Original subtitles

♪ On the 14th day of April ♪

♪ of 1935 ♪

♪ there struck the worst of dust storms ♪

♪ that ever filled the sky ♪

♪ you could see that dust storm coming ♪

♪ the cloud looked death-like black ♪

♪ and through our mighty nation ♪

♪ it left a dreadful track ♪

We have many words for what's under our feet.

"The good earth", we like to talk about the good earth

and pick it up and smell it and taste it.

This is the soil of our productivity, our prosperity.

But when it's loose and blowing

and it's getting into your attic

and it's covering your laundry on the clothes line, it's dirt,

or when you're breathing it, it's dust.

I think we all realize that where dirt belongs

is under our feet, not up in the air.

We made so much money

at raising wheat in the late twenties

that we broke everything out to raise more wheat.

Then the climate changed and the depression came along,

and the wheat wasn't worth much.

But we still had the land broken out.

We were just too selfish, and we were trying to make money

and get rich quick off of the wheat,

and it didn't work out.

Sustained environmental disasters in American history.

It's not something that happens in just one year.

It's not something that just lasts for 3 or 4 years.

It's a decade.

Because of the combination of extreme drought

and extreme high temperatures,

this is the worst 10-year period

in recorded history on the plains.

♪ We saw outside our window ♪

♪ where wheat fields they had grown ♪

♪ was now a rippling ocean ♪

♪ of dust the wind had blown ♪

In the summer of 1935,

at her homestead in the Oklahoma Panhandle,

Caroline Henderson, a farm wife and writer,

sat down and composed a letter

to the secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace,

to let him know what she, her husband,

and so many of her neighbors were going through.

We are now facing

a fourth year of failure.

Since 1931, the record has been

one of practically unbroken drought.

There can be no wheat for us in 1935.

In one respect, we realize that some farmers have themselves

contributed to this reaping of the whirlwind.

A revival preacher- a true job's comforter...

Proclaimed that the drought is a direct punishment for our sins.

The future promises only

hopeless and permanent desert conditions.

Special prayers for rain were offered

at our County seat last Sunday morning.

The afternoon brought one of the most sudden, dense,

and suffocating dust storms of the season.

By 1935, Caroline Henderson and her neighbors

needed all the help they could find.

Like everyone else in the United States,

they were suffering as the greatest economic cataclysm

in the nation's history...

The great depression... Lingered on.

But they were also caught in the midst

of the nation's greatest ecological catastrophe...

Where "black blizzards" blotted out the sun,

created drifts against their homes, ruined their crops,

and just when it seemed things

could not get any worse,

on Sunday, April 14, 1935,

the biggest storm of all

had struck with a surprising vengeance.

I think it really scared a lot of people.

It's also scary enough that it gets the attention

of the rest of the country.

If people weren't paying attention prior to Black Sunday,

this is an event that is so monumental

that people can't ignore it.

In the dust bowl, the survivors of Black Sunday

worried that they had become a forgotten people

in a forgotten land.

They weren't forgotten.

While president Franklin Roosevelt struggled

to get the whole country back on its feet,

he was also profoundly concerned about the fate

of the southern plains.

But over the next few years, the drought would only deepen,

and the "black blizzards" that added immeasurably

to people's miseries would only intensify.

Many would fight desperately

to hold on to their land and their lives.

Others would be forced to join an exodus

toward a promised land that offered both water and work.

In the crucible of dust and drought and depression,

some families would be torn apart,

others uprooted from their homes,

and some brought closer together than ever before.

I think to be a dry land farmer,

you have to be a certain kind of a person,

and deep down inside of themselves,

they must have had the feeling, "if we just stick it out

and stay here, times are bound to get better,"

which did give them a little hope,

but in the middle of a dust storm,

it's very difficult to hope,

and it takes a lot of willpower and everything else

to bring yourself back out time after time after time.

So you had to admire those people who did stick it out.

They had come there, maybe they'd been born there,

and they intended to stay.

This was their home.

We lived in a brown world.

The land was barren and brown.

It seemed like most of the houses were weather-beaten.

In my life it was a brown world.

The ground was brown. Everything was brown.

And I didn't know any difference.

It was all I knew.

During the 1930s, 46 of the 48 states

had experienced some form of drought,

and farmers everywhere were hurting, but none more

than those in the area surrounding the town

of Boise City, Oklahoma, which the federal government

had declared as the geographic center

of the dust bowl, where conditions were the worst...

A place once known as no man's land.

In 1935, Boise City received

fewer than 10 inches of precipitation,

the official definition of a desert.

Farmers in nearby Baca County, Colorado,

who had once harvested wheat on 237,000 acres,

now had successful crops on only 516.

In the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles,

the absentee "suitcase farmers"

who had hoped to strike it rich in wheat

simply abandoned nearly 4 million acres of exposed fields,

leaving them to blow with each new wind.

In southwestern Kansas,

vegetable gardens were producing 90% less than normal,

and more than a quarter of the children

were reported to be at least 10% underweight.

People here "have given up trying to be civilized,"

a local minister said.

"We are merely trying to exist."

We had a little heifer that had a new calf.

I went down to see the calf,

and it was laying there kicking,

and my dad was walking away with a hammer.

He had killed it.

And I ran to my mother just bawling about it,

because my dad was so tender-hearted,

and she said, "he had to."

She said, "we've just got the one milk cow.

There's not enough milk for you kids and the calf, too."

She said, "you kids have got to have milk."

So he killed the calf.

Well, it was pretty bad.

My mother saved sugar sacks and flour sacks for material

to make my panties,

and I had a dress made out of flour sacks.

It wasn't good percale.

It was just cotton that had been printed,

like little flowers on the sugar sacks.

That's why they were used for my panties.

The flour sacks might be plaid or have big flowers,

and that's why they made dresses out of them.

Mother could get us a dress out of 3 feed sacks.

They made them real pretty... Pretty prints

use they found out the farmers' wives

were using them for that.

We found out some of the neighbors wore

the same dresses we did,

but we always laughed at each other and went on

because we had a new dress.

It was fine.

My family, in terms of eating,

could have eggs, our own eggs,

and then start borrowing from the grocer.

When he would quit lending you money,

you were down to eating lard and bread or an egg.

We ate so poorly that the hobos wouldn't come to our house.

I was down to eating lard and bread.

We lived in 4 different places

when I was in elementary school to survive.

Every year my first, second, and third grade,

we moved to a different farm every time,

and every time, we lost it.

One summer, we needed a loaf of bread,

and there was this little country store

a half-mile away from where we lived.

And we looked for a dime in the house.

We couldn't find a dime.

We couldn't find a dime in the house to buy a loaf of bread.

I think it was probably harder

on my mother than it was my dad

because she worried about

what she was gonna be able to fix for us to eat.

It was rare for anyone to have money,

but my granddad was pretty resourceful,

and he had given me 3 dimes... and I was rich!

And I hid them, and my mother wanted to know where.

I said, "I buried them in the sand

out around the south window."

And she said, "well, you come show me."

And she looked until she found those 3 dimes.

One time my brother swallowed 2 dimes,

and my mother made him use a can or a slop jar

to go to the bathroom until she dug those dimes out.

South of Boise City, Don Wells and his family

were struggling to survive on their 160-acre farm.

There was 10 of us kids,

and we lived in a two-room house.

At night, we had wall-to-wall mattresses.

At daytime, we scooted them under the bed.

Had two rooms... The kitchen,

and then there was a bed in there,

and then the rest of us all slept in the other room.

One Sunday, Wells learned

that his father had died in a distant hospital,

from what had started as strep throat

and ended with him choking to death.

Don's mother, age 35, was now a widow

with a grade-school education and 10 mouths to feed.

We couldn't stay out on the farm

because the bank came and got what little machinery we had,

and we didn't have any cows left.

We didn't have any pigs to eat.

So my uncles loaded us up in a truck,

put all of our clothes and furniture in the back of it,

and they took us to Boise City.

The family lived in one house after another,

forced to move whenever they couldn't pay the rent,

until they finally found something they could afford...

A chicken coop.

Down in Amarillo, the dust bowl's biggest city,

Walter Lucius Durrett had lost his insurance business

and then his health.

