The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

In the winter of 1935, everyone in the Osteen dugout had a cough, a raw throat, and incessantly itchy eyes. They hung wet bed sheets against the walls to filter out the dust, but the dugout was like a sieve. A black blizzard in February knocked down telephone poles. In March, the worst dusters came from the north and blocked out the sun for days. Every school in the county was closed for a week that month. Ike considered dropping out of school to get a government job paving a road across southern Baca County into New Mexico, but Ike’s mother said that “it would break her heart if he left before making it out of high school.” He stayed and signed up for a senior play, which was cancelled when the Red Cross converted his school’s tiny gym into an emergency hospital. Nine people died that month, including some of Ike’s classmates.

In Oklahoma, Dr. John H. Blue of Guymon treated fifty-six people for dust pneumonia. All of them also had signs of silicosis. Other patients were suffering from early symptoms of tuberculosis—people were filled with dirt. Doctors saw a pattern of children, infants, and the elderly with “coughing jags and body aches, particularly chest pains, and shortness of breath.” Others had nausea and could not eat, and some died within days of being diagnosed with dust pneumonia.

Desperate parents begged the government for help to escape. One hundred families in Baca County gave up their property to the government in return for money to move. Roosevelt had not yet created a relocation plan, but there was money and there were some relief efforts that could help people move. Meanwhile, the Red Cross opened six emergency hospitals across No Man’s Land, Baca County, and southwestern Kansas to assist people who lived too far away to get to hospitals.

Jeanne Clark’s mother, Louise Walton, who had left New York for the High Plains to cure her respiratory ailment, now watched her daughter cope with a high fever, chills, and a chronic cough. The doctor did not know if Jeanne would live to Easter Sunday 1935. The former haven for "lungers” had turned deadly, and the Red Cross warned people against going outside. If they had to, they were to wear respiratory masks. Rail travel was hazardous, too. People had to scoop the dust out of passenger cars.