American Experience

Narrator: In 1931, there was no better place to be a farmer than the Southern Plains. The rest of the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression, but in wheat country they were reaping a record-breaking crop.

Plains farmers had turned untamed prairie into one of the most prosperous regions in the country.

Lawrence Svobida (Matthew Modine, voice over): I came to Meade County, Kansas fired with ambition to become a wheat farmer.

Narrator: Lawrence Svobida had come from Nebraska’s Corn Belt to start his own farm. He was one of those who believed he had found paradise.

Lawrence Svobida (Matthew Modine, voice over): Harvesting wheat was a thrill to me. The roar of the laboring motors and the whine of the combine was music to my ears.

It was breath-taking — hundreds of acres of wheat that were mine. To me it was the most beautiful scene in all the world.

Narrator: At the turn of the century, when settlers gazed upon the Southern Plains, they had looked out over a vast expanse of shrubs and grasses. The land was green and lush, and the soil so rich, an observer noted, that it “looked like chocolate where the plow turned the sod.”

The newcomers did not realize that they were witnessing only a brief moment in an endless cycle of rain and drought.

Yet boosters and promoters lured in farmers with the promise of heaven on earth.

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, historian: You had railroad companies and states putting out advertisements encouraging people to think of this land as a bountiful land. The State of Kansas put out posters showing watermelons the size of small automobiles, grapes the size of bowling balls, corn that you had to pick by going up a ladder, and people were encouraged to believe that this was the Garden of Eden if they would only have the courage to go out and challenge the land.

Narrator: Thousands of eager settlers took up the challenge, bringing farming techniques that had worked well in the Northeast. Confident of rain, unmindful of wind, they plowed mile after mile of virgin sod.

With the outbreak of WWI, Washington wanted wheat — wheat would win the war! With record high prices, the promise of the land was coming true. Millions of acres of grassland would feel the plow for the first time. The race was on to turn every inch of the Southern Plains into profit.

Appearing like giant armored bugs creeping along the horizon, tractors came to the fields in the 1920’s. With a team of horses, a farmer could barely turn three acres of prairie sod in a day. With a tractor, he could plow 50. The Great Plow-Up was under way.

J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: So everybody got him a John Deere tractor or an old International and really went to plowin’ this country and my dad was no different than the rest of 'em. You know, he’d run that thing all day and when the sun went down, why, he’d come in and do the chores and I’d go runnin’ that tractor 'til morning.

Dad would work it in the daytime. He’d have everything serviced, plow greased, everything ready to go. When I got my turn all I had to do was just get on there and drive that thing.

Narrator: With so much bounty flowing from the Southern Plains, outsiders saw an opportunity to make a killing and began speculating on wheat. “Suitcase Farmers,” they were called — eastern bankers, businessmen, lawyers — who put in their seed and went home till harvest season.

Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: It produced good. It looked like the greatest thing would never end. So they abused the land. They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could.

And we don’t think. We don’t think. Except for ourselves and it comes down to greed. We’re selfish and we want what we want and we don’t even think of what the end results might be.

J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: I think that most of those people thought this is just what we might say 'hog heaven’. It’ll always be this way. So they kept breaking this country out and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up. They got the whole country plowed up nearly and, ah, that’s about the time it turned off terribly dry.

Narrator: Whirlwinds had always danced across the fields on hot, dry, days. No one took much notice that these swirls of dust were growing thicker, taller, and faster than usual.

Then in the summer of 1931, the rains stopped. Wheat withered in the fields — leaving the land naked and vulnerable to the menacing winds. But, no one was prepared for what was to come.

Lawrence Svobida (Matthew Modine, voice over): The winds unleashed their fury with a force beyond my wildest imagination. It blew continuously for a hundred hours and it seemed as if the whole surface of the earth would be blown away.

As far as my eyes could see, my fields were completely bare.

Narrator: As dust enveloped the atmosphere, it got into the eyes, the nose, the mouth — breathing became difficult. The Red Cross issued an urgent call for dust masks, especially for children.

