“If you’re going through hell, keep going.
~Winston Churchill
“In the spring of 1933, we left everything behind.
That dust came in from Kansas through northern Oklahoma and the sky was just as red as it could be. The dust got so bad that you couldn’t even see the houses across the street, and it would come in through the windows and everywhere.
I put a wet rag over my face to keep from breathing it down my lungs. The rag would be muddy on top,’ just like you put mud on it. It was terrible. And all the crops would blow out, and dirt would pile real high up against your house.
Like I said, we sold everything we had and got in this old Model-T Ford truck that my brother had, and 16 of us started out. There was my mother and dad, their seven children, the man that lived with my parents, and my husband and I and our four babies.
We headed for California with nothin’. But I guess having nothin’ was a whole lot better than what we were going through in Nebraska.
There were nights when the children would cry–but we had nothing for them. We left everything behind in that old house. But we had to keep moving. It was that or die.”
~Miriam Soderberg, Dust Bowl Survivor
In 1931, rain stopped falling on the Midwestern and Southern Plains. The soil was already in bad shape. Farmers had cleared, plowed, and over-planted great stretches of land. Ranchers had allowed livestock to overgraze. Without grasses or trees to hold in moisture, the soil was dry. As the drought grew worse, winds whipped the powder-dry soil into huge storms of dust.
In what would soon become known as the Dust Bowl, thousands of families were left homeless and penniless with no other option than to head for California.
Vestiges of the Dust Bowl, Inavale, NE
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