The strain of it all proved too much for his wife.

My mother began to despair

that things were never going to get better;

in fact, they were getting worse.

It affected her... It affected her outlook on life,

and she began to...

Well, she had a nervous breakdown, actually.

So we 3 girls were pretty motherless

during the depression.

At one time, when we didn't have anything to eat,

we had to apply for relief, and that was hard for us to do.

The brown truck with the marking on the side came

to the front of our house and brought some food.

It was really hard for us to see that.

I guess we were sorry for the neighbors to see

that we needed that brown truck.

We could go to the courthouse in beaver

and get commodities if we wanted to.

The problem was that people like my father

and some of our neighbors were too proud to go do that.

And I remember my mother raising such a ruckus

because she wasn't too proud,

and we did get some grapefruit

and some other kinds commodities

that helped out with food.

In many towns, the names of families on relief

were published each month in the local newspaper.

In one County, 80% of the population now relied

on some form of government assistance.

These people were... were so needy,

and you felt so sorry for them.

You might feel like giving them a dollar out of your own pocket,

but, you know, you just didn't do things like that.

It's not professional.

Fresh out of college, at age 21,

Dorothy Williamson was hired as a social worker,

trained by the federal government, and dispatched

to prowers County in southeastern Colorado.

She

and went from one a dust-ravaged farm to another.

So we sat across the table and talked to each other.

It was almost as if they were in the middle of something

that they could see no way out.

That's why they looked so hopeless,

and also they looked stunned,

as if, "can this really be happening?"

It kind of left me with a bad feeling, too,

to have to go out there and see these people

because you felt you were helping them what you could,

but you really couldn't help them.

What they really needed was an inner thing

that nobody could give them.

They needed a...

A trust again in something which they had lost.

What help there was came from Washington now

and the flood of new deal programs

president Roosevelt had created.

The civilian conservation corps put young men to work

in national parks, state parks, and national forests,

and paid them $30 a month,

25 which they were required to send home to their families.

Thousands of ccc workers were also dispatched

to plant rows of trees up and down the great plains

as potential windbreaks against the fierce dust storms.

By the end of the decade, 18,600 miles of shelterbelts,

with 217 million trees, had been planted.

The national youth administration,

open to both boys and girls, let students remain at home

and earn a little money

through work-study projects.

In Amarillo, Pauline Durrett Robertson

was paid 25 cents an hour to grade papers.

In Boise City, Don Wells and his older brother

stayed after school to help the janitor clean classrooms.

As a bonus, he let them take showers in the locker room...

A luxury for boys who lived in a chicken coop.

In southwestern Kansas,

lorene white's mother received a pressure okco

from the federal emergency reliefdmistration,

and her father reluctantly enrolled

with the works progress administration,

the new deal's biggest and most controversial program.

My dad was a proud man.

He didn't want anything to do with government programs.

He thought he could handle it on his own.

He found out later that he needed to take part in them.

Dad worked on wpa, I think, about a year,

and they were building a bridge not too far from home.

It's a beautiful bridge. It's still there.

During the depths of the depression,

the wpa became the largest employer in the nation,

creating 8 million jobs

in virtually every corner of the country.

"The prairie, once the home of the deer, buffalo,

and antelope," one newspaper wrote,

"is now the home of the dust bowl and the wpa."

Many people considered it make-work and a waste of money.

It made a lot of difference

which side you were on.

If you didn't have a job, they were boondoggles...

Do-nothings, leaned on their shovels and got money for it,

and so they resented it very much.

But if you were the ones that had the shovel,

it was the difference between starving

and having food to eat.

We got paid enough, it saved... it kept us alive.

The wpa built a dam

on Rita Blanca Creek near Dalhart, Texas,

to create a reservoir and recreation area.

In union County, New Mexico, using only local materials,

6,000 of the 10,000 area residents

found temporary employment working on a new high school

that would still be in use

3/4 of a century later.

With my family, we would have starved to death

because we had no other way to make any money.

The new deal for us, the wpa in particular,

was just a lifesaver for us.

Most of our neighbors felt that way.

Pauline Hodges' father helped build

way 64 through the Oklahoma Panhandle.

It passed within a few miles of Caroline Henderson's homestead.

If mere dollars were to be considered,

the actually destitute in our section

uld undoubtedly have been fed and clothed more cheaply

than the works projects that have been carried out.

But in our national economy,

manhood must be considered as well as money.

People employed to do some useful work

may retain their self-respect

to a degree impossible under cash relief.

If we must worry so over the ruinous effects

of "made work" on people of this type,

why haven't we been worrying for generations

over the character of the idlers

to whom some accident of birth or inheritance

has given wealth unmeasured, unearned, and unappreciated?

"If you would like to have your heart broken,

"just come out here.

"This is the dust storm country.

"It is the saddest land I have ever seen.

"They say that in 20 years,

"our farmland is going to be pretty well shot

"unless something is done,

"and that in 75 years,

even a self-respecting cactus wouldn't be seen on most of it."

Ernie pyle.

In 1935, an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil

were being swept off the naked fields of the great plains,

where 4 million acres in 100 counties were blowing.

Predictions called for

a million more acres to do the same in 1936.

"Unless something is done," one government report concluded,

"the western plains will be

as arid as the arabian desert."

There were many people in that era

who thought this is not going to stop

with western Kansas, the Texas Panhandle.

It's going to start creeping eastward.

How do you stop this?

What's going to be the barrier you put up

to keep it from undermining agriculture in Illinois?

It had a huge effect on American policy, too,

because 4 or 5 days later,

the remnants of Black Sunday blew into Washington, DC.

You could go like this on your desk,

as Franklin Roosevelt did,

and get a little bit of Oklahoma in the oval office.

Within president Roosevelt's inner circle of advisers,

there was no consensus on what to do about the crisis.

Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture,

thought new policies could keep farmers on their land,

but interior secretary Harold Ickes questioned

whether any attempt should be made to save the dust bowl.

It was a character struggle

within the administration the same way it was

a character struggle out on the prairie itself.

Ickes says in his diary, "let's just get out.

"Let's pull out.

"Mr. President, it's not worth the effort.

Why should we try to save the people or the land?"

I mean, let it re-wild. Let's not fool these people

into thinking they can stay there.

Perhaps settlement was a mistake.

Another new deal program,

the resettlement administration,

was already providing farmers on the most marginal lands

with loans to encourage them to move somewhere else,

taking their land out of production.

It was homesteading in reverse.

It was very controversial because first of all,

it was an acknowledgement that we'd failed.

Perhaps they were right when Stephen Long said in 1820

that this is a land "wholly uninhabitable by a people

who are dependent on agriculture."

But the president refused to go that far.

Remember, Roosevelt, by his nature,

in his character, was an optimist.

He didn't want to be known as the only president

who gave up a big section of land on his watch.

He thought he could save both the land and the people.

And they felt a similar attachment to him.

Roosevelt turned to Hugh Hammond Bennett,

a straight-talking north carolinian,

to create a new soil conservation service,

an agency whose job it was

to study better agricultural practices

and teach them to the nation's farmers.

We Americans have been

the greatest destroyers of land

of any race or people, barbaric or civilized.

Unless immediate steps are taken

to restore these sun-scorched, wind-eroded lands,

we shall have on our hands a new, manmade Sahara

where formerly was rich grazing land.

Hugh Bennett was this tall, big-armed,

flap-eared, funny, jovial doctor of dirt.

Nobody knew more about soil

in the United States than Hugh Bennett.

So when Roosevelt gave him the job of trying to save the land,

he was arguably the perfect man for it.

For the agency's largest and hardest-hit region...

The nearly 100 million acres of the southern plains...

Bennett knew just the man for the job.

Howard Finnell was a soil scientist

who had been running the agricultural experiment station

in Goodwell, Oklahoma...

About 25 miles south of Caroline Henderson's homestead.

Finnell had pioneered new techniques

to double the odds of a good crop

by capturing as much moisture as possible...

Using terraces and plowing along the land's contour

to minimize runoff,

planting different types of crops,

and using the old-fashioned plow, called a lister,

to make deeper rows, rather than employing

the more popular one-way plow that pulverized the soil.

