♪ ♪ NARRATOR: "Black blizzards," they were called; dark clouds reaching miles into the sky churning millions of tons of dirt into torrents of destruction.

J.R. DAVISON: We could see this low cloud bank, it looked like.

You could see it all the way across.

And we watched that thing, and it got closer, seemed to kind of grow, you know, it was getting closer.

The ends of it would seem to sweep around.

And you felt like, you know, you were surrounded.

Finally, it would just close in on you, shut off all light.

You couldn't see a thing.

MELT WHITE: And it kept getting worse and worse, and the wind blowing harder and harder.

It kept getting darker and darker.

The old house is just vibrating like it was going to blow away.

And I started trying to see my hand.

And I kept bringing my hand up closer and closer and closer and closer, and I finally touched the end of my nose, and I still couldn't see my hand.

That's how black it was.

♪ ♪ A lot of people got out of the bed, got their children out of the bed got down praying, thought that was it.

They thought that was the end of the world.

(wind whistling) NARRATOR: Dust storms engulfed whole towns, ensnaring residents in a whirlwind of stinging, blinding dirt.

Thousands would get sick from a mysterious illness.

Scores would die.

IMOGENE GLOVER: When those dust storms blew, and you were out in them, well, you spit out dirt.

It looked like... (sighs): Tobacco juice, only it was dirt.

♪ ♪ MARGIE DANIELS: When I'd see one of these black clouds rolling in, I remember thinking, "Why is it so dark, why is it so dirty?

"What have I done now?

What did we do to cause this?"

♪ ♪ (crickets chirping) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In 1931, there was no better place to be a farmer than the southern Plains.

The rest of the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression, but in wheat country, they were reaping a record-breaking crop.

♪ ♪ Plains farmers had turned untamed prairie into one of the most prosperous regions in the country.

LAWRENCE SVOBIDA (dramatized): I came to Meade County, Kansas, fired with ambition to become a wheat farmer.

NARRATOR: Lawrence Svobida had come from Nebraska's corn belt to start his own farm.

He was one those who believed he had found paradise.

SVOBIDA (dramatized): Harvesting wheat was a thrill to me.

The roar of the laboring motors and the whine of the combine was music to my ears.

♪ ♪ It was breathtaking-- hundreds of acres of wheat that were mine.

To me, it was the most beautiful scene in all the world.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: At the turn of the century, when settlers gazed upon the southern Plains, they had looked out over a vast expanse of shrubs and grasses.

The land was green and lush and the soil so rich, an observer noted that "it looked like chocolate where the plow turned the sod."

The newcomers did not realize that they were witnessing only a brief moment in an endless cycle of rain and drought.

♪ ♪ Yet boosters and promoters lured in farmers with the promise of Heaven on Earth.

PAMELA RINEY-KEHRBERG: You have railroad companies and states putting out advertisements encouraging people to think of this land as a bountiful land.

The State of Kansas put out posters showing watermelons the size of small automobiles, grapes the size of bowling balls, corn that you had to pick by going up a ladder, and people were encouraged to believe that this was the Garden of Eden, if they would only have the courage to go out and challenge the land.

NARRATOR: Thousands of eager settlers took up the challenge, bringing farming techniques that had worked well in the North and East.

Confident of rain, unmindful of wind, they plowed mile after mile of virgin sod.

♪ ♪ With the outbreak of World War I, Washington wanted wheat.

Wheat would win the war.

With record-high prices, the promise of the land was coming true.

Millions of acres of grassland would feel the plow for the first time.

The race was on to turn every inch of the southern Plains into profit.

♪ ♪ Appearing like giant armored bugs creeping along the horizon, tractors came to the fields in the 1920s.

With a team of horses, a farmer could barely turn three acres of prairie sod in a day.

With a tractor, he could plow 50.

The great plow-up was underway.

DAVISON: So everybody got him a John Deere tractor or an old International and really went to plowing this country.

And my dad was no different than the rest of them.

