Timothy Egan wrote this book to describe a hard time during the Dust Bowl. He described how the Dust Bowl affected the farmers and effected on the life at all. The Dust Bowl occurred during the time of economic depression. He focused on untold stories about people live in the Dust Bowl.
At the beginning, Egan used the phrase, “the Great Plowup.” He meant the Era of large success for the people, who settle in the Great Plains, by changing the grasses with crops of wheat and corn. Those people settled in the Great Plains after moving of the Indian, killing a lot of animals, and removing the few trees in the land. They plowed a million acres and replaced the grass which covered the land with the crops. These crops like a lot of water. The years from 1901 to 1930 were rainy years. So, that encouraged the farmers to plow more and more acres. The Great Plowup encouraged more people to settle in the Great
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They had a store selling clothes. The Jewish was considered a secondary in Anglo Prairie. As Egan said, the clothing store of the Herzstein gave the people in Dalhart something to dream about. Also, Egan mentioned the Herzstein was the first Jewish family in the High Plains. However, Egan mention, “some people said Jews were to blame for the bad times.” Those people considered the Jewish not belong to this country because they were not from the highest type of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Also, some of them blamed the “Jewish system banking” for collapsing of the economy. In Nebraska, Egan described how the people blamed Jewish for the bad time. He described, “They held banners with rattlesnakes, labeled as the Jews, coiled around the American farmer.” Also, father Charles E. Coughlin blamed the Jews for American collapse when he talked in the radio. Egan said, “He would read the names of Hollywood movie stars and then “out” them, revealing their original Jewish names as if detailing a sinister