930s, the Great Plains region, were given the name The Dust Bowl due to the droughts in the 1930s, as America was going into the Great depression. The droughts, dust storms and people doing the method of dryland farming caused the destruction of the environment, agriculture, and the people life’s living there. Timothy Egan in book, “The Worst Hard Time,” emphasizes on the stories of the people who chose to stay and survived the environmental disasters, destruction of their towns, battling through starvation and diseases by dust storms in America’s High Plains. Hazel Lucas Shaw is a particular individual highlighted by Timothy Egan throughout the book. Egan analyzes her journey as she arrived in the Great Plains and throughout the dirty …show more content…
The promise time period is known during 1901 through 1930. Many settlers, including families migrated to the Great Plains. The Great Plains were the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase in 1806. The settlers and families migrated due to advertisement sent from companies’, giving false description how the land looked, stating the land had tress, fresh water, and a place where you can grow crops. The Government also promoted expansion towards west by passing the Homestead Acts, by providing 160 acres of lands to settlers. Including the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which increased the number of acres to 320. The Enlarged Homestead Act drew Hazel family in No Man’s Land, a place in the northwest Texas Panhandle which include the entire Oklahoma Panhandle in 1914. They decided to settle at No Man’s Land due to the federal …show more content…
According to Egan, “The Lucas family stayed through fires, the floods and the peculiar social life because the land was starting to pay.” (Egan, 39) Hazel Lucas had her first job at age seventeen, she taught thirty-nine students in eight grades. She also married Charles Shaw and decided to move to Cincinnati to start something but they were low in money. Thus Hazel went back to her land and got a job as teacher that paid enough money to save money. The land was also paying off for her family, her father was advised to grow dryland wheat as fast you could as the Great War started in 1914. The farmers who grew wheat had a great drastic improvement in life because the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel during war, causing over seventy-five million acres of wheat. According to Hazel, “the country was in a fever of fast money-making.” (Egan,
The availability of inexpensive land in the American West provided opportunity for many Americans to fulfill the American dream of individualism, economic opportunity and personal freedom. Immigrants, former slaves and other settlers moved across the country to become western farmers and ranchers to make a new life. One of the reasons why the west was a land of opportunity for the farmers and ranchers was the large quantity of cheap available land. This allowed for many Americans, both rich and poor, to buy land for farming and raising cattle. The Homestead Act of 1862 aided the process. The Homestead Act gave title to 160 acres of federal land to farmers who staked a claim and lived on the land for five years. Alternatively, a farmer could buy the land after six months for $1.25 an acre. Many blacks and immigrants joined the westward expansion, looking for a better life. Immigrants saw the land as opportunity because many could not own land in the countries where they were born. For example, in Nebraska, a fourth of the population was foreign born. These immigrants transformed...
The Worst Hard Time is all about surviving the dust bowl days in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, commonly referred to as no man’s land. The author, Timothy Egan, wrote this because he knew the sources for first hand accounts were dwindling as many people who were alive during that time are now growing old. Egan begins by describing breakup of the XIT ranch which covered most of the Texas panhandle. All this land was then sold in small sections to new homesteaders, or nesters, who then began to turn sod, till the land plant wheat, corn, and other crops on this newfound inexhaustible resource. Egan describes the forces that led to European settlement of the Great Plains. The U.S. government cleared the land of the Indians and bison by the
The “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s”, was written by Donald Worster, who admits wanted to write the book for selfish reasons, so that he would have a reason o visit the Southern Plains again. In the book he discusses the events of the “dirty thirties” in the Dust Bowl region and how it affected other areas in America. “Dust Bowl” was a term coined by a journalist and used to describe the area that was in the southern planes in the states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, between the years of 1931 and 1939. This area experienced massive dust storms, which left dust covering everything in its wake. These dust storms were so severe at times that it made it so that the visibility in the area was so low to where people
Most of the southern farmers moved west to find new job opportunities and fertile farmland however they were faced with many problems such as living conditions and bugs. When moving west, most farmers decided to settle in Kansas or Nebraska. The Homestead Act was instituted in 1862, if gave 160-arce farms to settlers to improve to land and live on it (3). If the farmers felt this was still to small of a land they were able to buy more land or borrow money to buy the land. The problem with that was that there was very little amount of trees to make houses so farmers resorted to making housed from sod (11). “The Sod wall is about 2 feet thick at the ground and slopes off on the outside...
