The Worst Hard Time

Don Hartwell is the writer of a secret diary, chronicled in Chapter 19, “Witnesses,” Chapter 22, “Cornhusker II”, and Chapter 24, “Cornhusker III.” Hartwell lives in Inavale, Nebraska in the upper eastern corner of the Dust Bowl. Egan defines the purpose of Hartwell's diary: “At age forty-seven, Harwell was not going down without a fight, but if the elements finally beat him, he wanted a record of his struggle” (242).

From his writings, we experience a firsthand account of a farmer struggling in the late 1930s. Hartwell tries to make money raising mainly corn on his family farm. He gets some spare change by playing piano at dances and lodges on the Nebraska-Kansas border. Hartwell chronicles his failure to raise crops, his depression, decline of ambition, his farm foreclosure, and the separation and breakdown of his twenty-five-year marriage due to financial hardship. Hartwell never leaves the area because he's paralyzed with depression, and he feels like the land is all he has.

Katherine and Fred Folkers ride the free train to the area that the government provides for potential homesteaders, and stake 640 acres near Boise City, Oklahoma plowing wheat after leaving rocky ground in Missouri. The couple are described as arriving “with very little” (46).