Hugh Bennett sent Finnell to Dalhart, Texas,

where he set up "operation dust bowl"

to prove to skeptical farmers

that his new techniques were worth following.

"We do not want a changed climate," Finnell said.

"Much of the land could still produce crops,

if the farmers would only change their attitudes."

The president and his administration may have decided

not to abandon the dust bowl,

but any solutions would take time,

and for the people living there, time was running out.

You go broke gradually, you know.

It doesn't happen like jumping off of a cliff.

You exhaust your savings, you exhaust your borrowings,

you exhaust your equipment,

you exhaust yourself, and you give up.

That takes about 5 years.

Then you're starting to look at the wolves.

Clarence Beck's father had moved his family

to a farm west of Boise City just as the 1920s were ending.

His timing couldn't have been worse.

By 1935, he had suffered repeated crop failures,

and the depression meant there were no jobs,

though he found temporary work with the wpa

to keep his wife and children from starvation.

Like many other families,

they started talking about moving somewhere else.

People didn't leave early

because there was no place to go.

You have no money, and you don't have anyplace to go.

Where can you go when you're penniless?

At least where you are, you have the feel-at-home-ness.

Meanwhile, the hard times placed a strain

on the becks' marriage.

My mother would have been a playgirl, really,

and my father's a drudge.

He would be perfectly happy to work from dawn till dusk.

One morning,

before Clarence's younger sister Irene headed for school,

her mother took her aside to deliver some news.

She just said, "I won't be home

when you come home tonight"... From school, or whatever.

"I won't be home. I'm leaving."

And my mother just left.

So, that was it. Didn't care.

She didn't care about me that much or anything.

Not long afterwards, their father's tractor...

The only possible means for him to stay on the land...

Was repossessed.

Sam Beck decided he had to move.

Clarence would stay with uncles back in central Kansas.

Irene wasn't sure what her father had in mind for her.

At first I asked him, "are you leaving, too?"

I was kind of crying, like, because naturally I was sad.

So he said, "no. We're going to California."

Not far from the becks,

Harry Forester had also lost his farm

and was living on someone else's land.

He had once dreamed of prospering enough

to give each of his 5 sons 640 acres.

Now he could barely feed his 9 children.

One time, he came in

from the wind blowing and dust,

and he was pacing the floor and saying,

"I don't know whatever will become of us."

And that just frightened me. That just...

My heart just clutched from that.

With his fields ruined by dust

and what was left of his livestock

reduced to skin and bones,

Forester had no choice but to give up farming.

His plan was to move his large family to Goodwell, Oklahoma,

where they could stay with his wife's mother.

He had read about a place where jobs were plentiful,

where he could make good money

and save enough to send for his family.

He, too, would head to California.

In southeastern Colorado, Calvin Crabill's father, John,

was coming to the same conclusion.

We lost all our stock.

We lost everything in 6 months.

So when we had nothing left, we left.

We had nothing left. There was no reason to stay.

But first,

John Crabill would have to sell his horses.

My mother and others who knew him said

once he sold his horses,

he was never the same again the rest of his life.

He never was the same again.

He would be staring off into space,

and we knew he was thinking about his stock.

In Texas County, Oklahoma,

Dorothy Kleffman's father thought

he could hang on to his farm,

but his wife had come down with the dust pneumonia.

I think she wod ve died.

He could see that she s wailing,

so he knew he had to do something, you know,

because there were people here who did die.

I really didn't want to go. This was my home,

and even though we had the dust storms

and we were in a depression, a great depression,

I would loved to have just stayed right here.

But because we had to save her life, we had to move.

Her father and an older brother

would try to stay on the farm,

but he moved his wife and younger children,

including Dorothy, not to California, but east,

to Arkansas, well out of the brown world of the dust bowl.

And when we got down there,

we had a green grass lawn.

We kids liked the chickens

because they would raise their legs up so high...

They were not used to that grass.

Mother raised a huge garden down there.

There was enough rain that we didn't have to water it

like we did out here.

And she would can about 600 quarts of food a year.

But we wanted to come back.

This was our home out here

.we wanted to come back.Ack.

Some of our neighbors with small children,

fearing the effects upon their health,

have left temporarily "until it rains."

Others have left permanently,

thinking doubtless that nothing could be worse.

Thus far, we and most of our friends seem held...

For better or for worse... By memory and hope.

Texas County, Oklahoma,

where Caroline Henderson had been homesteading since 1907,

lost 30% of its population in the 1930s.

Nearby cimarron County lost 32%,

and Baca County, just across the line in Colorado,

saw 41% of its residents move somewhere else.

Hardest hit was Morton County, Kansas,

where Edgar and rena Coen were raising their large family,

now diminished by two with the death

of a daughter and grandson from dust pneumonia.

The coens were determined to stick it out,

but their County would lose nearly half of its population

and would close 11 of its 17 rural schools

because the dust storms refused to relent.

You never got used to them.

You just hated every one of them

because you knew it was going to do damage outside,

and you knew you was probably gonna lose some more neighbors.

We was in school then, and you'd go to school one day,

your neighbors was there at school,

and next day, they'd moved away.

Kind of a sad time that way.

My aunt and uncle decided

they had to go to California to get away from the dust.

We all went over to see them off,

and they teverything tng that they could in their car.

The last thing daddy said to my uncle Jack was,

"do you have enough money for gas to get there?"

And Jack told him however mue had.

Ch

And daddy said, "well, I've just got $17 on me, and Jack told him however mue had.

"But I want you to take this

so you'll have enough money for gas."

Every day, all day long, those cars passed our house.

They often stopped and asked for food.

We didn't have very much, but my mother thought

we were better off than other people,

and we were because of the wpa,

and she always fed them something.

I still remember it was often bread and butter sandwiches,

but it was something.

She never, ever turned anybody down.

When I was in the eighth grade,

we had a practical lesson in geography.

How many people live in the district?

And it was 100 people.

How many people are in school? 25.

And then my brother get to the same place 10 years later.

How many people in the district? 25.

How many kids in the school? Maybe 10.

The rest of them had left.

But in the end,

for every family that left the dust bowl,

3 families... 75% of the population... would hang on.

Why didn't everybody leave?

For a lot of these people, well, there was no other place to go.

In their minds, they had invested their lives there.

They had family buried in cemeteries.

Why did they stay?

The plains can lay a hold on your affections

if you're there for a generation or two,

and they're a glorious place to live at times.

The great skies and the openness and the sense of freedom there

were powerful draws for these people.

I cannot act or feel or think

as if the experiences of our 27 years of life together

had never been, and they are all bound up

with the little corner to which we have given

our continued and united efforts.

I can look backward and see our covered wagon

drawn up by the door of the cabin

in the early light of that may morning long ago,

can feel again the sweet fresh breath of the untrodden prairie

and recall for a moment the proud confidence of our youth.

But when I try to see the wagon or the old model-t truck

headed in the opposite direction,

away from our home and all our cherished hopes,

I cannot see it at all.

Perhaps it is only because

the dust is too dense and blinding.

My parents left.

They couldn't find a living anymore in rural countryside.

Their farms were devastated.

They could see no future in this.

They decided in the late 1930s to follow the trek to California

to see what they could find there to support themselves.

The biggest percentage of people who moved into another state

were going to California.

There were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people

pouring into California.

They weren't all poor,

and they weren't all from the great plains.

So there was a river of people

flowing into California in the 1930s.

You could just see all of these cars

pulling out from little side roads along the way

joining this brigade going out route 66,

stopping at motels, sleeping under billboards.

That's the way my parents essentially went

from New Mexico across to Arizona.

They stopped in needles, California,

and didn't get any farther.

That was the end of the road for them.

Those who did leave the dust bowl for California

were joining an even larger exodus of Americans

displaced by the depression and the agricultural crisis

that extended far beyond the southern plains.

Now the folks who left, the diaspora,

the exodusters, they were called...

These refugees were largely from

the eastern fringe of the dust bowl.

They were from arguably not even the dust bowl itself.

They were arkies from Arkansas.

They were from Missouri. They were tenant farmers.

When the farm economy collapsed,

when the prices collapsed and you couldn't make a living,

if you were a tenant farmer, you had nothing,

because you didn't even own the dirt.

So they left.