You know, he'd run that thing all day, and when the sun went down, why, he'd come in and do the chores, and I'd go run that tractor till morning.

Dad would work it in the daytime.

He'd have everything serviced-- plow greased, everything ready to go.

When I got my turn, all I had to do was just get on there and drive that thing.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: With so much bounty flowing from the southern Plains, outsiders saw an opportunity to make a killing and began speculating on wheat.

"Suitcase farmers" they were called; Eastern bankers, businessmen, lawyers who put in their seed and went home till harvest season.

MELT WHITE: They produced good.

It looked like it was just a great thing would never end.

So they abused the land.

They abused it something terrible; they raped it.

They got everything out they could.

And we don't think, we don't think, except for ourselves, and it comes down to greed.

You know, we're selfish, and we want what we want, and we don't even think of what the end results might be.

DAVISON: I think that most of those people thought this is just, what we might say, hog heaven: "It'll always be this way."

So they kept breaking this country out, and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up.

They got the whole country plowed up, nearly.

And, uh, that's about the time it turned off terribly dry.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Whirlwinds had always danced across the fields on hot, dry days.

No one took much notice that these swirls of dust were growing thicker, taller, and faster than usual.

Then, in the summer of 1931, the rains stopped.

Wheat withered in the fields, leaving the land naked and vulnerable to the menacing winds.

But no one was prepared for what was to come.

SVOBIDA (dramatized): The winds unleashed their fury with a force beyond my wildest imagination.

It blew continuously for a hundred hours, and it seemed as if the whole surface of the Earth would be blown away.

As far as my eyes could see, my fields were completely bare.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As dust enveloped the atmosphere, it got into the eyes, the nose, the mouth.

Breathing became difficult.

The Red Cross issued an urgent call for dust masks, especially for children.

So we'd wear face masks in school and, and, uh, during our work and so forth.

It'd be a gauze mask that... And you could never seem to get a real good breath from that.

And you often wondered, "Will I get enough oxygen to my system?

Will this be damaging?"

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Residents grabbed any bits of cloth to cover their faces.

The Plains began to resemble a World War I battlefield, with dust, rather than mustard gas, fouling the air.

Where grain once grew high as a man's shoulder, dazed farmers walked out over their beaten, blown-out fields.

(wind howling) It had taken a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil on the southern Plains.

It took only minutes for one good blow to sweep it all away.

GLOVER: Well, after a dirt storm, the ground would just be bare where it had blown all the topsoil away.

And then it would be mounds over where the fencerows had been.

So we didn't have much except just bare old hard ground.

(clicks teeth) It was... a bad time.

(wind howling) NARRATOR: 100 million acres of the southern Plains were turning into a wasteland, a circle encompassing large sections of five states in the nation's heartland-- the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico.

♪ ♪ A journalist traveling through the region called it the "dust bowl."

WILSON COWEN: The farmhouses looked terrible.

The dust was deposited clear up to the windowsills in these farmhouses, clear up to the windowsills.

And even about half of the front door was blocked by this sand.

And if people inside wanted to get out, they had to climb out through the window, get out with a shovel, shovel out the front door.

And there was no longer any yard at all.

There was not a green sprig, not a living thing of any kind, not even a field mouse-- nothing.

NARRATOR: Convinced that the storms were a freak accident, that the rains would soon return, residents could not imagine that they had entered a battle that would last a decade.

DANIELS: The next morning, they'd still have that dust settling in the air, but there would be the sunshine and all again.

But then everything would just be covered in dirt.

Everything was full of dust.

If you were cooking a meal, you'd end up with dust in your food, and you would feel it in your teeth.

You'd start to eat, and when you would drink water or something, you would grit down, and you always felt like you had grit between your teeth, you know, it was, it felt terrible.

CLELLA SCHMIDT: The next day, when Mother and my grandmother started cleaning out the house, they were taking the dirt out in buckets full.

They were scooping it up onto wheat scoops, which are pretty good-size scoops, and carrying it out into the yard.

The dust was just like face powder.

