– A lifelong High Plains resident from Lamar, Colorado and a surviving witness of the Dust Bowl. Clark was the daughter of a rancher and a Broadway dancer, Louise Walton, who relocated to the prairie to treat a bronchial condition. As a child, Clark suffered from dust pneumonia. Clark was an only child who doctors did not think would survive past 1935, due to her diagnosis. She slept most of the day and was awakened only by the sight and smell of her father’s cigar smoke. As a little girl, she wore dresses made of old onion sacks, due to her family’s poverty as a result of both the Great Depression and the drought.
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Jeanne Clark Character Timeline in The Worst Hard Time
The timeline below shows where the character Jeanne Clark appears in The Worst Hard Time. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction: Live Through This
Jeanne Clark , who lives just up the road from Ike Osteen, is another witness to the...
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...afternoon, sending “waves of sand” over the prairie. The dust appeared like a “black wall.” Jeanne Clark recalls feeling as though she were “caught in a whirlpool.” It was the worst duster...
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Chapter 13: The Struggle for Air
Jeanne Clark ’s mother, Louise Walton, who had left New York for the High Plains to cure...
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Chapter 16: Black Sunday
...A rabbit drive was called back on after “a month-long delay” due to dusters. Little Jeanne Clark had just left the hospital in Lamar after “a long bout of dust pneumonia.” She...
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