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Episode Guide

Prosperous farmers with women and children stand in abundant wheat field. Molt, Montana. 1927. Credit: Mildred Romundstad Madson (1897-1992)

Episode One: The Great Plow-Up (1890-1935)

Farming here often reminds me of the man who when asked to embark upon some rather doubtful business venture replied that if he wanted to gamble he would prefer roulette,…where the chances were only 32 to 1 against him.

— Caroline Henderson

The film begins with the deep history of the place the Plains Indians considered home, where the short grasses that covered the treeless expanse sent roots five feet below the ground, forming a dense sod that could withstand the region's periodic droughts and violent weather extremes – nurturing deer, antelope, jackrabbits, and the vast herds of buffalo who grazed in number beyond counting. After the bison were eliminated and the Native Americans were driven onto reservations, cattlemen took over, until severe winters in the 1880s caused the "Beef Bonanza" to go bust. A severe drought in the 1890s pushed homesteaders who had swarmed the area off the land.

After Congress passes the Enlarged Homestead Act early in the twentieth century, farmers converge on a narrow-strip of Oklahoma that borders four other states – Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. They include Caroline Henderson, our principal historic voice, who staked her claim in 1907, and the families of many of our survivors, many of whom had never owned their own land or house, and who dreamed of passing on something to their children.

For a while, the dream comes true. In the teens and twenties, a combination of wet years, rising wheat prices and World War I produce a classic boom and speculative land bubble. More and more land is plowed under. And then the Depression hits. Not felt at first on the Great Plains, in 1931 there is no one to buy the bumper wheat crop and prices collapse to half of what it cost the farmers to grow it. Then the drought begins, accompanied by fierce windstorms that collect and carry off the topsoil from the fields that have been left to blow. Tumbleweeds that pile up on fencerows become wind eddies creating sand dunes. For lack of predators, rabbits proliferate, resulting in community-wide "rabbit drives," at the end of which children carrying clubs are deployed into pens to slaughter rabbits by the hundreds. As livestock die, the government institutes a program to pay farmers to kill their emaciated cattle, a traumatic event for many of our interviewees. The dust storms get worse – not only ruining crops but generating static electricity that makes even shaking hands hazardous; engulfing homes in darkness at mid-day; infiltrating everything with a layer of dirt and making housekeeping impossible for mothers; and ultimately resulting in outbreaks of "dust pneumonia," which strikes the most vulnerable members of many families (remembered in heartbreaking accounts by our survivors). But the "next year" people of the southern plains hang on, until "Black Sunday" – April 14, 1935, the date of worst dust storm in history, vividly recalled by anyone who lived through it.

The huge Black Sunday storm as it approaches Ulysses, Kansas, April 14, 1935. Credit: Historic Adobe Museum, Ulysses, Kansas.

Episode Two: Reaping the Whirlwind (1935-1940)

You exhaust your savings; you exhaust your borrowings; you exhaust your equipment; you exhaust yourself and you give up. And that takes about five years.

— Clarence Beck, survivor

We lived in a brown world.

— Dorothy Kleffman, survivor

A few days after Black Sunday, the remnants of the monstrous storm blow into Washington, DC., where Hugh Hammond Bennett, a soil scientist, aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of the film's historical characters, uses the blackened skies to persuade Congress to establish the Soil Conservation Service. A series of government programs attempt to rescue the increasingly desperate inhabitants of the Dust Bowl, many in a state of semi-starvation. Survivors recount stories of eating thistles, and of earning just enough money to get by working for the WPA, NYA and other New Deal programs.

Many families have no choice but to make the heart-rending decision to give up their dream and abandon their homes, joining the largest exodus in American history. Some move temporarily to neighboring states; but many more, including singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie, move to California, where they encounter vicious discrimination as "Okies." FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, are dispatched to chronicle both the Dust Bowl and the migrant camps. Pare Lorentz's movie, The Plow that Broke the Plains, brings the plight of the southern plains to national attention.

Meanwhile, as the drought continues, government agents, including Henry Howard Finnell, a soil scientist convinced that better farming practices can counteract the causes and impacts of the drought, work with farmers to develop conservation techniques. FDR makes several well-publicized trips to the region, determined to bring hope and prevent an American Sahara. Local boosters, like John McCarty of the Dalhart Texan, employ charlatan rainmakers and bristle at the image of the southern Plains and its people being portrayed in the national media. In some counties federal support payments are the only source of income. Grasshoppers descend, bringing another biblical plague.

Finally, in 1939, some rain returns, followed quickly by a wet cycle and booming wheat prices because of World War II. The stage is set for a reprise of the Dust Bowl in the "Filthy Fifties," before the southern Plains begin using the ancient Ogallala aquifer for irrigation in a shortsighted effort to provide water to a semi-arid land. Survivors and historians reflect on the lessons learned – or not – by the Dust Bowl.