These people didn't have but one thing to do,

and that was to just get out in the middle of the road.

These people just got up, and they bundled up

their little belongings, they throwed in

one or two little things they thought they'd need,

had heard about the land of California,

and according to the handbills they passed out

down in that country, you're supposed to have

a wonderful chance to succeed in California.

♪ I'm blowing down this old dusty road ♪

♪ I'm blowing down this old dusty road ♪

♪ I'm blowing down this old dusty road, lord, lord ♪

♪ and I ain't gonna be treated this way ♪

Back in Colorado,

with the money from selling his horses in his pockets,

Calvin Crabill's father loaded what he could

into their a cars rattling down highway 66,

with his 11-year-old son and asthmatic wife.

When you came down that grade in San Bernardino,

my mother, she was so happy,

and you saw the green valley there...

That was a beautiful, beautiful sight.

You see the trees. You see the trees.

My mother that day picked an orange, a ripe orange,

and ate it, and that was something for her.

The migration out of the great plains in the 1930s

was one of the biggest folk migrations in American history.

It dwarfs the movement along the Oregon trail

in the 19th century, the covered wagon era,

which we've so idealized and romanticized.

But we've forgotten this migration of the 1930s.

Nobody celebrates it.

There are no California trail associations.

We're ashamed of it, basically,

because it was a migration of the defeated.

Out in Oakland, California,

Harry Forester, who had left his family in Goodwell, Oklahoma,

was now working a variety of jobs,

sometimes making a dollar a day

and sending as much of it as possible

back to his ailing wife and children.

Everything he held dear was half a continent away.

The separation from his family made him miserable,

and then came news from home that added to his woes...

One of his 5 sons, slats,

had come down with dust pneumonia.

My oldest brother t dust pneia,

was at death's door, and my dad didn't know

whether to come home or not

because he thought he was gonna die.

I imagine he was absolutely the loneliest man on the planet.

Forester decided his family should join him

in Oakland as soon as they could.

Back in Goodwell, the Forester children mobil for the m

they added hoops and tarps and a hand-built box

for storing and serving food to a 1928 Chevy truck,

converting it into a modern-day covered wagon.

But Mrs. Forester's aged and blind mother refused to leave,

so slats, who had recovered, was left behind to care for her.

They made their good-bye s, d another clois took the wheel

with his frail mother in the front seat next to him.

Then the other 7 Forester children scrambled aboard,

and they set off for California.

It was pretty exciting for me

because it was hope...

In a hopeless little heart.

We were going to California

and have oranges and stuff, you know?

And we would have fruit, and we would live happily.

And it was just an exciting time.

I couldn't wait to get there.

We sat in different places.

We'd move around.

The mattresses were rolled up, and stuffed in the truck bed,

so we had those soft mattresses to sleep on.

My favorite spot seemed to be

over the wheel of the truck.

We had the side tarps rolled up so you could see out.

One thing I remember, I was so glad...

We saw a weeping willow tree, and I'd never seen one.

My brother was obsessed

with the potential that we might run out of gas,

so he stopped at damn near every gas station

to top off the tank.

It was a little 4-banger Chevy,

and he drove it at about maximum of 35 miles an hour,

and it took a long time.

He had a goal in mind

that was to get this crew safely through.

He was a nervous Nelly anyway, and he had

lots of tribulations when he had to take this job...

Well, because it was a big job.

He's a 21-year-old guy, and he's taking his sick mother

and a bunch of kids all the way to California,

across that big ol' desert.

It was a... A real worry for him, I know.

They were all anxious

about their mother's fragile health,

which prompted them to stop a number of times

so she could recoup her strength,

especially when a dust storm overtook them in New Mexico.

She was worn down

by the travails of the previous years,

and she was just in bad shape,

and she was very feeble all along the way.

Instead of camping one night in New Mexico,

we used a little of our scarce money to rent a motel

so that she could be sleeping out of the dust.

But in eastern Arizona, despite her condition,

she insisted that clois detour

through the painted desert and petrified forest,

which she had always yearned to see.

My mother's health got worse after that.

We felt that it was necessary jtot stop and not travel

so that she could have time being still

and resting in cool, shaded place.

Farther on, they had to descend to the Colorado river

on a winding road unlike anything on the southern plains.

But I had a great disappointment

when we hit the California border down at needles.

Ha ha ha!

You're in the desert, and I felt, oh...

I just went, "oh, my god, no,"

because I was just broken-hearted

because I thought there'd be orange groves right there, you know.

They crossed the mojave desert at night,

then turned north, up the central valley,

and finally made it to Oakland, on the moist San Francisco bay,

where Harry Forester had rented a house

and was waiting anxiously for them to arrive.

We got into Oakland, and we went to lake merritt

and went up grand Avenue

and turned right on Moraga and went up Moraga Avenue.

We're in the hills now, in the Oakland hills,

which are pretty steep for someone like us.

When we stopped in the canyon,

telephoned that we were coming up the road,

we were a mile and a half from the house,

we started driving, and dad started hustling,

and he raced down to the bottom of the canyon

so that he was standing beside the road

as we came driving by 10 minutes later.

And my dad met us

at the corner of Pine Haven road and Heather Ridge way,

and he had a house rented on the corner

just up the corner a ways.

I remember sitting in the back of the truck

waiting for my dad to come and greet us

while he was greeting mom and my brother

and whoever had been riding with them.

He went around to the back,

and he took each of the kids in turn,

and he gave us a hug, and we laughed,

and it was...

It was great.

And then he came around back

and started lifting us out one at a time

and giving us a hug and putting us down.

I looked around, and I thought,

"oh, yes, we have come to canaan land."

Then Harry Forester,

who had once dreamed of amassing so much land

he could bestow each of his sons

with one square mile of rolling Oklahoma prairie,

showed them all their new home... A rented house of 3 rooms,

on a hill so steep the buildings needed stilts to be level.

And there were big pine trees...

Oh, 60-, 70-foot, 80-foot tall, big trees,

and that was spectacular.

It wasn't Oklahoma, you know?

Ha ha ha!

Toto, we aren't in Oklahoma anymore.

Ha ha ha!

Especially to a fair-skinned,

freckle-faced, red-headed youngster that I was,

where that hot wind always just burned me.

The mist and the rain was so light often

that we kids would go off to school that first year

without a hat or a coat or anything

because we just loved the feeling of that moisture on us.

We were parched, too.

Weren't any crops.

It was dry, and so we didn't get any crops.

One of those years,

we put our entire wheat crop in one wagon,

which was maybe 50 bushels.

They were good people.

There was nothing about the population that was bad.

Everybody was hard-working, trying to make an honest living,

and nature just wouldn't let them do it.

So there were failures, and there were also people

that were awful hard to knock off of the bush.

Ended up, a depression,

the dust bowl didn't get them all.

It left quite a few. But it left the Hardy ones.

Oh, there were many jokes about the dust, of course,

so that we laughed so we wouldn't cry, I guess.

One of them was, a rancher, after a big dust storm,

walked out to see about his land,

and he was trying to find the barbed-wire fence

that had been covered with dirt.

He saw the tops of it,

and there was the cowboy's hat over there.

So he walked over and picked up the cowboy's hat,

and underneath was a cowboy,

and he said, "oh, my goodness. Aren't you in trouble there?"

He's covered with dust.

And he said, "well, I think I'm gonna be ok,

but this horse I'm riding is in a little trouble."

By now, those who remained in the dust bowl

had found that one way to deal with what was happening to them

was to poke fun at it.

Well, there's an old saying there

that one of the old-timers was telling the people that

they'd had a chain wrapped around a corner post

and said when that chain got sticking out straight,

that was a pretty good wind,

but when it went to snapping the links off, it was damn windy.

Of course, that wasn't true.

That was just a saying. Ha ha ha!

1936 would prove to be as dry as 1935,

with even more dust storms.

In April, an outsider showed up in Boise City.

Arthur Rothstein was 21 years old,

the son of Jewish immigrants,

born and raised in New York City.

He was in no man's land to take photographs

for the federal government's resettlement administration.

Rothstein's boss, Roy stryker,

believed that pictures could be a powerful tool

to show not only the multitude of problems

the nation was facing,

but what the government was doing about them.

