The Dust Bowl (years, country, civilizations, how)

[Trudy Rose]

Dorothea Lange's picture of the care-worn "Migrant Mother" that's the one I was trying to remember...probably the one picture that says it all!

[quiet walker]

You can't go wrong with this movie. Check it out...

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

[rangerider]

My parents were "Depression babies" and told me lots of stories about the dirty thirties, as they called them. They were in the north-northeast section of Nebraska, and the dust storms were not as bad there as Kansas and Oklahoma, but bad enough. The drought was horrible, and both their families lost many acres of crops and lots of livestock; many from anthrax that ravaged the country more than once. Dad remembered burning carcasses in big pits more than once - it was the only way to make sure the virus wouldn't spread. Both remembered their mothers hanging wet sheets across the windows during the dust storms to try and trap at least some of the dirt blasting through the cracks. Dad remembered trying to put fencing back up because the dirt would drift like snow and tear wire to the ground. They tried to practice low till farming, like you are describing, and it helped, but the wind tore into the land and anywhere it found a foothold, especially in the sandhills country, it started a blowout and that quickly grew with each new storm. As kids, my brother and I would go into these blowouts large and small with flour sifters from the kitchen and find arrowheads and little pieces of pottery and stone. If you were really lucky, you might find a stone used to scrape hides or a piece that looked like it might have been a pounding tool. That area was on my great-uncle's place on the very east edge of the sandhills. He and his sister never married and had about a section and a half of sandhills and a little black dirt. He figured out a long time before anyone else about planting big shelterbelts to deflect the wind and rotating his Angus cattle herd from pasture to pasture so they never chewed the grasses down more than about 4". This kept his land intact and his cattle looking pretty nice long after most of the neighbors had turned their places into wastelands. I can't imagine how many loads of water he took out on his buckboard to get 3 1/2 miles of shelterbelt trees started.

My dad was a heck of a good shot, and he had to be, because they hunted for food a large share of the time and ammunition was expensive. Rabbits, pheasants, and squirrels were the preferred game. He said some rabbits carried a "fever" that it was wise to watch for; it sickened people, cooked well or not. Both their families raised sufficient produce to feed themselves, but still ate what they could off the land so they could sell the rest for flour, sugar, seed, or repair parts for their homes and machinery. Although they never really went hungry, Mom said they always put what they could away, for the winters were not easy. No one threw anything away; repairs and fabrication used any and all materials used to ship food, liquids, etc. Dresses and aprons were made from flour sacks, and most kids went without shoes in the warm months so they could be used in the cold. Mom said there were some cases of tetanus stemming from that, although they called it lockjaw then. Every article of clothing was worn until there was not enough left to wash, and what little they had was carefully maintained and cared for - a habit I picked up and I admit it does look a little strange in this disposable day and age. Today most of us cannot imagine how it was, and further how we could ever live in those circumstances....

The most poignant thing I ever heard from them about those Depression days was a thing my Mom said when she was in her last two months of life. At one point, a hospice volunteer asked if she would like a preacher to come visit, or maybe if she felt up to it make a short trip up to a church a mile from where we live. Mom thought for a minute, and said, "You know, when I was a girl during the depression, my shoes were very worn and I had only enough cardboard to patch the holes enough to get to school and back every week; so I didn't go to church." The gal from the hospice was probably in her thirties and had no idea what my Mom was talking about...

I think that story exemplifies just what those days were like for so many people. But it burned a resolve and sacrifice into them that enabled the greatest generation to win a very difficult war a decade later.

[John Walmsley]

rangerider,

Thanks for sharing your interesting Dust Bowl Memories. Those were hard-scrabble times to eke out a living. The Great Depression was bad enough without the dust storms. I can only imagine what it must have been like in the high-plains west. It's interesting that your father used sound environmental grazing practice long before it became widely accepted. As I'm sure you know, overgrazing is causing serious desertification of large areas of the globe.

I've always been fascinated how the early high-plains settlers managed to survive the brutal winters in their sod homes. BTW, your mention of digging in the soil, made me wonder if you ever found any fossils of prehistoric animals. I understand that parts of Nebraska and eastern Montana have been a treasure trove for paleontologists.
John

[rangerider]

Yup, found quite a few. But that was during college when I was pursuing a degree in wildlife biology and wound up taking more of an interest in paleontology and historical geology. We didn't find much on my great-uncle's place, but there were quite a few simple Indian artifacts, mostly broken up but a lot of nice arrowheads and stone tools. I still have probably a couple hundred or more. You are correct in thinking Nebraska and Montana are a haven for fossil hunters - some of the world's most famous have been found in eastern and north central Montana.