It was so heavy and thick.

It wasn't like sand.

It was just... real... heavy, like face powder, only it was real dark, almost black.

NARRATOR: To the astonishment of residents, the dust kept coming.

In 1932, the Weather Bureau reported 14 dust storms.

The next year, the number climbed to 38.

(wind whistling) People tried to protect themselves by hanging wet sheets in front of doorways and windows to filter the dirt.

They stuffed window frames with gummed tape and rags.

But keeping the fine particles out was impossible.

The dust permeated the tiniest cracks and crevices.

We just had a lot of... dirt.

(chuckling) I just grew up with it, thought that's what life was all about.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The drought persisted, made worse by some of the hottest summers on record.

Windmills provided drinking water from deep wells, but the fields were bone-dry.

Still confident that the rains would return, farmers continued to plow.

"Out of this blast of dust," one observer wrote, "the men of western Kansas whistle and go right on sowing wheat."

LORENE WHITE: If Dad was in the field, we were always afraid, you know.

We didn't know whether Dad could get in or not, because the dust was so bad.

Dad always had a tendency, like most men did, I guess.

They would stay in the field until it, the storm, got there.

So Mom and we kids, we were at home watching, waiting for Dad to come in, thinking he would surely come before the dirt hit, and usually he didn't.

And then we'd have to worry about him getting in.

And I, worry was part of my makeup, so I, I worried about him.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: 1934.

The storms were coming with alarming frequency.

Residents believed they could pinpoint a storm's origins by the color of the dust-- black from Kansas, red from Oklahoma, gray from Colorado or New Mexico.

As the storms rampaged across the land, they unleashed another destructive force.

DAVISON: I can remember when Dad had a good wheat crop growing, and it blew terribly hard for two days.

At the end of that two days, static electricity-- the electricity in the air-- had completely killed that wheat crop.

All of that green wheat had just turned brown and was dead.

I had a little garden, and I had me some watermelons, and I'd carry water, the bucket out and water them.

And I remember, I went out that evening to water them, and I had some little watermelons about as long as your little finger, just as pretty and shiny, a little fuzz on them, you know?

I went out the next morning, after one of them sandstorms, and there are the watermelons' vines whipped around, and them little melons just black as tar, just, completely just... Because of static electricity and then that continuous wind.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For farmers, it was going on three years of planting with little to show for it.

The hard times were beginning to take their toll.

DANIELS: I can remember looking at Dad, and he'd be laid back in his big chair, his old lounge chair, you know, with his feet up, and usually one of the kids on his lap, but he would just be, you know, kind of looking off into space or something.

You could tell.

You could tell by his attitude if he was depressed.

♪ ♪ MELT WHITE: My mother, she'd be walking the floor, and when she got to nearly crying, her chin would draw up, you know, and she'd wring her hands and say, "Oh, the wind, the wind, the wind."

And she'd just cry, because she realized the condition things was in.

I didn't, I just thought, "Well, it's dry, and the wind's blowing, and the sand's blowing."

But she realized how Dad was having to work, what little he was making, and we was about to starve to death.

GLOVER: We had meager food at that time-- everyone did-- and we lived literally on cornbread and beans, and that was our main meal.

And at night, we'd just have cornbread and milk, but so did everybody else.

In fact, I felt like we had good food compared to a lot of people.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Outside the southern Plains, few grasped the full measure of the disaster.

♪ ♪ In Washington, the dust bowl was seen as just another trouble spot in the nationwide crisis of the Depression.

The government began offering relief through Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

LORENE WHITE: My dad was really proud.

He thought it was charity to take help from the government, and for a long time, he wouldn't.

Even when government programs came in, you know, in relation to his farming, where he could have been paid for certain farming practices, there was quite a while that Dad wouldn't do it.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The sturdy people who settled this country were not "leaners," residents insisted.

Yet most had no choice but to suffer the humiliation of relief checks and food handouts.

LORENE WHITE: There was a time when there was canned food that was available to people who were in the situation that we were.