Over the course of 7 years, as the agency became

part of the farm security administration,

stryker would launch

an unprecedented documentary effort,

eventually amassing more than 200,000 images

of america in the 1930s,

taken by a talented dre of photographers,

including Walker Evans, Russell Lee,

Marion Post Walcott, John Vachon,

and Dorothea Lange.

He sent them out there

with a very simple set of instructions...

I want to see their eyes. I want to see their faces.

I want to see emotion.

I want people to look at these pictures

and not see abstraction.

I want them to see folks struggling in the land.

Prior to arriving in Oklahoma,

Arthur Rothstein' assignment had taken him

on a nationwide tour of the depression.

He had documented rural people being dispossessed

to create shenandoah national park,

desperate tenant farmers in Arkansas,

hard-luck ranchers in Montana,

and slum dwellers in St. Louis.

But the most distressing situation he ever coentered,

he remembered later, was what he saw

driving through the dust bowl.

"It was like a landscape of the moon," he said,

populated by "hard-working people who,

"through no fault of their own, needed assistance,

"and the only place they could get that assistance

was from the government."

About 14 miles south of Boise City,

chee across art coble,

digging out a fence post from a sand drift.

Rothstein chatted with him and his two young sons,

snapped a few pictures, and was getting back into his car

when the wind suddenly picked up.

Looking back, he saw them bending into the storm,

pointed his camera at them, d anicked the shutter.

The image that Rothstein captured

touched emotional chords with everyone who saw it,

becoming the iconic picture of the dust bowl

and one of the most widely reproduced photographs

of the 20th century.

In addition to hiring photographers,

the federal government also underwrote a documentary film,

and that summer it premiered

at the mission theatre in Dalhart, Texas.

"The plow that broke the plains,"

directed by pare lorentz,

was meant to describe the causes of the dust bowl

and what Roosevelt's new deal was trying to do about it.

The grasslands...

A treeless, windswept continent of grass...

A country of high winds and sun,

high winds and sun.

The film placed much of the blame of the dust bowl

on the arrival of the tractor to the southern plains

and described how sturdy farmers

who had once slowly turned the soil behind a team of mules

suddenly became a mechanized force

arrayed against nature itself.

The reaction inside the dust bowl itself

was largely not good.

They didn't like seeing their land or themselves

as characters on the bad end of a drama.

Sometimes at the movies,

the newsreel showed the dust bowl,

and that infuriated the local boosters,

because they said, "that's bad publicity.

We don't need that bad publicity."

The rest of us besides the boosters thought,

well, they got that right,

and they're really telling it, what's happening to us...

They're really telling it right.

In the summer of 1936,

president Roosevelt took a 4,000-mile whistle-stop tour

across the midwest and northern plains

to see for himself the extent

of the nation's agricultural crisis.

My friends,

I have been on a journey of husbandry.

I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop,

lost their corn crop, lost their livestock,

lost the water in their well,

and come through to the end of the summer

without one dollar of cash resources,

facing a winter without feed or food,

facing a planting season...

At the same time,

Hugh Bennett, the head of the soil conservation service,

was on his own fact-finding tour with a committee of experts

expected to make a report to fdr

on the future of the great plains.

Bennett's first stop was Dalhart,

where Howard Finnell was making headway

with the farmers he was trying to convert.

Earlier in the year,

Finnell had petitioned secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace

for $2 million in emergency funds

to offer incentives of 20 cents an acre

for those who would try his method

of contour plowing on their own land.

Nearly 40,000 farmers had signed up

and gone to work on 5.5 million acres.

The only program that was out there

that was effective was this one,

and Finnell was the point man to try to make it work

among these farmers who had still not admitted

that it was their fault,

farmers who basically said, "this is all nature's doing.

"Leave us alone. The rains will come back,

and we will be back in business."

Bennett and his committee moved on

with their tour, planning to meet up

with the president in north Dakota

and give him their findings.

The final report estimated

that 80% of the great plains was in some stage of erosion

and pointed to what Bennett called

"the basic cause" of the problem...

"An attempt to impose upon the region a system of agriculture

to which the plains are not adapted."

But, it concluded,

the nation "cannot afford to let the farmer fail."

His boss was not about to let that happen.

Back east, there have been

all kinds of reports that out in the drought area

there was despondency, a lack of hope for the future,

and a general atmosphere of gloom.

But I had a hunch... And it was the right one...

When I got out here,

I'd find that you people had your chins out...

That you are not looking forward to the day

when this country would be depopulated,

but that you and your children expect to remain here.

To us, he was a savior.

He just... he gave us hope where we had none.

I can remember my dad saying that he normally didn't

vote democrat, but he thought he would that time,

and I think he became a staunch democrat after that.

No cracked earth, no blistering sun,

no burning wind are a permanent match

for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen,

and their wives and children,

who have carried on through desperate days.

Here's a land that god himself seems to have given up on...

I shall never forget the fields of wheat...

And the fact that the president still

gave it his attention... So that was a very big deal

at a time when they felt so abandoned,

and you can't understate the importance

of just giving it some attention.

It was their fathers' task to make homes,

it is their task to keep these homes,

and it is our task to help them win their fight.

We're continuing with

Mr. Woody Guthrie's dust bowl songs

from Texas, Oklahoma, and California.

As I rambled around over the country

and kept looking at all these people,

seeing how they lived outside like coyotes

around in the trees and timber and under the Bridges

and along all the railroad tracks

and in their little shack houses thatht built

out of cardboard and toe sacks

and old corrugated iron that they got out of the dumps...

That just struck me to write this song.

♪ I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roamin' round ♪

During the 10 years of the great depression,

California's population would grow more than 20%.

Half of the newcomers came from cities, not farms.

One in 6 were professionals or white-collar workers.

Of the 315,000 who arrived from Oklahoma, Texas,

and neighboring states,

only 16,000 were from the dust bowl itself.

But regardless of where they actually came from,

regardless of their skills and their education

and their individual reasons

for seeking a new life in a new place,

to most californians... And to the nation at large...

They were all the same,

and they all had the same name.

"Okies." and we were made fun of,

and, "you talk funny," and, you know, all of that.

Or, "talk some more. You talk funny."

And you hated that because it set you apart.

There was a sign in a movie theater

in the central valley of California

which basically said "niggers and okies upstairs."

That is, you can't sit down here with real people.

They were horribly mistreated.

In some cases, they were treated

the way blacks were treated in the south.

There were signs similar to the signs

they had in Dalhart, Texas, that said,

"black man, don't let the sun go down on you here."

Similarly, there were signs all throughout the central valley

saying, "okie, go back. We don't want you."

About a third of all the recent arrivals,

many of them former sharecroppers

from the cotton belt,

ended up in California's agricultural valleys,

where farmers had always relied on migrant labor

to pick their cotton, vegetables, and fruits.

They settled in developments

called "little oklahomas" and "okievilles"

or moved with the harvests,

sometimes traveling 700 to 1,000 miles in the season,

staying in squalid roadside camps called "jungles"

or simply putting up a tent

along the road or in an unused field.

And they found themselves at the mercy

of the contractors, who conspired with the growers

to drive down the field workers' wages.

"They have the simple and sturdy values

"often bemoaned as lost.

"They are proud, strong people,

"patient, uncomplaining, intelligent.

"They want first of all to work,

"to have a home for their families,

"to educate their children.

"These simple rights are part of the heritage of Americans.

"It is difficult for them to understand

"that none of them remain.

"Their whole lives are concentrated now

"on one instinctive problem...

That of keeping alive."

Sanora babb.

Sanora babb, a former reporter

who had grown up in the area around no man's land,

had found a new job with the farm security administration.

With her boss, Tom Collins,

she went up and down the central valley,

informing the newly arrived migran atsut programs

to provide them with food and medical assistance

for their families, education for their children,

and better living conditions.

Only a few days ago,

we met a young man walking along the road to town

in search of immediate work and help.

His wife had had a baby 3 days before

in an abandoned milk house separated from any camp,

where they had taken refuge during the recent storms.

He was desperate.

Since the birth, his wife, their other children,

and he himself had not eaten for 3 days.

If he did not get something for them at once,

she and the baby would die.

