Cold Open

It’s 7 PM, on April 14th, 1935, in Follett, Texas.

Holding a heavy jug of lemonade, eight-year-old Trixie Travis Brown kicks open the door of her family’s farmhouse and steps out carefully onto the deck. Her parents are lounging on a picnic blanket in the yard, and her brother’s busy throwing rocks at an old tin can balanced on a fencepost.

Trixie pours lemonade into four glasses and offers one to her father. He accepts it with a smile. But before Trixie takes a drink herself, she joins in her brother’s game. She grabs a rock from the ground… and hits the can with her first throw.

Trixie’s mother and father applaud as Trixie lifts her glass and takes a triumphant gulp of lemonade. It's a small moment of triumph and good cheer, one the family needs right now.

For the last few years, times have been tough in America. The country’s been hit hard by the Great Depression, so too the Brown family. Paint is peeling off the farmhouse. Trixie’s clothes are threadbare. And her brother has to make do with rocks and old cans instead of a baseball and bat.

But today, the sun’s shining. Trixie and her brother have finished their chores. And her parents have fed the animals. They’re able to spend some precious family time together before dusk settles across the plains.

But as Trixie puts down her glass and picks up another rock, a huge mass of birds flies overhead. There are hundreds of ducks and geese, all heading south.

The family gets to their feet and stares. It's April, birds shouldn't be migrating. The family looks to each other in confusion. Until suddenly, Trixie understands why the birds are in the air. They’re not headed somewhere. They’re fleeing something. She whirls round and then screams. A dust cloud bigger than any Trixie has ever seen has darkened the sky to the north—and it’s heading right for them.

Within just minutes, the Brown family will be hit by one of the worst dust storms ever seen in the United States. Enormous clouds reaching 600 feet high will sweep across the dry plains at 60 miles an hour, causing widespread destruction that will persist long after the Black Sunday Dust Storm blows through Oklahoma and Texas on April 14th, 1935.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is April 14th, 1935: The Black Sunday Dust Storm.

Act One: Cause and Effect

It’s November 1929 in Follett, Texas, six years before a dust storm hits the state.

30-year-old Pete Brown clears the last of the bacon and eggs from his plate and leans back in his chair, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He calls out a thanks to his sister-in-law in the kitchen. After a hard morning of work on the farm, there’s nothing Pete enjoys more than a homemade breakfast.

Pete then rises from his chair and walks outside onto the deck, where his brother’s playing with his daughter. Pete sneaks up behind two-year-old Trixie, puts his hands over her eyes. Trixie turns around, and her face lights up when she sees her uncle.

Twelve years ago, the Browns were one of the first families to move to Follett when the new town was founded alongside the Texas and Santa Fe Railway. But other newcomers soon joined them, all drawn to the area by the convenience the railway provides in transporting crops to market. Ever since, the Browns have enjoyed the boom years in Texas farming. Their crops have grown well, there’s ample demand, and they’ve put money into building a large farmhouse.

But Pete is ambitious. The harvest of 1929 has been their best yet, and Pete wants to invest the money they’re about to make into a new venture. So out on the deck, he lays out the plan to his brother. Pete wants to open a new hardware store to cater to the influx of new farmers. That’ll give the Browns two income streams, and hopefully mean they will grow even richer.

Pete is overjoyed to find his brother has been thinking along similar lines. The two men spit and shake hands in agreement. Then they laugh a little when Trixie spits on her palm and insists on shaking too. But the smiles don’t last too long. The Brown brothers’ new hardware business doesn’t go to plan—and it’s all down to bad timing.

A month ago, the New York Stock Exchange was struck by an unprecedented crash. Financiers who’d borrowed money to invest in what had been a booming market suddenly found themselves unable to pay their debts and forced into bankruptcy.

And while the Brown brothers are building their hardware store, the economic fallout of the Wall Street Crash begins to sweep across America. By the time the brothers open their store, businesses are already starting to fold. Unemployment rockets. And since Americans have less disposable income, demand for food goes down. The price of wheat drops from a dollar a bushel to 70 cents. And suddenly, farming isn’t such a good living anymore. So farming communities like Follett, Texas, are no longer growing, people are leaving—and as business gets slower and slower, the Brown brothers’ new hardware store is forced to close.

The following year, the price of wheat plummets even further to 25 cents a bushel—only a quarter of what it was two years earlier. For the farmers who’ve decided to stick out the hard times, the only solution is to plant more crops and sell more wheat to make up for the shortfall in income. They increase the amount of land in cultivation, and replant fields immediately after harvesting rather than leaving them fallow to recover.

But the over cultivation of the Southern plains has devastating consequences on the land itself. Repeated plowing removes the natural grass that anchors the topsoil and traps moisture in the ground. Farmers become locked in a vicious circle. Over-farming means that the land becomes less productive, and the crop yield falls. But the falling crop yield means that farmers have no choice but to over-farm what they have left in order to make any money at all.

And then, in the mid-1930s, the economic calamity is joined by a natural one. A devastating drought strikes the Great Plains. And the lack of rain kills off crops and turns the dry dirt into dust. Now, all it takes is a little wind to whip up enormous dust storms—but that just strips the ground even further, making future storms even more likely.

Soon, the once-prosperous Brown family will be reduced to scraping a living from the little arable land they have left—and their struggle to survive will become even harder when their house is engulfed by the biggest dust cloud in American history.

Act Two: A Perfect Storm

It’s just after 7 PM, on April 14th, 1935, in Follett, Texas, five and a half years after the Wall Street Crash.

