The Worst Hard Time

Chapter 1 opens with Bam White, a ranch hand, marooned in 1926 near Dalhart, Texas. White abandons his original plan to escape the cold winters of Colorado to find work in Littlefield, Texas because one of his horses dies, and he has no money to buy another one. White believes his horse dying is an omen that he should settle in the area.

Egan then takes us a few miles southeast of Dalhart where archeologists are beginning to uncover a 700-year-old Indian village. From a description of this ancient village, Egan launches a series of early historical facts about the High Plains. He begins with Vasquez de Coronado's pursuit for precious metals in 1541 and tells how Spaniards like Coronado brought horses to the area, helping to empower the Comanche Indians to migrate and populate the High Plains. The Comanche secure the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 with the United States government, which grants them hunting rights on the Plains. However, Anglo buffalo hunters and the state of Texas breaks the treaty. (Texas claims the land belonged to the Republic of Texas when the treaty was signed).The Comanche's period of dominating and roaming freely on the Plains ends when the tribe surrenders to the U.S. Army in the Red River War (1874-1875).

Egan also gives information about the three-million-acre XIT Ranch adjoining Dalhart, Texas “the biggest ranch in the world under fence” (21). The ranch is built by the Capitol Syndicate company, who accepts the state of Texas's offer of three million acres of land in exchange for promising to finance the state's capitol. However, skeptical foreign investors convince the Capitol Syndicate to sell off the XIT land after the investors hear the news about some recent harsh winters in Texas. The company enlists the help of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and circulates outlandish propaganda that includes falsehoods such as plowing the land would cause it to rain, and farmers could use dust to moisturize the soil.

The chapter ends with White wandering around Dalhart observing a movie theater, hotel, sanitarium, and clothiers’ shop–all establishments owned by characters Egan details in later chapters of his book.

Chapter 2 begins with the founding of Boisy City, Oklahoma. The city name of Boisy is penned from the French word le bois, meaning trees; however, there is not one tree in Boisy City. The real estate company Southwest Immigration and Development sells nonexistent lots in Boisy City by distributing brochures with pictures of “elegantly aged trees lining the streets, [and] a tower of cold, clean water gushing from an artesian well in the center of town,” next to fine houses, businesses and a railroad crossing (32). When the purchasers arrive to claim their lots, the town has none of these things.

After describing the birth of Boisy City, Egan shifts a few miles south and introduces Carlie Lucas and his family, who arrived in the Boisy City area in 1914, during the “peak year for the homesteaders in the twentieth century” (36). One of Lucas's neighbors, Fred Folkers, is another new homesteader in the area. Folkers can barely make a living using a horse-drawn plow until he buys the new one-way tractor plow on the market. This miracle plow triples his wheat production. With his increased income, Folkers buys more land, the latest appliances, and a new piano and house for his family. The railroads add a station in Boisy City, which makes shipping wheat easy. Carlie Lucas (Hazel Lucas Shaw's father) also makes a fortune producing wheat by 1917. Boisy City shows signs of new wealth: new Model-Ts and shops, and a new farmland bank (after Congress passes the Federal Farm Loan Act in 1916).It's easy for the prosperous farmers to secure loans, even the so-called suitcase farmers, “who rent a tractor and a piece of land for a few days, drop some winter wheat into the fresh-turned fold, and come back next summer for the payoff” (50).

Chapter 3 focuses on the founders of Dalhart, Texas. Bam White, the ranch hand who decided to settle in Dalhart because his horse died, moves his family into a shack and sharecrops. He befriends the James brothers, who own the second-biggest ranch on the Texas panhandle. The James brothers, however, are forced by bankruptcy to sell off large tracks of their ranch because of a cattle surplus and subsequent beef price crash.

The wealthiest man in Dalhart is “Uncle” Dick Coon. Coon suffered through the Galveston, Texas flood and childhood poverty, and comes to Dalhart at first to buy XIT ranch property, but later discovers he can make more money in town building. He now owns practically every business on the main street in Dalhart, including the De Soto Hotel and Mission Theater.

A prosperous merchant in the town is Levi Hertzstein. Hertzstein is also the only Jew in the town. He owns the clothier shop that advertises the new idea of ready-to-wear clothes.

The two professionals in the town are John “Doc” Dawson and John McCarty. Dawson is a surgeon from Kentucky and runs the local sanitarium with his wife. Dawson wants to eventually quit the sanitarium, however, and make the easy money farming like he sees the wheat farmers doing. Egan weaves in historical facts that show how many people are like Dawson and want to farm: “Only four small farms existed in Dallam County, Texas, in 1901, covering barely a thousand acres; by 1930, a third of the county was in cultivation” (58).The other professional in the town is John McCarty, a twenty-eight-year-old owner and editor of the Dalhart Texan newspaper. McCarty becomes an influential figure in later chapters as he becomes the town's President of the Chamber of Commerce, and fervent booster of Dalhart's morale during the worst of times.