When the refugees learned

sanora had grown up on the southern plains,

it helped establish a trust and respect that extended both ways.

The government had also asked

the photographer Dorothea Lange to come back to California

to document the deplorable conditions among the migrants.

Tom Collins and the fsa used her photos

to ph r creation of a handful of government camps

with better shelter and sanitation for

the steady stream of refugees who were arriving every day.

Collins insisted that the camps be self-governed,

with elected committees responsible for everything from

sewing clubs and libraries to childcare and cleanliness.

But only a lucky few were able to find space there.

And while the growers depended on the migrants for cheap labor,

the locals, who were themselves suffering from the depression,

didn't appreciate anything

that encouraged the newcomers to stay,

nor did the growers once the harvest was over.

♪ It takes a worried man ♪

♪ to sing a worried song ♪

♪ takes a worried man ♪

♪ to sing a worried song ♪

♪ I'm worried now... ♪

Like many of the new arrivals,

Woody Guthrie had settled in one of California's cities...

Los Angeles, where he worked washing dishes

and singing in bars before finally landing

his own show on radio station kfvd.

Each day, he performed his own songs, as well as

older folk tunes he had learned in Oklahoma and Texas,

which reminded many listeners in his growing audience

of the homes they had left.

♪ I asked that judge... ♪

But though he was becoming

a well-known radio personality,

he, too, felt the sting of bigotry

aimed at anyone considered an "okie."

He began spending time traveling

and performing for free in the central valley,

whthe treatment of the faerenfarm workers politicized,

and his music, for the rest of his life.

He sang at picket lines of workers

holding out for higher wages

and starnewspaperter column, "Woody sez,"

in the left-leaning "people's world."

"I ain't a communist necessarily," he said,

"but I've been in the red all my life."

♪ Lots of folks back east, they say ♪

♪ is leavin' home every day ♪

♪ beatin' a hot old dusty way ♪

♪ to the California line ♪

Guthrie was offended that the state legislature

nearly passed a law closing the state's borders

to people it called

"paupers and persons likely to become public charges."

♪ Now, the police at the port of entry say ♪

♪ you're number 14,000 for today... ♪

Then, without any legal authority,

the Los Angeles police chief dispatched 125 of his officers

to the main entry points from Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.

For 6 weeks, they intimidated

anyone they considered "vagrants,"

including Clarence and Irene Beck's father Sam,

from wheeless, Oklahoma.

My father was a dust bowl okie.

He got put in jail when he crossed into California

because he didn't have 50 bucks.

When he was arrested, he was arrested as a vagrant

and would have gone to jail except that

one of his ex-neighbors in Oklahoma knew he was coming

and was prepared for this

met him, arranged that he could stay with them

so he no longer was a vagrant.

For a while,

Beck was allowed to stay at a chicken farm,

where he worked in exchange for eggs to eat.

But he finally landed a job

with the Los Angeles highway department

and started a new life for himself and his daughter.

It's a fresh start.

I guess that's the words to use... a fresh start,

which it was.

It really was.

So thank god of that.

I was blessed that way.

Sam Beck died of a heart attack in 1947, at age 54,

spreading blacktop on a California highway.

He had a tough life.

Very tough life.

He and his life was the reason that I said,

"god, what do I have to do to have money

"and not be a farmer, and I'll do it.

"I don't care whether it's being a pimp.

"I don't care whether it's stealing.

"Whatever it takes, I'm not gonna farm,

and I'm not going to be broke."

And that's been my driving force.

It has been.

And I'm not a farmer, and I'm not broke.

I'm not a pimp, either, thank god.

♪ I'm a dust bowl refugee ♪

Calvin Crabill's father, John,

had rescued his wife and family

from the dust of eastern Colorado,

but the hard times followed him to southern California.

He moved from one temporary job to another...

A Colorado cowboy, far from the plains he loved.

My father was called an okie.

He was a gentle, quiet man,

so I think he could take it pretty well.

It made me with a chip on my shoulder

that I probably carry to this day,

that I was very aware that I thought I was

the poorest kid in high school.

We rented a little house on the alley in Burbank,

and the house in front, the people had more money,

and they were very aware that we were

the poor people on the block.

In those days, you could get something

to put on your license plate

that would be some kind of a slogan.

It said "peaceful valley,"

and so my father liked that place,

so he put it on his license plate.

The people at his job crossed out the "v"

and wrote "peaceful alley"

because they knew he lived on an alley.

So if you're down, they push you down, fella,

they push you down,

and that's what happened to him,

over and over and over, over and over.

How brave they all are.

I have not heard one complaint.

They all want work and hate to have help.

As she moved from camp to camp,

sanora babb kept a nightly journal,

which she planned to turn into a novel,

about the people she had met and what they had gone through.

She also wrote detailed reports for her boss Tom Collins,

who was regularly sharing her notes

with a writer working on a muck-raking article

for the "San Francisco news" named John steinbeck.

When steinbeck first came,

he had to stop seeing them before the day was out.

Tom Collins said he said,

"by god, I can't stand anymore.

I'm going away and blow the lid off this place."

Sanora babb would eventually send

some chapters of her novel to Bennett cerf,

a prominent editor of random house in New York City,

who was so impressed he asked her

to come east to talk about it.

But by the time she arrived, in the winter of 1939,

steinbeck had come out with

his own pulitzer prize-winning novel,

"the grapes of wrath,"

which chronicled the tribulations of the joad family,

tenant farmers who had migrated to California

from the cotton fields of eastern Oklahoma...

Not the dust bowl.

The book was such a hit that the market couldn't support

a second novel on the same subject,

and her editor advised sanora to put her manuscript aside.

It was finally published in 2004,

a year before her death.

You, who live in any kind of comfort

or convenience, do not know how these people

can survive these things, do you?

They will endure because

there is no immediate escape from endurance.

Some will die.

The rest must live.

The worst storm thus far in 1937

occurred immediately after a slight snowfall,

which again roused delusive hopes.

That snow melted on a Tuesday.

Wednesday morning, with a rising wind,

the dust began to move again,

and until late Friday night, there was little respite.

We are now reluctant feeding our livestock

the last small remainder of the crop of 1931.

In most of the nation, the drought had ended,

but for Caroline Henderson and her neighbors

who had stayed in the heart of the dust bowl,

1937 would prove to be the worst year yet.

Guymon, Oklahoma, just 30 miles southeast of her homestead,

was engulfed by 6 bad dust storms that January,

14 in February, and then 13 more in march,

including one that closed the schools in nearby Boise City

and tore roofs off of buildings

a hundred miles away in Dodge City, Kansas.

On the afternoon of may 21,

a local photographer named Francis Craver

noticed a dust cloud appearing

over the doric theatre in downtown Elkhart, Kansas.

He grabbed his camera and chronicled the storm's descent,

which caused the high school to cancel

commencement ceremonies planned for that evening.

Two weeks later, 50 miles east of the Hendersons,

in Hooker, Oklahoma, a furniture sman named George risen

saw another wall of dirt approaching.

He scrambled to the top of the tallest building in town

and began taking pictures with his brownie camera.

As it passed, the storm dropped 3 feet of dust

on Hooker and the surrounding countryside.

By the end of July, the number of destructive storms

would rise to 79;

by the end of the year, to 110.

The only difference between the southern plains

and the Sahara desert, one resident suggested,

was that a lot of "damned fools"

weren't trying to farm the Sahara.

If you were a farmer,

you plowed the ground,

and you put seed in it, and it grew up.

That was farming.

You didn't expect this dirt that was giving you this food

to turn on you like that and destroy you like it did.

Those people that was real religious

said that god was trying to drive us off of the land.

I never did believe that, or dad never did believe it,

and we believed whatever dad believed, you know, as kids.

Dad said they'll just be times that they'll be bad

and times that they won't.

Both of my parents were very, very good Christian.

No matter what came along, they seemed to accept it.

They both just seemed like they were just going on

doing the best they could,

and they didn't do a whole lot of griping about it.

Around the house, Virginia frantz's mother

often sang hymns to take her children's minds

off the troubles staring them in the face.

♪ I'm pressing on the upward way ♪

♪ new heights I'm gaining every day ♪

♪ still praying as I onward bound ♪

♪ my prayer, my aim, is higher ground ♪

And then it was...

