Two great histories

Over the weekend NewMexiKen read Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Both are excellent, readable and informative about two periods in American history where mostly myth abounds. Egan’s book won the National Book Award.

Philbrick begins by retelling the story of the Pilgrims, their voyage on the Mayflower, and their colony at Plymouth. But he also tells the story of the people who were there to meet them and the interdependence that developed — and then collapsed. Subtitled A Story of Community, Courage, and War, the second half of the book describes King Philip’s War, Philip being the adopted Christian name for the Pokonokets sachem, a son of Massasoit. It was the deadliest war, proportionately, ever fought on American soil.

Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.

It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.

And the worst of it was man made.

But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.

In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.