Floyd Coen, Elkhart, Kansas: So we’d wear face masks in school, and — and, ah, during our work and so forth, it’d be a gauze mask that — and you could never seem to get a real good breath from that. And you often wondered, will I get enough oxygen to my system? Will this be damaging?

Narrator: Residents grabbed any bits of cloth to cover their faces. The Plains began to resemble a WWI battlefield, with dust rather than mustard gas fouling the air.

Where grain once grew high as a man’s shoulder, dazed farmers walked out over their beaten, blown-out fields.

It had taken a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil on the Southern Plains. It took only minutes for one good blow to sweep it all away.

Imogene Glover, Guymon, Oklahoma: Well, after a dirt storm the ground would just be bare where it had blown all the topsoil away and then it would be mounds over where the fence rows had been. So we didn’t have much except just bare old hard ground. It was a bad time.

Narrator: One hundred million acres of the Southern Plains were turning into a wasteland. A circle encompassing large sections of five states in the nation’s heartland: the Panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico.

A journalist traveling through the region called it the Dust Bowl.

Judge Wilson Cowen, Dalhart, Texas: The farmhouses looked terrible—the dust was deposited clear up to the window sills in these farmhouses, clear up to the window sills. And even about half of the front door was blocked by this sand. And if people inside wanted to get out, they had to climb out through the window to get out with a shovel to shovel out the front door. And, ah, there was no longer any yard at all there, not a green sprig, not a living thing of any kind, not even a field mouse. Nothing.

Narrator: Convinced that the storms were a freak accident, that the rains would soon return, residents could not imagine that they had entered a battle that would last a decade.

Margie Daniels, Hooker, Oklahoma: The next morning you’d still have that dust settling in the air, but there would be the sunshine and all again but then everything would just be covered in dirt. Everything was full of dust. If you were cooking a meal, you’d end up with dust in your food and you would feel it in your teeth. You’d start to eat and when you would drink water or something, you would grit down and you always felt like you had grit between your teeth. You know it felt terrible.

Clella Schmidt, Spearman, Texas: The next day when Mother and my grandmother started cleaning out the house, they were taking the dirt out in buckets full. They were scooping it up onto, ah, ah, wheat scoops, which are pretty good-sized scoops, and carrying it out into the yard.

Imogene Glover, Guymon, Oklahoma: The dust was just like face powder. It was so heavy and thick. It wasn’t like sand. It was just real heavy, like face powder. Only it was real dark, almost black.

Narrator: To the astonishment of residents, the dust kept coming. In 1932, the weather bureau reported 14 dust storms. The next year, the number climbed to 38.

People tried to protect themselves by hanging wet sheets in front of doorways and windows to filter the dirt. They stuffed window frames with gummed tape and rags. But keeping the fine particles out was impossible. The dust permeated the tiniest cracks and crevices.

Imogene Glover, Guymon, Oklahoma: We just had a lot of dirt. (Laughs) I just grew up with it. I thought that was what life was all about.

Narrator: The drought persisted, made worse by some of the hottest summers on record. Windmills provided drinking water from deep wells, but the fields were bone dry.

Still confident that the rains would return, farmers continued to plow. “Out of this blast of dust,” one observer wrote, “the men of Western Kansas whistle and go right on sowing wheat.”

Lorene White, Manter, Kansas: If dad was in the field we were always afraid, you know. We didn’t know whether dad could get in or not because the dust was so bad. Dad always had a tendency, like most men did, I guess, they would stay in the field until it — the storm got there. So Mom and we kids, we were at home watching, waiting for Dad to come in, thinking he would surely come before the dirt hit, and usually he didn’t. And, ah, then we’d have to worry about him getting in. And I, worry was part of my make up, so I — I worried about him.

Narrator: 1934. The storms were coming with alarming frequency. Residents believed they could pinpoint a storm’s origins by the color of the dust — black from Kansas, red from Oklahoma, gray from Colorado or New Mexico.

