Dust Bowl: Ballads and Stories
Hitting it’s hardest in 1933, the dust bowl caused the Midwest to turn into a dry, barren desert. Karen Hesse gives a easy-to-understand account of the dust bowl through the eyes of Billie Jo, a fourteen year old girl struggling through the impacts of the dust bowl and the great depression all at once.
The story takes place between January 1934 and December 1935 in Oklahoma, when the most disastrous of the dust storms occurred. Strong winds would carry large amounts of topsoil across plains states in the Midwest and blanket them in giant mounds of dust.
The dust would cover highways and invade the homes of the people who lived in the center of them. Billie Jo mentions several times that she has to clean the dishes and furniture after each storm because the dust would cover them. Teams of horses, such as the ones in the above photograph, were called upon to remove the swaths of dust that covered the roadways.
The dust storms that ravaged the midwest killed the crops of thousands of farmers, including people like Billie Jo’s father. This picture, taken near Muskogee, Oklahoma, depicts a farmer and his family after his fields have been ruined by the dust storms. While Billie Jo and her father decide at the end of the novel to stay in Oklahoma, many others took their families and migrated to Western states such as California.
This happened at a time where the Great Depression’s impact on the United States worsened the already devastating Dust Bowl occurring in the Midwest. During the 1920s, as World War I was happening, people began relying more and more on land in the Midwest for agriculture. This along with a large lack of rainfall which hit in the 1930s caused the eventual Dust Bowl. Some even believe that if not for the intensive farming that happened in the 1920s, the Dust Bowl may not have ad as great of an impact on the Midwest (Ekbia & Suri).
Some of the worst of the dust storms occurred during April of 1935, and they play an important part in the development of Billie Jo’s journey in the book. She recounts the storm in the entry titled “Blankets of Black” on page 162; the storm occurs just as things are taking a positive turn in Billie Jo’s life, and it is after the storm that she decides to leave her home. Others have recounted their journeys through the Dust Bowl, including the woman in the audioclip below. If you are interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl and the lives of those who lived through it, be sure to check out the audio clip below as well as more of Woodie Guthrie’s music, which reflects his own experiences. To hear the audio clip of the woman retelling her experiences, click here.
References:
Ekbia, Hamid R., and Vankata R. Suri. “Of Dustbowl Ballads and Railroad Rate Tables: Erudite enactments in historical inquiry.” Information & culture 48.2 (2013): 260. Web. 24 Nov. 2015.
Written and Published by Tiffany Atwood & Helen Groothuis
