4 1 I was born in 1923 on a farm in Cimarron County Oklahoma That’s in the Oklahoma panhandle I’ve lived in Oklahoma all my life and I’ve loved it all my life too How could anybody not love its beautiful blue skies and wide open grasslands For part of my childhood though Oklahoma was hideous Every now and then I still Vernon Thompson Oklahoma Farmer
5 have a nightmare about a black blizzard animal corpses or my daddy crying You see I grew up during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s We called this time the Dirty Thirties My family has been here since the 1880s Back then just a handful of sheep and cattle ranchers lived here My ancestors raised sheep Few folks farmed back then or at any rate they didn’t grow much The prairie sod was really tough It was hard to break up with a horse-drawn plow And the weather was awfully dry too A drought dragged on through much of the 1890s when my momma and daddy were little But over time more settlers arrived The drought ended Plows got bigger and better and farmers started using motorized tractors The ranches steadily turned into farms By the time I came along people had plowed up the prairie What had once been a vast thick thatch
6 of grass was now an expanse of powdery topsoil Cimarron County had become a paradise of fertile dirt and waving wheat just like the rest of the southern Great Plains But in 1931 when I was eight it stopped raining At first no one worried much Rain had fallen pretty regularly for 25 years before this A lot of folks were new to Oklahoma They came during More and more farms were created on the Great Plains in the early 1900s
7 these rainy years and figured it would always be rainy They didn’t know that in these parts there’s a normal cycle of rain and drought So people kept on plowing and planting But the rain didn’t come When the first dust storm approached our farm in September 1931 we saw a wall of darkness in the distance We thought it was a tornado Momma told us to hightail it down into the root cellar As the storm blew over us we could tell it was no tornado They say a tornado sounds like a freight train This storm sounded like a blizzard The wind wailed overhead It lashed the house with something We didn’t know what Turns out it was dirt not snow After the wind stopped Daddy pushed up on the cellar door with his shoulder The door swung open and bushels of Find another source on the September 1931 duster Compare the information there to the information here Second Source