♪ Oh, lift me up and let me stand ♪

♪ by faith, on heaven's table land ♪

♪ a higher faith than I have found ♪

♪ oh, lift me up on higher ground ♪

Ha ha! It's been probably 60 years

since I've heard that song.

I remember we had the radio, and he's listeninin it

talking about a flood on the Ohio river

and houses floating down and people on them houses.

My dad turned to us and said,

"we've got it better here than they have up there."

And that was in '37.

So he thought that the dirt was better than that water.

In April of 1937,

farmers from 5 states met in guymon, Oklahoma.

"The problem in the dust bowl is entirely too large

"for the remaining good farmers to even make a start

to cope with," they wrote the government.

"We must have help, and it's imperative we have help now."

I think it has to be pretty extreme

for a group of farmers,

very independent-minded, very stubborn,

a group that on the whole doesn't like to be meddled with

to say, "please come and meddle with us."

But at this point,

they're into their sixth year of no income,

their fifth year of no crops,

and they're seeing neighbors' fields blowing into their own,

they're seeing enormous clouds of dirt in the air,

and they don't know what else to do.

And when you don't know what else to do

and you're afraid of losing your farm,

then you begin to ask for rather more extreme measures

than you would have asked for otherwise.

If one man mishandled his land,

everybody suffered under these conditions.

All it took was one thousand-acre farm

blowing dirt badly

to disrupt the lives of everybody around him.

And if that farm operator actually happened

to be living in Amarillo or Denver

and only came out on weekends anyway, who did you talk to?

There was no authority to stop this sort of process.

The farmers wanted every landowner to be required

to leave stubble on ested fields,

and they wanted some way

to have abandoned re planted with cover crops.

To do it, they even suggested that martial law be declared.

They wanted the ability to condemn other people's property

if they weren't keeping it up.

This was hugely antithetical

to how most of these people thought.

In some counties, they were granted authority

to go out and condemn someone,

to slap them in jail if need be,

if he was letting his land blow again.

Very authoritarian measure for folks who

considered themselves highly individualistic.

When your back is against the wall,

all ideology goes out the window.

So here is a group of people

who are very anti-state, anti-government,

who never wanted the government interfering

with anything they did or telling them what to do,

but who, when the chips are down,

are going to ask for the only help they c gan,

and that's from the federal government.

Evtuenly,

soil conservation districts were established,

meant to enforce better farming practices through consensus.

At the same time, the government was buying back

as much land as it could from dusted-out homesteaders

and slowly returning it to permanent grassland.

Farmers now got help to buy gasoline for their tractors

if they were doing soil-erosion work.

And in some cases,

they even received payments not to grow cash crops at all.

"We have got to begin to induce people to plant less."

How do you do that?

You can't just take their land away from them.

So the idea was to pay them not to produce.

For the people in the great plains, this was a salvation.

They could keep their land,

they didn't have to go out every fall and plant wheat again,

the government would send them a check,

and year after year, this could go on,

and until better times emerged.

Nobody knew whether

any of this would really work or how long it would take.

Might be 50 years, might be 70 years; Nobody knew.

It's a time period in which the federal government

entered agriculture as never before, and it's never left.

Meanwhile, near Dalhart,

dunes that had once towered 36 feet

above one of Howard Finnell's employee's cars

had been tamed in 18 months of painstaking restoration work.

The contrast between contoured fields that captured the rain

and those farmed the old way was striking.

With such tangible results,

more and more farmers decided to take Finnell's advice.

By the end of 1937, despite the persistent dust storms,

the amount of dangerously eroded land

had been reduced by more than half.

In 1938, the rainfall edged upward...

More than 18 inches in Boise City...

And although the number of dust storms receded only slightly,

some farmers in no man's land

brought in a wheat crop of 10 bushels per acre...

Nothing close to a bumper crop,

but almost bountiful compared to previous years.

The drought seemed to be losing its grip.

When the worst was arguably over,

when they had seen the backhand of nature,

when they'd seen more venom and anger and outright evil,

as they called it, that the sky thrown at them,

that any human beings could ever take,

and they thought it was over,

came one more almost biblical plague.

Grasshoppers mostly were awlicr,

but, you know, you scare them, they'd jump and fly.

But most of them were just crawling,

just like a whole sea of them.

They ate everything in sight.

It it almost looked like the ground was moving,

and they would get that big,

and they would eat on the bark of the trees,

and they ate everything

that they could come in contact with.

And they kept on going.

From here, they left on, and what I understand,

somewheres in Oklahoma, they grew wings,

and they all took flight,

and they said they shaded the sun

because they were all together.

Farmers hooked up sleds to their tractors

and dragged them across the fields,

trapping grasshoppers in vats of kerosene.

Some tried crushing them under rollers.

Several states called out their national guards

to spread poison, mixed with sawdust

and molasses and banana oil, along the roadsides.

How much more out of sync could nature be

when they're now pouring strychnine

on what had been the greatest grassland

to kill grasshoppers who are chewing on fence posts

because there's nothing else left to live?

That itself, by the time they were pouring poison

on the land that had been killed by them,

I think they had gone so far down the road

in altering this great grassland

that it was almost beyond repair.

All the democrats were excited.

There were people in Amarillo who did not like Roosevelt,

and they were usually the wealthy people.

I know one of them was... One of the rich men I heard say,

"this socialistic regime is not American.

It's anti-American."

Those of us who were, you know, poor

appreciated e thograms th rsevelt started.

On July 11, 1938,

a train bearing the president of the United States

pulled into the station at Amarillo, Texas,

the largest city in the dust bowl.

In honor of the president's visit,

organizers had assembled what they claimed to be

the world's largest marching band: 3,000 people...

Anyone, they said, between the ages of 9 and 90

who could play "the eyes of Texas" on any instrument.

An estimated crowd of 200,000...

4 times the population of the city itself...

Turned out, lining the 3-mile route

of Roosevelt's motorcade to Ellwood park.

"People who are ignorant and people who think

only in terms of the moment," the president said,

"scoff at our efforts and say,

"oh, let the next generation take care of itself.

"If people out in the dry parts of the country

cannot live there, let them move out."

And then the most amazing thing happens.

Remember, the drought has been going on for 8 years.

It starts to rain.

These clouds come out of nowhere.

It's a July day. It's peak hot season.

Clouds bunch, and it rains.

And it's an old-fashioned gully-washer.

And the rain comes off of Roosevelt, and he continues.

He's got his clamped knees up there,

and he continues to give his speech.

"I'm never gonna desert you."

"I think this little shower we have had,"

the president beamed, "is a mighty good omen."

And we had been wishing for rain,

praying for rain, and it rained the day he came.

It rained. So he took credit for that.

A snowstorm in early 1939 brought more hope,

which grew when the soil conservation service

announced that, thanks to better farming practices,

the soil was in its best condition in 7 years.

By the end of the year,

the dust bowl had shrunk to 1/5 its previous size.

I don't know how many weeks

we'd get a little rain and a little rain.

The thing I remember, that when it first started,

the sunflowers started growing.

They were in our pasture that was close to the house.

When we went to get our milk cows in,

which we did on horseback...

You had to hunt them because you couldn't see them...

And the sunflowers would be up above our head.

In Follett, Texas,

Trixie Travis Brown's father had been trying for years

to persuade his wife to pull up stakes and move to Idaho.

My mother was very reluctant

because all of her family... You know, we had,

probably 50 people of the 437 in Follett

were all relatives.

She just was not willing to say yes.

My father, he even had the land picked out in Idaho.

He had the map out.

And mother just kept holding out.

Then, slowly, things began improving.

We began to go out on a regular basis.

Mother and dad liked to take drives anyway.

Mother got so worn out with all the kids in the house

that she would say, "George, let's take a drive

out to look at the wheat."

We would go out and stand

and see how high it was to us children.

We'd stand there,

and they'd sort of measure the height of the wheat.

And then when it began to really develop,

it was obvious it was going to be a really good wheat crop.

And it was.

The map went into a drawer,

and the trip to Idaho was cancelled.

No one will ever know

what it meant to you to have it rain.

Even to this day, we had rain the other day,

and I thought when it was raining how nice this was,

what a good rain.

