History's hard times

After years of having it on my shelf, I'm finally reading a book called The Worst Hard Time by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Timothy Egan. It's a non-fiction piece about those who suffered to settle the forbidding lands of the the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, only to lose everything to the twin disasters of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

As I was deep into the book last night, I glanced up at the living room wall and saw a picture that I've had hanging in nearly every place I've ever lived: the wedding photograph of my great-grandfather, Hansford Burks and great-grandmother, Florence Aurelia Chandler. They were married in Indian Territory, where he was a deputy sheriff, in August 1900 — seven years before that area joined Oklahoma in statehood. I never met him, but that solemn picture from a happy day is a connection to his life — and many hard times.

Wedding picture of Hansford Burks and Florence Aurelia Chandler — August 1900 in Indian Territory, seven years before Oklahoma became a state.

The lawlessness and inhospitable red clay soil made the territory no place to raise a young family, so Hansford and Florence packed up and they headed back to Henley, a small town in his native central Missouri. There, Hansford did a lot of things to make a living, including stints as a postmaster, school superintendent, grain miller and preacher. He was father to ten children, three of whom didn't survive childhood.

But he, his wife Florence and seven of their children did survive economic collapse and natural upheaval. The Dust Bowl rendered more than 500,000 people homeless and forced the exodus of at least 2.5 million people from devastated areas of states including Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas: the largest such migration in American history.

Homelessness caused by an enormous natural disaster. Mass human migration. Outside of the epic tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, we as Americans are usually — and blessedly — far-removed from that kind of suffering.

But most of us know at least one person who survived the Great Depression. We know how those years shaped their lives, altered their state of thinking and belief systems forever. My maternal grandmother, who lived with my family from the time I was three years old, never put much faith in banks after they failed in the early 1930s and took families' savings with them. Even 13 years after my grandmother's passing, my mother still finds stacks of dollars hidden in drawers and books around the house.

And here we are today, in the midst of a global economic crisis, with fears that are much the same. Last month, I read an article about what's happened to Detroit and, you know, it scared the hell out of me. I mean, 22.8 percent unemployment? No national grocery stores chains in town any more? Thirty percent of the population on food stamps? Those are numbers that hearken back to darker days, things we've all just heard stories about. Things that people are living through, here, today.

What do we do in history's hard times? We pull together, hopefully find common ground and help each other out. We keep moving forward, perhaps more carefully than before.

I think there's enormous value in the stories of those who endure and emerge from hard times. They give us hope, passed down through generations.

Millions around the world, including here in the United States, are going through the worst hard times of their lives right now. If you take time to look around this website, you can get to know a few of them. Maybe a pair of eyes will catch yours, just as Hansford's gaze caught mine last night.