Waiting on the Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary of Mary Knackstedt Dyck - Hardcover

Mary Knackstedt Dyck was a farmer's wife in Kansas for over 30 years, during that time she kept a diary written in pencil on notebook paper. This volume contains her entries for the years 1936-1941, the years of the dustbowl, which drove many farmers from their farms.

The daughter of German immigrants, Mary Knackstedt married Henry Dyck, a Mennonite farmer, and in 1905 moved west to a settlement near Lamont Township in Hamilton County, Kansas. For the next thirty years they enjoyed growth and prosperity. Then the drought and dust storms that had driven many farmers from the region in the early years of the century returned. The Dycks remained on their farm and witnessed the mass exodus of farmers and townspeople -- including close friends and family -- who fled the Kansas wheat country to find work.Though she had only a fifth-grade education, Mary Knackstedt Dyck faithfully kept a diary. Written with pencil on lined notebook paper, her daily notations tell the story of farm life on the far western border of Kansas during the grim Dust Bowl years. Manuscript diaries from this era and region are extremely rare, and those written by farm women are even more so. From the point of view of a wife, mother, and partner in the farming enterprise, Dyck recorded the everyday events as well as the frustrations of living with drought and dust storms and the sadness of watching one's children leave the farm.A remarkable historical document, the diary describes a period in this century before the telephone and indoor plumbing were common-place in rural homes -- a time when farm families in the Plains states were isolated from world events and radio provided an enormously important link between farmsteads and the world at large. Waiting on the Bounty brings us unusual insights into the agricultural and rural history of the United States, detailing the tremendous changes affecting farming families and small towns during the Great Depression.