As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west - from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, 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 pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.’"

"Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930's deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads."

An online report by Siegfried D. Schubert and others continues, "On the Cause of the 1930's Dust Bowl, Mr. Schubert continues, "During the 1930's, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains."

"The Dust Bowl of the 1930's lasted about a decade. Its primary area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were not so badly effected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact, the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains was also profound.

I read an article in Time Magazine Online described as "devised in 1935 by a German immigrant farmer named Fred Hoeme after he discovered that an area of his Oklahoma dust bowl farm which had been torn by some heavy machinery was the only section on which he could grow a crop",

"The dust storms of the south plains had their beginnings when the sod was first broken by homesteaders’ plows in the late 1800's; the first U. S. Dust bowl developed in Thomas County, Kansas, in 1912. The development of the tractor, the rainy years between 1914 and 1931, and high prices for farmers’ crops caused a tremendous increas in plowing. Millions of acres of sandy or submarginal land were planted to wheat, corn and cotton. Amid the droughts of the 1930's, the coverless, power-dry earth of the plains lay helpless under the scouring winds. During World Warr II, heavy rainfall and high prices brought a repetition of the cycle; once more millions of marginal acres were plowed and planted by ‘suitcase farmers’ intent on a fast dollar."

The Times Magazine Online article continues: "A four-year cycle of drought, which began in 1950, was hardly noticed at first; the borders of the drought area varied from year to year because of local weather conditions. In parts of Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Illinois, for instance, rainfall had been far below normal, yet still far above that of the Southwest. But in the five mosgt affected states, the earth has grown drier every year. Parts of Texas, between the Red River and the weakly trickling Rio Grande, has gotten less than 10% of normal rainfall for four years; southwestern Oklahoma has gotten little more, and areas of Colorado, Kansas, Arizona and New Mexico have suffered dangerous drought. In all of them last week, not only the topsoil but the subsoil was parched deep down.

"In areas of deep soil that has had good care, even this has not yet proven disastrous. In the last two decades man has learned to battle the wind; by planting windbreaks and cover crops, by contour plowing to keep precious moisture in the soil, bu use of the double-mouldboard lister plow, which ridges the ground and slows down wind action, by ‘chiseling’ the earth with a spike-toothed Hoeme’s plow, which brings clods of subsoil to the surface.

"But even these tactics failed against this year’s winds - far stronger than the winds of the 1930's. Week after week gales of 60, 70 and 80 miles an hour scourged the earth. In the Oklahoma panhandle alone there were 499,000 acres of land that either lost at least one inch of topsoil, or was covered with from one to two inches of windblown dust and sand.

"Many a state how has soil-conservation laws that permit authorities to ‘list’ or chisel’ the uncared-for land and tax the owner for the expense. All over the plains the fight against soil erosion was going on But such work - and particularly the job of getting grass back on thin, bad soil - would take time. Only soaking rains could guarantee an end to the blowing plumes of dust."

Randy Francis submitted a dissertation on the Dust Bowl to Dr. Thomas Charlton in Partial Completion of the Requirements of the Course HIS 3380 Texas History. In part, it stated, "The Panhandle of Texas was a part of one of the worst disasters in U. S. agricultural history. As part of a five-state region affected by severe drought and soil erosion, the "Dust Bowl" was result of several factors. Cyclical drought and farming of marginally productive acreage was exacerbated by a lack of soil conservation methods. Because the disaster lasted throughout the 1930's, the lives of every Plains resident and expectations of farming the region changed forever. The settlement and development of the Southern Plains came relatively late. Not recognizing the problems of initiating massive agricultural programs meant farmers had no contingency plans when the drought hit."

I was raised in the Oklahoma Flat area, about 12 miles southwest of Littlefield, on a hill my sister and I fondly call "Rattlesnake Hill", for obvious reasons. We lived in a small, three-room house with our parents. The house wasn’t very tightly built - in fact, it was rather like a sieve when the sand blew. Linda and I slept on bunk beds next to the window in the bedroom we shared with our parents. I vividly remember going to sleep with the sheet pulled all the way over my head, because the sand was so thick in the air. When I’d awake, I had to carefully lift the sheet away, or I’d dump all the sand that had collected during the night right in my face. Such fond memories......