We were poor, I guess.

We didn't call ourselves poor, but I guess we were.

And, but Dad wouldn't, he wouldn't let Mom get it.

I think Dad would have let us eat pretty poorly before he would have accepted any help.

He was, he thought he was, that it was his job.

He was the breadwinner of the family.

And it was a disgrace for him to let someone else come in and take care of his family, and he felt like that's what was happening.

NARRATOR: Piece by piece, farmers were losing everything they cherished.

In the fall of 1934, with livestock feed depleted, the government began to buy and destroy thousands of starving cattle.

MELT WHITE: Each and every day got worse, and you couldn't see no end.

You couldn't see anything of any improvement.

And the government come in and took the cattle and killed them, paid $16 for a cow and three dollars for a calf.

When that was gone, then you didn't have anything hardly left.

NARRATOR: Of all the government programs, cattle slaughter would be the most wrenching.

Well, that cow, you'd milked her, you'd see her big, old kind eyes and she furnished you milk and food, and then see them just take and lead her off, and you knew that was, that was the end of her, that was the end of her life.

Well, when was yours coming, you know?

It was, it was pretty sad, surely.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: With the southern Plains becoming more desert-like with each passing month, residents themselves were beginning to wonder whether the only difference between the dust bowl and the Sahara Desert was that a lot of "damned fools" were not trying to farm the sands of North Africa.

♪ ♪ SVOBIDA (dramatized): I believe any man must see the beauty in mile upon mile of level land, where the wheat is waist-high, sways to the slightest breeze, and is turning a golden yellow under a flaming sun.

(thunder rumbling) It was evening when a huge bank of dark rain clouds formed in the northwest.

As the storm approached, I could feel its coolness, smell it, almost taste it.

I waited in suspense, looking, hoping, praying for rain.

But the rain did not come.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: 1935.

After years of drought and dust, the land was now being destroyed by another kind of plague.

Hundreds of thousands of starving jackrabbits came down from the hills, devouring everything in their path.

Dust bowlers were forced to begin an extermination campaign.

Almost every Sunday, people gathered to take part in rabbit drives.

DAVISON: When we first came over the hill there on this one drive, there were a big line of us.

Just looked like the country below us just, just all began to move.

Looked like a herd of sheep, but it was jackrabbits.

The first rabbit drive that I ever witnessed was with shotguns, but that was kind of dangerous, so then they decided later that they'd have some more of these rabbit drives, and we'd just use clubs.

So they would form lines of people and these lines of people would march down through that country and come together and funnel these rabbits into those pens.

And any that tried to get back by you, which would be a lot of them, why, you were supposed to knock them on the head with the club as they came by.

And then after they got them all in these pens, why, the young fellows would get in those pens with these clubs, which was like an old ax handle or something like this, and just club them to death.

I can imagine, you know, what the Humane Society would say about that now.

Whew!

♪ ♪ DANIELS: You could hear the rabbits screaming, you know.

That's what was scary to me.

I think that sound affected everyone.

I know it sounded terrible to me as a little girl.

And I, you know, I'd thought, I'd think, "Sounds like a baby crying or squealing, or, you know, being hurt."

It was really sad.

And then this dirt storm was coming in at that time.

But it was starting to get dark.

And, you know, some people felt that was the wrath of God coming up on them when they'd kill these rabbits like this.

NARRATOR: April 14, 1935, was the worst day of them all, the day no dust bowler would forget-- the day they would call "Black Sunday."

Everybody tried to get out of there.

Everybody was scrambling to get out to their vehicles and find their families.

It looked real black as it came in, just big old rolls just coming in.

NARRATOR: As the dark clouds approached, there was an ominous silence.

Minutes later, the stillness was shattered by thousands of birds fleeing before the avalanche of dirt.

And back in the north is just a little bank, oh, like, about eight or ten feet high, but they had one of those headers out on each end, you know?

And I did a few things there around the chickens, and then went back in the house, and I said, "Dad, we ain't going to be able to go to church tonight."

