Special report: Out of the dust

Kittie Clason Webb watched her brother scoop bucket after bucket of windblown dirt from the roof of their home on the Plains.

He handed each load down to his mother and sister, who dumped it on the ground and sent the bucket back up.

Left in place, the pile on the roof might have crashed through the house, one more misfortune for a family that was seeing its share in the 1930s.

The family, dairy farmers in the northeast corner of New Mexico, tried in vain to stand its ground amid the Dust Bowl.

"When the dust storms were on, I had to wear something over my face to keep the dust out of my nose," recalled Webb, a 90-year-old Modesto resident. "It blew so hard that sometimes we couldn't even put our food on the table."

The Dust Bowl migration brought more than a quarter-million people to California. More than 70,000 of them came to the San Joaquin Valley, which started the '30s with a population of about 540,000.

It was one of the key forces that shaped the valley, along with the migrations from Mexico, Europe, Asia and other parts of the United States.

Many people left the Plains with little to their name, and they faced continued hardship upon arriving in California. Some had family or friends already here, but others were strangers.

Some of the longtime residents derided the "Okies," as these rugged, often ragged, folks from Oklahoma and nearby states frequently were called.

But they endured. They put down roots, built businesses and left their mark on politics, religion and other parts of valley life.

"They made things work out of nothing," said Tom Whitfield, 81, of Modesto, who left a drought-ravaged part of Texas in 1935. "Little by little, I think the general population found out that these people were not as bad as they portrayed them to be."

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"Dust Bowl," one of the most evocative phrases in the nation's lore, is something of a misnomer. Less than 10 percent of the migrants came from areas where dust storms hit hard -- the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico.

But these storms blew though other parts of the Plains and beyond. At times more than 10,000 feet high, they bore massive amounts of the topsoil that had supported buffalo grazing for millennia and grain crops for decades.

And the entire region, some 400 million acres from the Dakotas to Texas, faced severe drought through much of the '30s.

"I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that they cannot be harvested," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said after a 1936 tour. "I shall never forget field after field of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left the grasshoppers took. I saw brown pastures which would not keep a cow on 50 acres."

A series of wet years in the 1920s had led farmers to believe that the Plains could sustain annual plowing, mainly for wheat. They hoped as well that grain prices would stay near the highs they reached during and soon after World War I, when European agriculture shrank.

But the '30s brought a long spell of the dry weather common in this mostly treeless land east of the Rockies. The soil was thin, irrigation scarce.

The drought extended into Missouri and Arkansas, which also sent many migrants to California, and to other parts of the West and Midwest.

Whatever the farmers did coax from the ground brought pitiful prices on the commodity markets during the Depression.

"We were literally about to starve to death," said Whitfield, who is from Beeville in southern Texas. "There was no food. The water was brackish, alkaline."