As the storms rampaged across the land, they unleashed another destructive force.

J.R.Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: I can remember when Dad had a good wheat crop growing and it blew terribly hard for two days. At the end of that two days, static electricity, the electricity in the air, had completely killed the wheat crop. All of that green wheat had just turned brown and was dead.

Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: I had a little garden and I had me some watermelons and I’d carry water by the bucket out and water it. And I remember I went out that evenin’ to water 'em and I had some little watermelons about as long as your little finger, just as pretty and shiny, a little fuzz on 'em, you know? And went out the next mornin’ after one of them sand storms and there are the watermelons’ vines whipped around and them little melons just black as tar. It was completely just because of static electricity and that continuous wind.

Narrator: For farmers it was going on three years of planting with little to show for it. The hard times were beginning to take their toll.

Margie Daniels, Hooker, Oklahoma: I can remember looking at Dad and he’d be laid back in his big chair, his old lounge chair, you know, with his feet up and usually one of the kids on his lap. But he would just be, you know, kinda lookin’ off into space or something. You could tell. You could tell by his attitude if he was depressed.

Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: My mother, she’d be walkin’ the floor and when she got nearly cryin’, her chin would draw up, you know, and she’d wring her hands and say, “Oh, the wind, the wind, the wind.” And she’d just cry, because she realized the conditions things was in. I didn’t. I just thought, “Well, it’s dry and the wind’s blowin’ and the sand’s blowin’.” But she realized how Dad was havin’ to work, what little he was makin’, and we’as about to starve to death.

Imogene Glover, Guymon, Oklahoma: We had meager food at that time. Everyone did. And we lived literally on cornbread and beans. And that was our main meal and at night we’d just have cornbread and milk, but so did everybody else. In fact, I felt like we had good food compared to a lot of people.

Narrator: Outside the Southern Plains, few grasped the full measure of the disaster. In Washington, the Dust Bowl was seen as just another trouble spot in the nationwide crisis of the Depression. The government began offering relief through Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Lorene White, Manter, Kansas: My Dad was really proud. He thought it was charity to take help from the government, and for a long time, he wouldn’t. Even when government programs came in, you know, in relation to his farming, where he could have been paid for certain farming practices, there was quite a while that Dad wouldn’t do it.

Narrator: The sturdy people who settled this country were not “leaners,” residents insisted. Yet most had no choice but to suffer the humiliation of relief checks and food hand-outs.

Lorene White, Manter, Kansas: There was a time when there was canned food that was available to people who were in the situation that we were. We were poor I guess. We didn’t call ourselves poor but I guess we were. But Dad wouldn’t, he wouldn’t let Mom get it.

I think Dad would have let us eat pretty poorly before he would have accepted any help. He was, he thought he was, that it was his job. He was the breadwinner of the family, and it was a disgrace for him to let someone else come in and take care of his family, and he felt like that’s what was happening.

Narrator: Piece by piece, farmers were losing everything they cherished.

In the fall of 1934, with livestock feed depleted, the government began to buy and destroy thousands of starving cattle.

Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: Each and everyday got worse and you couldn’t see no end, and you couldn’t see anything of any improvement. And the government come in and took the cattle and killed 'em, paid $16 for a cow and $3 dollars for a calf. When that was gone, you didn’t have anything hardly left.

Narrator: Of all the government programs, cattle slaughter would be the most wrenching.

Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: Well, that cow, you’d milked her. See her big ol’ kind eyes and she furnished you milk and food and — and to see 'em just take and lead her off and you knew that’as the end of her, that’as the end of her life, well, when was yours comin’, you know? It was pretty sad.

Narrator: With the Southern Plains becoming more desert-like with each passing month, residents themselves were beginning to wonder whether the only difference between the Dust Bowl and the Sahara Desert was that a lot of “dammed fools” were not trying to farm the sands of North Africa.