Dust Bowl .... photos, novels & music.

Throughout the drought, farm families had to choose between their property and starvation, or to leave their lands, especially in Oklahoma. Heading west on historic Route 66, they followed the mythology that California might be the solution to all their troubles. 

California’s agriculture at the time was in a boom, and owners of the farms needed pickers, but the work was not steady, the pay was low and seldom provided housing. People lived in squatter camps of rough-made shacks, or as often simply pulled off the road and threw up a tent. 

At the forefront of the movement to publicize the tragic conditions in California was Paul Taylor, a professor at Cal.  His effort took on added power when he was joined by Dorothea Lange (his future wife), whose images cast the plight of the refugees into the American consciousness.  Lange’s picture “Migrant Mother” has achieved near mythical status, defining an entire era in United States' history.  Florence Owens Thompson migrated west to the farms near Sacramento from Oklahoma.  In 1931, Florence’s husband Cleo died of tuberculosis.  Florence would later recall times in which she would pick 400-500 pounds of cotton from first daylight until after it was too dark to work. She added, “I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I did a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids.  Lange's notes of the image read: "Seven hungry children …  Destitute in pea pickers’ camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food.”

The vast majority of migrants continued to suffer in terrifying conditions through the end of the decade.  It was John Steinbeck, who gave us a powerful description of the plight of the “Oklahomans” in his 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath”.  “ and then the dispossessed were drawn west-from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas…- families, tribes, dusted out and fractured out.  Carloads and caravans, of homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand.  They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless – restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do, to lift, to push, to pick, to cut – anything, any burden to bear for food” 

Woody Guthrie was the troubadour of the Dust Bowl with blues describing how the wind and dust destroyed farms and people.