And he said, "Why?"

and... (imitates wind rushing) That's how fast it was traveling.

♪ ♪ DAVISON: My dad went into the kitchen when that dirt was blowing the hardest, the wind was really whipping.

And I can remember my dad going in there and taking hold of those two-by-fours, and his hands would move up and down five or six inches, this wind was whipping so hard.

And I thought to myself, "This thing may blow away."

DANIELS: When the storm hit, my father just grabbed us.

I remember Daddy taking me, and he set us right by the car, and he said, "Stay there, don't move."

Well, I wasn't about to move.

And so, then the neighbor man was crying, and his family was all crying.

And so Daddy went over, and he tried to help them, and he was sticking his hanky in the radiator, you know, and putting it on his face and he'd say, "Oh, God, we're going to die."

He said, "We're all going to die."

And Daddy finally just said, "Hush!

You help me take care of these kids."

That's when he told him, he said, "You get your family in your car, and I will bumper you home."

NARRATOR: Terrified residents tried to drive through the blinding dust.

One Kansas farmer, disoriented, drove his car off the road.

Searchers found him the next day, suffocated.

My dad thought that we should stop and pick up this neighbor and her baby, and it hit just about the time we were getting out of the car to go into the house.

And this woman was hysterical.

She was, she thought she should maybe just go ahead and kill the baby and herself, because it was the end of the world, and she didn't want to face it alone.

And so my dad quoted Bible scriptures to her to prove that it was not yet time for the end of the world; that he had no idea what this was, but it was certainly not the end of the world.

NARRATOR: After Black Sunday, others turning to the Bible found support for their worst fears.

"The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust," they read.

"From Heaven it shall come down upon thee until thou be destroyed."

MELT WHITE: The spring of 1935, the wind blew 27 days and nights without quitting.

And I remember, that's when my mother just...

I thought she was going to go crazy, because it was just, it was, you got desperate, because if the wind blew during the day or during the night and let up, you got some relief, but just day and night 24 hours one and 24 hours after the other, it just...

But it's 27 days and nights, the spring of 1935, that it didn't let up.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Living on the Plains was becoming an act of sheer will.

The dust was beginning to make living things sick.

Animals were found dead in the fields, their stomachs coated with two inches of dirt.

People spat up clods of dirt, sometimes three to four inches long and as big around as a pencil.

(wind blowing) An epidemic raged throughout the Plains.

They called it "dust pneumonia."

Many residents tried their own home remedies.

Skunk grease.

We had a neighbor that trapped skunks, and he would save the fat and render it out, and supposedly that skunk grease, or skunk oil, was, penetrates your chest better, but we never, we never liked to use it.

Mother would give us sugar with a drop of coal oil on it or a drop of turpentine.

And this would clear the phlegm out of our throats.

Mom would mix kerosene and lard.

And nowadays we have Crisco, but then we had lard, you know.

and she would mix those together.

I supposed it would have blistered if they hadn't used lard in it, but she'd rub our throats.

Oh, we'd be covered with it, and I hated it, because it would stink so.

NARRATOR: In 1935, one-third of the deaths in Ford County, Kansas, resulted from pneumonia.

Children were especially vulnerable.

DAVISON: I guess I was sicker than I ever realized, because I got delirious.

I was out of my head.

I can see to this day those merry-go-round horses coming out of the ceiling, you know?

They'd just... like this, just like a merry-go-horse, round-horse goes.

And I'd say, "Mom"... She was always there by my bed, it seemed like.

I'd say, "Mom, those horses are going to hit you."

Said, "You better move your head."

And she'd move her head over.

I said, "Boy, that one like to have got you."

And so I don't really know how sick I was, but I was pretty sick.

I think she thought a time or two I wasn't going to make it.

DANIELS: I had a little brother that had pneumonia three times, and I've always felt it was caused from too much dirt.

I remember Mother took, gave him his medicine in the spoon.

I stayed in the room with her, to, because we had to sit up with him all night.