First, Egan believes that the Chicago Syndicate, as well as the government, took part in causing the Dust Bowl. The Worst Hard Time began with an explanation of how the land was inhabited after the Comanche were kicked off. Texas wanted an extravagant state capitol building after the Civil War. In order to fund this building, Texas agreed to give land to whoever would take on the endeavor of building the structure. The Chicago Syndicate decided
There were three acts implemented in 1862. The first was the Homestead Act which stated that 160 acres would be granted after five years of residence and upon making specific improvements. This act led to the rapid settlement of the Midwest. The next act was the Morrill Act which granted two townships (approximately 40,000 acres) to each state for
The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States.
White settlers started moving westward to settle the land gained by the victory over the Native Americans. A major factor that caused this major movement, other than by the victory of the war, was the homestead act. This act provided and granted 160 acres of free land to any citizen who was the head of a house or family. While moving, the settlers were challanged by the new enviornment of the plains and they had to start adapting to the new enviornment. While moving west, all farmers were supported by the government on technical aspects and on agricultural education.
Post Civil War, America was looking for new opportunities to become a stronger and more efficient nation. Though reconstruction collapsed, they took the opportunity of the Manifest Destiny to gain the territories of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War and settle the west. With this expansion, it provided numerous opportunities for the people to gain success alongside the nation. The gold rush caused an increase in immigration that brought more people to the newly flourishing nation, and allowed the west coast to become settled as well as help the economy from the new wealth. The land that was gained in the Louisiana Purchase provided the Great Plains, where pioneers settled and ranching operations were run. Though it sadly pushed away the native tribes who originally lived there, throughout the gilded age the government has tried to return to them their land and rights – and gives them reparations today. All of which provided a basis to the American dream that gave the opportunity for a better life to many people. Towns and economy was...
The Homestead Act of 1862 was signed into law by our late president, Abraham Lincoln. The Homestead Act transferred over 200 million acres of public land into private land for purchase. Anybody who wanted to move west just had to file for land, usually it was like 160 acres and after five years of living there it was theirs for free or after 6 months they could purchase it for a dollar and sixty two cents an acre. Settlers would set out in search of gold and land. The land wash is harsh and much more suitable for raising cattle as compared to farming.
In his award-winning account of the devastating environmental and cultural effects of the Dust Bowl that enveloped America’s Midwest in the 1930’s, Timothy Egan attributes the disaster to the collective cause of reckless man-made agricultural practices, even as he surveys the tragic individual stories of the people who suffered from it. He argues that the combined effects of drought and a heat wave in the early 1930s, and man’s hubris and environmental ignorance and irresponsibility throughout the decade caused the Dust Bowl, and yet finds compassion for the small homestead farmer and the weak and powerless families who inhabited the region and lived through the disaster rather than picking up stakes and moving on. His story is a traumatic
Can you imagine living in harsh dust, losing your mother and brother, and barely recognizing the man, sitting in front of you, is your father? In the novel, Out of the Dust, the author, Karen Hesse, reveals the theme of the novel is loss and grief. Karen Hesse unfolds the theme by using messages throughout the book to emphasize the hardship and power of the Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.
Indians had been moved around much earlier than the nineteenth century, but The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the first legal account. After this act many of the Indians that were east of the Mississippi river were repositioned to the west of the river. Tribes that refused to relocate ended up losing much of their land to European peoples (Sandefur, p.37). Before the Civil War in the U.S. many farmers and their families stayed away from the west due to a lack of rainfall (Nash et al., 2010). Propaganda in newspapers lured Americans and many other immigrants to the west to farm. The abundance of natural grasses in the west drew cattlemen and their families as well.
The opening chapter paints a vivid picture of the situation facing the drought-stricken farmers of Oklahoma. Dust is described a covering everything, smothering the life out of anything that wants to grow. The dust is symbolic of the erosion of the lives of the people. The dust is synonymous with "deadness". The land is ruined ^way of life (farming) gone, people ^uprooted and forced to leave. Secondly, the dust stands for ^profiteering banks in the background that squeeze the life out the land by forcing the people off the land. The soil, the people (farmers) have been drained of life and are exploited: