Heartland History

Often, necessity makes migrants out of farmers, and farm workers. But sometimes – a catastrophe does.  And by far, the worst ever to hit the heartland was “the dirty thirties", the so-called Oklahoma Dust Bowl that ruined farms and farmers from North Dakota to Texas. Much has been written about those years, about the so-called Okies moving on to safer climates such as California’s central valley. But many stayed on the land while dust and drought buried everything they knew. Many are still there though, still telling their stories. We met up with some of them in the Oklahoma panhandle – the epicenter of the dust bowl.

92 year old Orville Clemens still farms near the land where he grew up in Guymon, Oklahoma. And he remembers well the difficult days of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, “Yes, that all hit in a very short time. The drought hit, the depression hit, and the dust storms hit all about the same time. So many people left and we stayed with it and it’s worked out alright. Clouds would start showing up on the horizon in the north; you’d just see a little bit of cloud and in and an hour, hour and a half time everything was blacked out.”

The severe drought and dust storms of the 1930s weren’t limited just to Oklahoma; neighboring states of Kansas, Colorado New Mexico and Texas were also affected. But we know the situation mostly from John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” about beleaguered, small farmers escaping the Oklahoma Dust bowl.

Pauline Hodges is an author and historian who’s written about the period,” But when the land began to blow and nobody was there to try to stop it. At the beginning of the dustbowl there were approximately 26 thousand people in Beaver County. At the end of the dustbowl there were 6 thousand.”

Those left behind agree that there was one overriding reason that kept many families from packing up and moving away. Dust Bowl survivor Melbourne Headrick has one reason, “Well one thing that made you stay was we didn’t have money to financially get away. Too poor to leave. I don’t really know how the hell they did it”

Historians say that the accepted farming techniques of the time exposed Oklahoma soil to the ravages of nature- a situation aggravated by 7 long years of drought.

Imogene Glover remembers the time very well, “In 1902 and 1903 we began a big influx of people from the Midwest. People who came out here and of course didn’t know about farming practices like we do today. And they plowed up all this land out here that probably should have never been plowed. So that by the time the drought hit in 1931 all that land was open and we always have lots of wind here. All that land began to blow.”

Imogene Glover’s memories of those hard and dusty days are captured in the images on the canvasses that she’s created. She says the images are important, “They needed to know what we lived through and I couldn’t tell them except to paint it. I’d run from the chicken house to the house when those dust storms first started and oh it would burn and sting my legs. We ran to the cellar just a hand dug dirt hole with boards laid across it and dirt piled on top of that so the boards wouldn’t blow away .I’d sit in the corner and read funny books or Big Little books while the storm was the worst.

The dust storms not only wreaked havoc on the land the quantity and powder-like quality of the dust also created serious health issues. Orville Clemens says there was another threat, “Two or three of our neighbors died of dust pneumonia and what they do a lot of people did would wet sheets and put them over the windows, the damp sheets would catch the dust. Imogene says it touched her family as well, “Well my brother had dust pneumonia and they thought he was going to die, but he lived. Killed a lot of young people. The dust took its toll on livestock as well. During 34 and 35 during the late spring the cattle were dying from dust clogging up their noses.”

The Dust Bowl meant desperate times for farmers who lost homes and loved ones. But many who left Oklahoma did find new opportunities in California and the Northwest. And for many who remained, the intervening years have brought happier endings. Imogene says hers was one of them, ‘My brother and sister and I are still all benefiting from the fact that he kept the land and added to it. And we get royalties from the gas and oil and that helps.

As a result of the dust bowl in the 1930s the U.S. Department of Agriculture established a number of programs that help farmers reseed a lot of that land to the native grasses that grew here, Because the land was not lying open to the wind when the droughts came we didn’t have another dust bowl.”

Another Oklahoma Historical Fact
The Oklahoma Panhandle, once part of Mexico and then Texas, became a “No Man’s Land” when Texas was admitted to the Union in the 1840’s. As state boundaries around the panhandle shifted, ranchers and farmers moved in, calling it, unofficially, the “Cimarron Territory.”  Efforts to establish their own government failed and by 1890 Washington assigned this “No Man’s Land” to the new territory of Oklahoma.