The Worst Hard Time Summary

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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,

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