And she put this medicine in a spoon and put it in his mouth, and he... (sobbing quietly) (voice breaking): He swallowed it and laid back in her arms and died.

Excuse me.

But I'll never forget how that affected my mother.

She started screaming, and she just held him so tight.

And even though she had several children, you know, you have people say, "Well, you have several children.

If you lose one, it won't matter."

That's not true, because this affected Mother in a way that... She was never the same again.

I cried myself to sleep, I think, every night for a year, because of losing him, but...

I think the worst thing about that was that I was the one that brought the measles home to him.

You know, I was in school, and I took the measles, and I came home with them, and he, if he hadn't got the measles, he would have, he might have come out of it.

But they said pneumonia and measles, they never did.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: By the end of 1935, with no substantial rainfall in four years, some residents were giving up.

Dust bowlers watched as their neighbors and friends picked up and headed west in search of farm jobs in California.

Having packed their meager belongings, they didn't even bother to shut the door behind them.

They just drove away, their eyes fixed on the uncertain road before them.

COWEN: Many of them came by the courthouse, and they'd come by to see me and say, "Judge, you know, we've reached the end of our rope.

"We don't have anything left.

We've got to get out of here."

And then they'd say to me, "You know, we need a secondhand tire pretty bad."

Well, of course, I always signed orders authorizing the local filling stations to give them a cheap, secondhand tire-- cost them about three dollars and a half-- and a tankful of gasoline.

And they were very pleased about it.

But I'll tell you, they were gaunt, tired-looking people.

I felt very sorry for them.

The whole family-- the wife, the kids, and the husband-- they were tired-looking people, people that you could see that felt rather hopeless.

NARRATOR: Throughout the country, word spread of a mass exodus from the Plains.

In all, a quarter of the population would flee the region.

We hated to see anyone leave.

There were so few close neighbors, or close friends or relatives.

And we hated for them to leave.

But we all told them to be sure and write us from California.

♪ ♪ We were all afraid we'd never see them again, you know, when everyone was leaving the Panhandle.

LORENE WHITE: Lots of people left.

The family west of us left, and they'd had kids that we played with.

There was a family, two families east of us that left.

One of the ones, one of the families was the one where the man died-- young man died-- with the dust pneumonia.

And they, they moved away.

NARRATOR: As people abandoned the southern Plains, tight-knit rural communities began to unravel.

Banks and businesses failed.

Schools shut their doors.

Churches were boarded up.

Yet even with the world crumbling around them, most dust bowlers chose to stay.

MELT WHITE: Dad always lived with hope, see?

He, "Next year, next year.

I failed this time, but next year will be better."

And I never did see him have the look of giving up or quitting.

He always stayed in there and seemed that he's going to make it some way or another.

If anybody made it, he'd be one of them, he thought.

NARRATOR: No one understood the tenacity of Plains farmers better than John McCarty, the editor of the "Dalhart Texan" newspaper.

COWEN: John McCarty was a great booster.

He was always saying that "one of these days, the rains will come again and this land will bloom like a rose."

And he was good at getting that message across.

NARRATOR: A week after the infamous Black Sunday, McCarty created the Last Man's Club.

Urging dust bowlers to "grab a root and growl," the young editor issued a call to arms.

COWEN: The Last Man's Club was one of John McCarty's efforts to build up courage in the minds of the people.

And all of us who joined-- I think my number was 31-- we all had to sign a pledge.

And the pledge went something like this: "In the absence of an act of God, "serious family injury, or some other emergency, "I pledge to stay here as the last man "and to do everything I can to help other last men remain in this country."

In states north of here, people are moving out by the thousands.

Well, we're not quitting.

Nonresident land is vicious land.

Are we going to stay here till hell freezes over?

(cheering) COEN: My father would often say, "Why would I go somewhere else?

"Everything I have is here, and it's going, it's going, it's going to be better."

I've heard him say so many times, "It's going to be better."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: On the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, townspeople discovered a crow's nest made entirely of barbed wire-- the only material the birds could scavenge from the lifeless terrain.

