The Dust Bowl

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.

Modern machinery made farming more profitable and changed the structure of the land for growing wheat. The result was more land speculation, more acreage turned over to wheat farming, and a blind faith that the good times wouldn’t end, but warning signs were evident.

FDR was greeted with signs along the road saying "You gave us beer. Now give us water."

Land prices are going up and people say the climate is undergoing a permanent shift.

Plagues of jack rabbits swarmed the great plains destroying everything in their path.

"Do you have enough gas money?" Some people moved west to get away from the storms.

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.