Braving an Oklahoma Dirt Storm

Burned in Memory

Photos that changed the world

In April 1936, Arthur Rothstein arrived near Boise City in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. He was photographing the dirt-choked results of the Dust Bowl — a series of howling dust storms that ravaged the American Midwest from 1933 to 1940.

Rothstein was one of many photographers which the U.S. Farm Service Administration had dispatched to chronicle the storms, their aftermath, and federal efforts at clean up and prevention.

The mid-day sky darkened. The wind whipped clouds of red Oklahoma dust through the county, turning the sky a dusky mix of red-brick and brown.

Rothstein snapped this iconic photo of a farmer and his sons leaning into the storm as they walk out of the field toward home. They are passing one their farm’s outbuildings, perhaps a low animal shed or coop.

The shed has been through several such storms, some of its corrugated tin panels missing and its shingles peeling back in the present windstorm.

The older boy is almost sprinting ahead, perhaps relishing the excitement of the storm. The youngest boy lags behind; I can imagine him wiping dirt from his eyes and crying out to the others to slow down.

The father is thin from years of doing without. His clothes are baggy and flapping in the wind. He’s looking down at the older boy, and there is just a trace of something about his face. A hint of confidence, maybe a touch of a smile that means to say, “We’ll be fine. We’ll get through this.”

The Dust Bowl centered in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. It ranged west into New Mexico and north as far as South Dakota. It blew tons of dirt eastward and displaced millions of Americans.

It was the result of consecutive years of drought and decades of reckless farming practices that stripped the soil of its nutrients and turned it into flyaway dust.

If you have ever been in either of the Panhandle areas, you know they are flat. There are no topographical features to slow the winds that formed east of the Rockies. Neither were there any tree rows to act as windbreaks.

The efforts of the Farm Service Administration, university extension services, agriculturalists, and farmers nationwide led to significant changes in farming practices. Farmers learned to let fields sit fallow and replenish nutrients; terrace their fields to hold water; and replant tree rows.

Americans learned, for a time at least, that they had to work with nature instead of against it.

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