Anything that could was stubbornly holding on.

(wind blowing) (explosion roars) On the parched Texas landscape, explosives expert Tex Thornton proposed a novel solution to the region's woes.

Explosions, he claimed, would excite the atmosphere and induce rain.

Desperate to end the drought, a group of farmers and businessmen hired Thornton, giving him $300 to buy nitroglycerin and TNT.

COWEN: He advertised himself as a rainmaker and a few of the people in town believed it might help.

I didn't think that you could make rain that way, but, of course, I had to admit that I didn't know.

And like other people, I hoped maybe something good would happen-- that we'd get some rain.

(explosions roaring) Well, he tried two or three times, and one of the queer results about it, the, just a little bit following his last try, they had quite a little bit of snow.

Not very much, but it was in May, so it was quite unusual.

There might have been, oh, maybe two or three inches at the most.

And he got a lot of credit for that.

Some of the people who had espoused his work thought that really, that we were ending the drought here, but that was illusory-- it didn't happen.

(wind blowing) SVOBIDA (dramatized): The summer of '36 was one of the hottest ever.

Hundreds of square miles of bare fields absorbed the sun's rays like firebrick in a kiln.

The wind was like a blast from a huge, red-hot furnace, causing my face to blister and peel off.

Perhaps I was learning stoicism, but I found myself hardening to disaster.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As the drought wore on, there were some who claimed that Plains farmers themselves held the key to their own survival.

HUGH BENNETT (on film): We Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race or people, barbaric or civilized.

NARRATOR: Known as the father of soil conservation, Hugh Bennett was the leader of a new breed of agricultural experts.

He argued that conservation techniques could restore farming to the southern Plains.

Bennett took his case to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

As he was about to testify, he learned that a great dust storm was heading towards the East Coast.

The storm had already deposited 12 million tons of dust on Chicago-- four pounds for each person in the city-- and was poised to descend on the nation's capital.

Bennett used every stalling tactic he could, managing to keep the committee in session until the dark gloom settled on Washington.

"This, gentlemen," he announced, "is what I have been talking about."

For the first time, Easterners smelled, breathed, and tasted the dust blowing off the southern Plains.

♪ ♪ For years-- before the dust storms-- the federal government had regarded the soil as a limitless, indestructible resource.

In a major shift, Washington now put its full weight and authority behind soil conservation.

To promote the new message, the administration produced a provocative film about the causes of the dust bowl.

Filmed near Dalhart, Texas, the filmmakers searched for a local farmer to play the part of an original settler.

They found Bam White, Melt White's father.

MELT WHITE: They was wanting someone with a team and a plow to more or less demonstrate how they started breaking the Plains up.

So him with, with a team-- just two horses, a single team-- and a one-bottom breaking plow, that way they could take and show that and have him let the plow go in the ground and start turning over sod and grassland that had never been broken up.

So they come to him.

And I know he put on his best hat, and he left about 8:00 or 8:30 that morning and got back a little after 11:00, and you never saw such a happy man in your life.

He said, "They paid me $25 for two hours' work."

He said, "That's nearly a month's wages, and I don't see how they can afford to pay wages like that."

He had no idea what it was all about, who they were, or what they was going to make of it.

FILM NARRATOR: High winds and sun.

High winds and sun.

A country without rivers and with little rain.

♪ ♪ Settler, plow at your peril.

MELT WHITE: So they had him being the guilty one to start it, of being the one that started breaking the Plains out, back in the early day.

FILM NARRATOR: 100 million acres.

200 million acres.

More wheat.

NARRATOR: In 1936, the completed film was released across the country, and in Dalhart, at the Mission Theatre.

MELT WHITE: And directly, there Dad went to going across the screen up there, him, and old Tom and Anne's the name of the horses.

There he was a-plowing; here he was sitting here with me, and I was looking at him, looking there, and I couldn't figure out how they was doing that, showing him that real, him and the horses are being shown, and here he's sat here by me.

So it was quite a thing, and that's the first movie I ever saw in my life.

