These stark, heart-wrenching Dust Bowl pictures reveal both the vast scope and intimate despair of this tragic time.
Children of a migrant fruit worker in Berrien County, Michigan, July 1940.John Vachon/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library Farm machinery buried by a dust storm near a barn lot in Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936.United States Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons Thirty-two-year-old Florence Owens Thompson with three of her seven children at a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California, March 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons Dust Bowl farm in the Coldwater District, north of Dalhart, Texas, June 1938.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A child plays in a California migratory camp, 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library A dust storm looms behind a car in the Texas Panhandle, March 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons Migrant worker looking through back window of automobile near Prague, Oklahoma, 1939.Russell Lee/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library The young son of a farmer walks amid the dust in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm security Administration via Library of Congress A destitute family in the Ozark Mountains area of Arkansas, 1935.Ben Shahn/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library The "Black Sunday" dust storm, one of the worst of the entire era, hits Liberal, Kansas on April 14, 1935.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons Children from Oklahoma staying in a migratory camp in California, November 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons Veteran migrant worker camped in Wagoner County, Oklahoma, June 1939. When asked where his home was, he told photographer Russell Lee, "It's all over."Russell Lee/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress Poor 24-year-old father and 17-year-old mother attempt to hitchhike with their baby on California's U.S. Highway 99, November 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library Landscape left barren by the Dust Bowl, north of Dalhart, Texas, June 1938.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A farmer and his sons walk amid a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons The children of a migrant family living in a trailer in the middle of a field south of Chandler, Arizona, November 1940.Dorothea Lange/United States Department of Agriculture via National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons "This is a hard way to serve the Lord": An Oklahoma refugee in California, March 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress Migrant family traveling on foot through Oklahoma, looking for work elsewhere after father fell ill but was refused country relief, June 1938.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress Dust bowl refugee from Chickasaw, Oklahoma, now in Imperial Valley, California, March 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm security Administration via Library of Congress A woman identified as Mrs. Howard holds her baby at a migrant camp in California, 1935.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library Tenant farmers in Imperial Valley, California, March 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons Children of a tenant farmer in Boone County, Arkansas, 1935.Ben Shahn/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library A drought refugee from Oklahoma attempts to prepare dinner in her makeshift outdoor dwelling in Marysville, California, August 1935.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library The children of a migrant fruit worker in Berrien County, Michigan, July 1940.John Vachon/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library Dust storm damage in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress Dust Bowl refugees camp along the highway near Bakersfield, California, November 1935.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A young migratory mother originally from Texas, now in Edison, California, April 1940. The day before this photo was taken, she and her husband had traveled 35 miles each way to pick peas for five hours, earning just $2.25 between them.Dorothea Lange/United States Department of Agriculture via National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons Sand dunes on a farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A migrant fruit farmer and his family rest at a camp in Marysville, California, June 1935.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library Soil blown by Dust Bowl winds piled up in large drifts near Liberal, Kansas, March 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm security Administration via Library of Congress Members of a poor family of nine who'd been living in a makeshift dwelling constructed from an abandoned car and using a nearby creek as their only water source along U.S. Route 70 between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee, March 1936.Carl Mydans/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library An abandoned farm house in southwest Oklahoma, June 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A man stands amid a raging dust storm at an unspecified location, circa 1934-1936.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons An abandoned house on the edge of the Great Plains near Hollis, Oklahoma, June 1938.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A migratory field worker's makeshift home on the edge of a pea field, where they lived through the winter, in Imperial Valley, California, 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library A dust storm in Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A migrant farmer and his child in California, 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library A dust storm rages at an unspecified location, circa 1930s.United States Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons At the Midway Dairy cooperative, near Santa Ana, California, 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library A dust storm near Beaver, Oklahoma, July 1935.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons A farmer in Kansas, March 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress The "Black Sunday" dust storm approaches Spearman, Texas on April 14, 1935.National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons A mother and child at the El Monte Federal Subsistence Homesteads in California, 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library An abandoned farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress A migrant mother from Missouri tends to her sick child after experiencing car trouble on U.S. Highway 99 near Tracy, California, February 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons A woman in a pea picker's camp in California, March 1937.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via Library of Congress Dust Bowl refugees in California, 1936.Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration via New York Public Library
47 Dust Bowl Pictures That Are Still Haunting Today View GalleryYou'll recognize the stare. You have likely seen it in Dorothea Lange's iconic photo of a migrant mother taken in 1936 in California (see slide three above). And as you look through other Dust Bowl pictures, you will see that stare again and again.
It's an ineffable look at once vacant and intent, stoic and poignant, broken and resolved — the quintessential thousand-yard stare.
And if any group should summon such a stare, it's those who lived through the Dust Bowl, the worst manmade ecological disaster in United States history.
Throughout most of the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the Dust Bowl turned much of what's now known as the American heartland into a virtual wasteland.
For nearly a decade, approximately 100 million acres centered around the panhandles of both Oklahoma and Texas (though spreading as far north as the Canadian prairies) endured devastating drought made even more catastrophic by the harmful farming practices that had taken hold in the decades before.
Because the region's arid grasslands receive very little rainfall, its natural grasses played an essential part in both holding what little moisture there was in the soil and holding the soil itself down on the ground during periods of intense wind storms.
However, during the 1920s, farmers of the Great Plains had plowed away much of this grass in order to make room for more people and more crops, thus making this land even more sensitive to both drought and windstorms. And when both of those struck in the mid-1930s, the region's fate was sealed.
The land turned desolate and the sky went dark as "black blizzards" — better known as dust storms — flared up day in and day out. It was something like a biblical plague and the storms were so strong that massive clouds of dust made their way to Chicago, Boston, and New York City. In fact, one storm in 1934 was so powerful that it left both the U.S. Capitol and the Statue of Liberty covered in dirt and dust that had blown in from the Midwest.
Thanks to the drought and resultant dust storms over the course of the 1930s, crops repeatedly failed across the region while the severe conditions killed both livestock and people, leaving the situation both untenable and unliveable.
Dorothea LangeTitled "Broke, baby sick, and car trouble!", Dorothea Lange captured this photograph in 1937 of a migrant family whose car broke down outside of Tracy, California.
And thus it's entirely fitting that it caused a tremendous exodus. Between 1930 and 1940, approximately 3.5 million desperately poor Americans abandoned their now barren farms in the Plains states and headed for greener pastures, largely in California.
However, while as much as 75 percent of the topsoil had blown away in the region these migrants abandoned, the Great Depression made it such that California's pastures weren't actually all that much greener, with most migrants confined to low-paying farm work.
Nevertheless, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in with a myriad of aid programs whose efforts ranged from planting trees to block wind and hold soil to distributing food to the hungry to teaching farmers dryland techniques to prevent an episode like this from ever happening again.
Thankfully, in the decades since, nothing quite like it ever has. Today, we're left with the photographs of Dorothea Lange and a few others to provide an up-close look at this one-of-a-kind American tragedy.
See some of those who lived through it, their thousand-yard stares, and the ghostly landscapes they traveled through in the Dust Bowl pictures above.
After viewing these haunting pictures of the Dust Bowl, have a look at photos that reveal the trauma experienced across America during the Great Depression as well as how life looked for the rich and powerful during this era.
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