And that's what we what we prayed, what we yearned for

was the rain that came that would soak into the ground

and let us raise a crop and eventually stop the dust.

Well, when it did start raining,

it was just such a blessing.

We'd go out in the rain and hold our hands up

and let that hit our hands and our face

and just almost worshipped that rain

because we knew then that we was gonna have some crops.

It just seemed happier everywhere you went...

Everybody, not just my folks.

When we'd go to the neighbors either side,

the thrashers or the freemans,

we always felt like things are getting better.

I remember the first year

that we probably had a good crop after the dirty thirties,

we got stuck in the field

and daddy didn't even gripe about it,

he was so glad that we were having rain.

At his farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle,

Dorothy Kleffman's father decided it was now safe

to bring his wife and children back from Arkansas.

They have a saying here

that if you wear out a pair of boots here in the Panhandle,

you'll come back, and when we did come back,

the land had been recovered.

They had learned how to terrace the land.

And I remember my dad had a wheat crop,

I think in 1940, that was a good wheat crop.

And we thought, we're back.

We survived.

December 13, 1944.

We had for once a super-abundance of rain

and already 3 snows.

Wheat was a fair crop.

We saved mosoft t between rains.

We have ample pasturage with the increased rainfall,

and cattle have done reasonably well.

And we had a nice garden,

thwiost of our winter's living stored away.

Just as it had 30 years earlier,

a war in Europe and the return

of a relatively wet weather cycle

brought prosperity to the southern plains.

Wheat prices skyrocketed, and harvests were bountiful.

May 1945.

We have at last assembled

most of the materials for piping water into the house,

with a sink in the kitchen

and indoor toilet in the bathroom.

But we need a Superman to do the work.

We have both worn down fast

during the years of extreme desolation since 1931.

Every small accomplishment now seems to demand

a greater output of energy and resolution

than in the years that are gone.

Caroline Henderson was grateful

for better weather and higher prices,

but she and her husband will were now nearing 70.

She suffered from asthma, he had a heart condition,

and neither of them could forget

the stern teachings of the dust bowl.

It is good to remember

that the laws of the universe recognize no favorites

and cherish no hostility or small vindictiveness;

that before sun and rain, stormy winds,

or summer's kind beneficence,

we all stand upon one common level.

In the first 5 years of the 1940s,

land devoted to wheat expanded by nearly 3 million acres.

The speculators and suitcase farmers returned.

Parcels that had sold for $5.00 an acre during the dust bowl

now commanded prices of 50, 60, sometimes 100 dollars an acre.

Even some of the most marginal lands

were put back into production.

"The same process," Howard Finnell warned,

"is starting again in the very same place."

"I always said I was the only one

who could remember those dreadful days,"

Caroline confided to a friend, adding,

"people have simply assumed it couldn't happen again."

Then, in the early 1950s,

when the wet cycle ended and a two-year drought replaced it,

the dust storms picked up once more.

But the damage to the land was mitigated

by those farmers who had continued using

Howard Finnell's conservation practices,

and because nearly 4 million acres had been purchased

by the government during the dust bowl

and permanently restored as national grasslands,

the soil didn't blow as much.

At least a few lessons had been learned.

We want it now,

and if it if it makes money now, it's a good idea.

But it isn't necessarily it's a good idea.

If the things we're doing are going to mess up the future,

it wasn't a good idea.

Don't deal on the moment.

Take the long-term look at things.

I think that the most basic lesson was, be humble.

Respect the land itself.

Listen to what it's trying to tell you.

If the wind blows 60, 70 miles an hour for 50% of the year,

there's a reason why only one thing is growing there,

and it's native grass.

Don't try to put things in place there that don't belong there.

Listen to the land itself.

But now, instead of looking to the skies for rain,

many farmers began looking beneath the soil,

where they believed a more reliable... and irresistible...

Supply of water could be found...

The vast ogallala aquifer, an underground reservoir

stretching from Nebraska to north Texas,

filled with water that had seeped down for centuries

after the last ice age.

With new technology, farmers could pump the ancient water up,

irrigate their land, and grow other crops,

like feed corn for cattle and pigs,

which require even more moisture than wheat.

The only thing

that's holding that ground together

is that irrigation water that comes out of the ogallala.

The ogallala is about 100 feet deep on the average.

We've used over 50 feet of it now.

We've got about 20 years of water left

under these 8 states or the portions of these 8 states,

and it's disappearing.

It's gonna be gone in 20 years.

If you lose the water, you're gonna lose the land.

And that's it in a nutshell.

My folks put in one of the first irrigation wells,

and we thought it was a great idea.

As I look back at it now, it was the beginning of a bad idea.

Having irrigation water permitted us to do some things

that weren't good for the long term.

And some of these days... I'll be gone,

but somebody is gonna be out of water.

Folks are gonna have trouble getting enough drinking water,

and they'll look back and say,

"and to think back there in the fifties and sixties,

they used up our drinking water to raise hog feed."

I think the dust bowl can happen again...

Most emphatically can happen again.

It can become a creeping Sahara.

The Sahara desert, a few thousand years ago,

was a Savannah.

We know that it's possible

to turn from Savannah to a stark desert,

and there's no reason to think that it can't happen

in the middle of North America.

August 1, 1965.

Another hot and desolate day.

We are both quite weakened by our struggles,

either with asthma or a desperate cough,

I believe largely the result of working with the dusty wheat.

We had reason to hope for a good rain for the feed crop,

just now in need of encouragement,

but the moisture was cut off with only a light shower.

On her homestead in no man's land,

Caroline Henderson carried on without resorting

to irrigation water from the ogallala aquifer.

It had been nearly 60 years since she first arrived,

full of dreams of farming her own land

and prospering from its bounty.

In those 60 years,

she and will had seen only 10 bumper crops...

And oftentimes, she expressed

feelings of failure to those she knew best.

As they approached the age of 80,

they were still using the farm equipment

they had purchased in the 1920s because

Caroline refused to borrow money for land or machinery.

But they were free of debt,

their daughter had become a successful doctor

and had given them a grandson with a bright future.

In her old age, Caroline steadfastly refused

to turn her land over to a farm management company...

"Strangers of some far-away money-gathering corporation,"

she called them, "with no possible interest

in this small bit of the good earth."

In 1965, with both of them in bad health,

she finally agreed to come to Arizona

to live with their daughter.

They returned to no man's land

the next spring for a final visit.

Will died 3 days later.

Caroline joined him...

Passing through what she called "the western gate"...

Within a few months.

In accordance with her wishes,

the homestead was placed in trust,

on the condition that it never be plowed again.

To prepare the ground as well as we may,

to sow our seeds, to cultivate and care for...

That is our part.

Yet how difficult it is for some of us to learn

that the results we must leave

to the great silent unseen forces of nature,

whether the crop be corn or character.

Caroline Henderson.

♪ That old dust storm's killed my baby, ♪

♪ But it can't kill me, Lord And it can't kill me. ♪

♪ That old dust storm killed my family, ♪

♪ But it can't kill me, Lord And it can't kill me. ♪

♪ That old landlord got my homestead, ♪

♪ But he can't get me, Lord, And he can't get me. ♪

♪ That old dry spell killed my crop, boys, ♪

♪ But it can't kill me, Lord And it can't kill me. ♪

♪ That old tractor got my home, boys,

♪ But it can't get me, Lord And it can't get me.

♪ That old tractor run my house down,

♪ But it can't get me down, And it can't get me.

♪ That old pawn shop got my furniture,

♪ But it can't get me, Lord, And it can't get me.

♪ That old highway's got my relatives,

♪ But it can't get me, Lord, And it can't get me.

♪ That old dust might kill my wheat, boys,

♪ But it can't kill me, Lord And it can't kill me.

♪ I have weathered a-many a dust storm,

♪ But it can't get me, boys, And it can't kill me.

♪ That old dust storm, well, it blowed my barn down, ♪

♪ But it can't blow me down, And it can't blow me down. ♪

♪ That old wind might blow this world down, ♪

♪ But it can't blow me down, It can't kill me. ♪

♪ That old dust storm's killed my baby, ♪

♪ But it can't kill me, Lord And it can't kill me. ♪