The Worst Hard Time

The rabbits, bugs, drought, heat, the Great Depression and now the black dusters are causing emotional stress in Dalhart, Texas. Egan explains an unexpected result of the traumatic dusters:“As the ground took flight through the middle years of the Dirty Thirties, the courts had to contend with a new type of mental illness–the person driven mad by the dust” (177). The trial of a thirty-five-year-old Dalhart widow with young children, whose husband had just died of dust pneumonia, represents the many new insanity trials brought to Dust Bowl courts. The woman is found in the streets babbling incoherently. Because an expert tells the Dalhart judge that the woman is unable to care for herself or her children, he signs a certificate committing the woman to an insane asylum.

In this chapter, John McCarty, the publisher of the Dalhart Texan newspaper, finds out that Movietone News has been filming the dusters (pinpointing his town and Boise City as the center of the worst storms). They are even distributing the films to big theaters that show them as previews before movies. McCarty fights back. He declares that it's time to stop viewing the dusters as a plague: “The newsreel people [...] they had it all wrong,” McCarty says, “The dust storms were majestic, in their way, even beautiful […] Instead of cowering in the sand, people should look skyward in wonder” (185).