Eight-year-old Trixie Travis Brown knocks over the jug of lemonade as she points to the enormous dust cloud she’s just spotted. Her mother tugs Trixie sharply by her arm and tells her to get inside the house. Trixie runs to the front door as her mother gathers up their belongings from the deck. And by the time she’s done, the sky has turned as black as night. The sudden darkness has Trixie and her brother trembling with fear. But the darkness isn’t what they should be scared of—the dust is.

It’s five years since the Great Plains were first struck by a dust storm—a vast cloud of dry dirt stirred up by high winds. But thanks to over-farming and now drought, they’ve become commonplace. Two years earlier, a huge dust storm rolled through the plains of South Dakota and deposited 12 million pounds of dirt across the Midwest. A year later, an even bigger storm lifted dirt from across the Great Plains and blew it all the way to the East Coast. The windows of Philadelphia and Baltimore were coated in dust. The Statue of Liberty and the White House needed cleaning, and red snow fell in Boston.

But the inconvenience of dust on the East Coast was nothing compared to the danger that the storms posed on the Great Plains. People caught outside when dust storms hit found it difficult to breathe, and several unlucky victims suffocated. And even those who found shelter weren’t safe. Instances of dust pneumonia, fevers, and chest pains increased, and many people began suffering from chronic ill health—especially the elderly, and children like Trixie.

Now as the enormous storm rolls toward the farmhouse, Trixie is roughly pushed inside by her mother, who slams the door behind them. Trixie watches through a window as her father runs to secure the barn where their livestock is kept. Then her mother sharply tells Trixie and her brother to race around the house and close the windows. They push rags into any gaps or cracks they can see. But they can’t plug every hole. The dust still finds its way in around the windows and through the wooden slats of the walls, and soon even the air inside the farmhouse is tinged with red.

Trixie moves back to the window, hoping to get a glimpse of her father. But now the visibility outside is reduced to almost zero. It feels like their farmhouse is completely isolated, cut off completely by a thick, impenetrable cloud.

Eventually, Trixie’s father staggers in out of the gloom. He climbs the deck and stumbles into the house, a rush of dust following him as he closes the door. He pulls off a scarf he’s tied around his mouth and nose, and sucks in air, but that only sends him into a violent coughing fit. Trixie rubs his back as he slumps into a chair, his color gradually returning.

Even though it seems to Trixie like the storm will never end, after 20 long minutes, the howling winds dissipate. But the dust it brought will stay for much longer.

The newspapers call it the Black Sunday Dust Storm. And the cleanup operation begins almost immediately. Trixie’s father uses a shovel to remove piles of dirt that have built up in the corners of the house. Her mother spends hours wiping down every surface over and over. Because outside, the dust hangs in the air for weeks. Every time her mother washes clothes and puts them out on the line, they come back dirtier than before.

But the Browns aren’t the only family affected by the storm. Every Sunday, they meet up with their neighbors for church. And normally, the congregation shares a barbecue lunch after service. But for weeks after the dust storm, the air is too dirty to stay outside for long. The churchgoers take to eating in their cars instead, hopping from vehicle to vehicle to catch up with their friends.

In neighboring Oklahoma, one reporter caught up in the Black Sunday Dust Storm writes up his experiences and coins a new name for the storm-ravaged regions of America: the Dust Bowl. This label soon catches on.

Although the Brown family will remain in Follett, Texas, many others will choose not to stick it out. The constant struggle to earn a living will become too much, and soon, more than two million people will be on the march, in a mass movement of migrants searching desperately for a new home and a better life.

Act Three: Documenting Survival

It’s March 1936 in a migrant camp in Nipomo, California, almost a year after the Black Sunday Dust Storm.

40-year-old photographer Dorothea Lange moves her camera an inch to the left and refocuses the lens. She glances up at her subjects before returning her eye to the viewfinder. In front of Dorothea, a mother in her early 30s sits with three of her young children. A sleeping baby lies in the woman’s arms, but the other two children look right down the lens. Dorothea waves to catch their attention and tells the children to look away—she wants to catch them in a more natural pose.

But Dorothea doesn’t need to worry about the mother. She’s already staring off into the distance. As a resident of the migrant camp, an uncertain future awaits her and her children, and it’s clear from her anxious expression that she’s under considerable pressure to make ends meet.

After the Black Sunday Dust Storm, hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families made an exodus from the Great Plains in search of a better life. Many travelled west to California, where they heard that jobs were available in the big cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. But so many migrants were on the move that the government was forced to create large camps to house them all. For the past year, Dorothea has photographed them for a government agency that hopes cataloging the lives of the migrants will raise awareness of the growing crisis in the west.

So, when she’s finally happy with the composition of her picture, Dorothea takes her shot. Over the next few minutes, she takes several more photographs of the same mother and her children before moving on to another part of the camp. Then, she pockets the film, ready to send it to her bosses.

Several weeks later, the picture that Dorothea took of the mother and her children will be published in the San Francisco News under the caption “Migrant Mother.” The photo will accompany a story about life on the move, detailing the struggles of ordinary people during the Great Depression. The report will describe how migrant families are forced to eat roadkill and dead birds, and how migrant camps often offer the only shelter for people forced from their homes by the Dust Bowl. The story will strike a chord with readers. But it’s the photograph that people will remember the most.

The image of the “Migrant Mother” will become one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, seemingly capturing all the hardship and uncertainty faced by those who tried to escape the Dust Bowl, in a mass migration that intensified after the Black Sunday Dust Storm wreaked havoc on Oklahoma and Texas on April 14th, 1935.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 15th, 1912. After hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage, the world’s largest ship sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Supervising Sound Designer Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Edited by Scott Reeves.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.