It's interesting that you should mention the fact that the settlers should manage to survive in their sod homes. An account of this life you might enjoy reading is a book about the blizzard of 1888 entitled "In All It's Fury", by W.H. O'Gara. It is a compilation of stories gathered from survivors of what came to be known as the "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" named so because it struck when the one-room schools on the prairie let out for the day and many schoolchildren died trying to reach home. Amongst it's stories you will discover that many people died of the cold in their "modern" frame house while the dugouts and soddys kept their occupants relatively warm even in the most miserable cold. My folks mentioned this fact more than once. But even though these primitive structures were life savers on the prairie, they were dirty and not considered proper living; frame houses eventually became the norm. Ironically, the same thing happens today in the same place, only now it involves tornados. I grew up in Nebraska, and when a tornado flattened a single place or part of a town, they rebuild the exact design that just failed. There are better options...but I guess it's hard to part with traditional methods.

My dad grew up in a frame house on the northeast Nebraska prairie; it was a prime example of walls without any sort of barrier against the cold. He recalled his dad saying that on a cold day, "..it was only a little colder in the house than it was outside." When I first moved out here to SW Montana in the late 70s, I found common ground with his experience by living first in an old ranch bunkhouse and then for several years in an old miner's shack sans any insulation, running water, and an old Monarch wood range for heat. Packed in all my water from a spring up the hill and had a reservoir on the side of the Monarch firebox for heating it. Actually, other than being time consuming, it wasn't bad at all - just depends what you get used to, I guess.

[John Walmsley]

rangerider,

A few years ago National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine printed an interesting story on the fossils found at Hell Creek, Montana. This is an aside, but one of the high points of a trip my wife and I made to Italy a couple years ago was to see the 5000-year-old "Ice Man" now located in a Bolzano, Italy, museum. It's amazing how much detail scientists can learn from studying the remains of the body and clothing.

Thanks for the tip on the book "In All It's Fury." I'll put it on my list of must-reads. I recall reading a book a few years ago about the incredible western blizzard of 1888, but I think that was by another author. That was also the year there was a record blizzard on the east coast. I'm not sure it's done so much today, but I've read that farmers in the west often tied a rope from their house to the barn to avoid wandering off course during fierce storms.

As you mentioned, I'm sure the sod houses and earth-dug homes were far more substantial and warmer than frame homes. We recently watched a movie made in Mongolia called "The Weeping Camel," which featured a Mongolian family living on the almost treeless plains. The yurt must be one of the most practical shelters ever devised, and it stands up against some pretty severe weather. It's surprising that it hasn't been more widely used.

Your mention of the Monarch stove brought back some memories. My parents had a cast-iron Home Comfort stove that dominated our kitchen in the 1930s. It was the one room in the house where it was usually warm. The Monarch was apparently the Rolls-Royce of cast-iron stoves. Even the restored ones are very expensive today.

To get back on topic, I read today that NASA scientists think that the 1930s droughts and resulting dust storms were brought on by ocean temperature changes over a period between 1930 and 1939. Hopefully, new farming and grazing methods will help in the event of another.

[delusianne]

Family members of mine who were children in the dustbowl area during the Depression are cautious to this day about money, food, debt, property - the underlying thought being - you never know when it will disappear. They've prospered because they had an unbelievable work ethic - fragile security.

[HighPlainsDrifter73]

I've always been interested in the dust bowl days. Something about the black and white pictures of that time. I can only imagine how hard the times must have been for the people living in those areas. The high plains and dust bowl have always fascinated me. I can't remember how many times I watched The Grapes of Wrath.

About 20 years ago I was driving in southwest Kansas and saw many old windmills and abandoned houses that look like they were from the depression era. If only those structures could talk.

[rangerider]

During the 30s and 40s, most all my family was not poor, but teetered on the brink of it from time to time. I asked my Dad about what they considered to be the benchmark of being poor, and he said pretty much everybody was but since it was the case almost universally no one really thought of themselves as being such. Which is why one thing has fascinated me for years and I never really got a straight answer from anyone in my family about it - they took quite a few pictures. Taking pictures, especially in the 30s, was a relatively expensive thing when you consider what their budget must have looked like. But for whatever reason, I have probably a dozen or more shoeboxes full of pictures taken from those days, and some of them are pretty grim. But most show an industrious set of farmers and ranchers working and having fun also.

When I have the time, I need to sort and archive them somehow. Most are labeled with the whos and wheres and whats, and I can recognize a lot of the names and faces. They probably belong in a museum somewhere, as many show everyday life in those days. One of the most treasured is a large photograph of my paternal grandfather; it was taken for the local newspaper and shows him driving the first Farmall Regular that was delivered in that area. He was unloading it off the railcar in the depot yard. Pretty cool if you like looking at that kind of stuff.

[GregW]

I do not remember the author's name but try to find a book titled "Dirt". It chronicles the downfall of many societies because they abused and lost their productive soil.

Ironically as we plant fence to fence to supply the corn to alcohol factories we are setting ourselves up for another dust bowl.