FILM NARRATOR: Last year, in every summer month, 50,000 people left the Great Plains and hit the highways for the Pacific Coast, the last border.

NARRATOR: Panicked by the flood of penniless refugees heading to the West Coast, a government report warned that, "For its own sake, the nation cannot allow farmers to fail."

(engine rumbling) In 1937, Washington began an aggressive campaign to encourage dust bowlers to adopt planting and plowing methods that conserved the soil.

But getting the farmers of the southern Plains to change their ways would not be easy.

They came out with a lot of these methods, but most of these old-timers wouldn't do it.

You know, finally they got where they'd pay them.

You know, you could make a dollar an acre if you practiced one of these methods.

And that got a lot of them working on it, because they needed that dollar an acre.

NARRATOR: Once again, farmers ran their tractors from dawn to dark, this time to prevent barren fields from blowing.

SVOBIDA (dramatized): I felt I was becoming a slave to the land, but I held on to the thought that this land had to be stopped from blowing.

Often I was so full of dust that I drove blind, unable to see even the radiator cap on my tractor or hear the roar of the engines.

But I kept driving on and on, by guess and instinct.

I was making my last stand in the dust bowl.

(engine rumbling) NARRATOR: 1938.

The massive conservation crusade had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65%.

But the drought dragged on.

The parched land refused to yield a decent living.

♪ ♪ The proud settlers of the Plains were becoming dependent on government work projects for survival.

MELT WHITE: Dad would get up in the morning and feed the horses and harness the team, hitch them, and go to work.

And, uh, work for the WPA.

Drove the team.

He got $1.35 a day, him, team, and wagon.

And, uh, that was, that was it.

♪ ♪ On the weekend, say, on a Sunday, we'd try to get him to play the fiddle.

Well, when he was working on the WPA, hauling caliche, his hands would be cracked from that caliche-- that alkali would just crack his hands-- and he'd get that old fiddle out, and it makes tears in my eyes now to think he'd set and play it with blood running out of his fingers.

(voice breaking): Just for our entertainment.

(wind blowing) SVOBIDA (dramatized): Preachers teach the blessings of adversity, but I now believe too much adversity breaks a person down.

Season after season, I had worked incessantly to keep my land from blowing, and no effort of mine had proved fruitful.

Words are useless to describe the experience when the thin thread of faith snaps.

My youth and ambition were ground into the very dust itself.

I was finally ready to admit defeat.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In the spring of 1939, after the failure of seven wheat crops in eight years, Lawrence Svobida abandoned his farm and fled, convinced that the dust bowl was creating an American Sahara.

♪ ♪ (thunder rumbling) Six months later, the skies finally opened.

♪ ♪ Nearly a decade of dirt and dust was coming to an end.

COEN: When the rain came, it meant life itself.

It meant a future.

It meant that there would be something better ahead of you.

And we as young people, and sometimes parents, you'd go out in that rain and just feel that rain hit your face.

It was a, a very emotional time when you'd get rain, because it meant so much to you, give you... You didn't have false hope anymore.

You, you knew then that, that you was going to, to have some crops.

(thunder rumbling) MELT WHITE: There'd be lightning back in the northwest.

You'd see the flickering lightning.

And Dad would say, "That'll be in here about 2:00 in the morning."

But the rains was so welcome, and they smelled so good, and I'd lay and listen to them pitter-patter on the side of the old house at night and really sleep, because it was a wonderful feeling.

(thunder rumbling) NARRATOR: With the return of the rain, dry fields soon overflowed with golden wheat.

The harsh years of the dust bowl had forced farmers to accept the limits of the land.

But with fortunes to be made once more on the southern Plains, that wisdom would soon be tested.

In western Kansas, a group of farmers gathered on the steps of the local courthouse.

One was hopeful about the future.

"People are thinking differently about taking care of the land," he said.

"Don't fool yourself," another replied.

"You can't convince me we've learned our lesson.

It's just not in our blood to play a safe game."

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