The Dust Bowl

Experience the conservation efforts to bring farms back to life, with dangers of another Dust Bowl in the future.

The government hired photographers to capture the movement of immigrants to CA.

Trixie Travis Brown talks about her father moving to Follett, TX.

Robert Boots McCoy talks about the jack rabbits.

The Dust Bowl chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the Great Plow-Up, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation..

Dale Coen reads a poem by his mother about why she moved to the Great Plains.

Wheat prices continue to fall and a drought begins, farmers elect a democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for president.

From the time she was a young girl, Caroline Henderson dreamed of having a piece of land she could call her own.

By 1937, the Dust Bowl farmers are asking for government help in regulating the land by forcing other farmers to take better care of their soil. They even consider declaring martial law. For many farmers who had previously demonstrated independence and suspicion of government, this is a substantial ideological turnaround.

Learn about the two types of plows farmers used.

Dorthy Williamson discusses working in the southern Great Plains during the dust bowl.

Sanora Babb sent chapters of her book back to New York, but John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is so popular, that her editor recommends holding off on publication. It is eventually published in 2004, a year before her death.