There was no rain at all in Cimarron County, Oklahoma.

In March of 1933.

The agricultural agent there predicted that at best, farmers might harvest four bushels of winter wheat per acre, versus the previous yields of nearly 30.

And now the dust storms were becoming more frequent.

Instead of the 14 storms of 1932 classified as the worst, there were 38.

In 1933.

One storm in April lasted 24 hours.

You could hardly avoid looking to the West to see if you could see this rim of dus that was rising on the horizon.

It was earth colored, way fa away, right, beginning to rise.

And the next day, perhaps it would be bigger and come, come quicker and higher.

And then, suddenly you were just engulfed.

It was overhead and you couldn't see the sun.

And that's when it was a really bad day and day after day it would be that way.

Dark black, scary.

The experts could tell wher the dust came from by the color.

And the Mexico had one color, and Oklahoma coming from the other direction had another color.

And they would say, well we're enjoying Oklahoma today.

Well, we're getting this involved in the Mexicans today and so forth.

The big dust storms were fine particles of soil.

Others were sand, ear blows.

And that, blew alon the highways at low elevation.

And that could take the paint off your mobile or your house like sandpaper from being rubbed against it.

But the ones that were the most terrifying were the ones were based on these very fine particles that rose up into the air at 78,000ft in this kind of boiling wall of dirt coming at you with gale force 40, 50, 60 mile an hour winds.

These were the black blizzards that frightened people so much during those periods.

When one of these dusters would approach from afar and they would see it for the first time.

It was like a mountain range because some case the storms were 100 miles, 150 miles, 200 miles wide and a mile or more high.

So imagine driving on a flat land and looking off and seeing a mountain range itself starting to move.

Daylight itself would be obliterated.

Someone told me it was like two midnights in a jug.

One particularly bad storm we had.

It was in the daytime and it rolled in, and it was so black that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

So we all gathered in the kitchen, the whole family.

We lit the carrots, seen lam and that didn't help very much.

And the mother had tea towels that were made out of flour sacks, because we were also in the Great Depression, and we just took them and drag from overhead down the face, you know, just a whole head.

You couldn't see anything.

You sit there and, you know, you couldn't talk or visit with anybody very much, but, that wet towel would catch the dust.

And sometimes those towns were pretty black by the time we took them off.

But it gets about.

And you couldn't even see it dry.

You couldn't see the sides of the road with your lights on.

You couldn't tell whether you're on the road or on the sides or where you were.

Sometimes we were caught in the house or in the car, and we just sat there until it all blew over.

It was the old brown dirt blowing all around the car, and we just sat there until it kind of cleared up enough so you could see the roa to go on to get to that house.

And it was gritty and dirty, and you had to wash your mouth of whenever you got in the house, so you weren't eating dirt.

If you'd go out and pick up handful of dirt and stick it in your mouth, that's just the way it would feel.

One of the things that happened just before a duster hit was there was this amazin static electricity in the air, and so people used to carry a chain in their car to ground the electricity.

So you didn't drive anywhere without having this chain that you'd then throw out and drag it along the ground to ground the electricity and your radio would go out, your electrical stuff would short, and every person would talk about how you literally couldn't shake another person's hand before one of these dusters, because the static was so strong.

It was the kinetic energy that was in the air just before a duster hit.

I can remember feeling it in my hair.

It just kind of like your hea tingles or something, you know, your hair just kind of wiry.

More dust.

And the longer the ride, the higher the charge.

Until finally it got such a powerful charge that if you reached out to touch your car, the electricity will jump out about six inches to meet you and knock your eye flat on your butt.

But it wasn't always like that.

Don't forget this is a storm which means it had a beginning and an end.

And in between, storms couldn't been more beautiful.

These guys were crysta blue, in charge of those puffy white summertime cloud without a drop of water in 50 M, but I could sure remember my father looking up at the sky and praying that that rain would.

Actually, I never would guess where it was.

Weren' rain clouds and never would be in the times between storms.

The farmers and townspeople tried their best to carry on with their lives, but the land they called home was being rearranged before their very eyes.

Just dirt.

Piles of dirt around anything like the fence rose or something like a plow implement or anything out in the yard.

It might be nearly covered up with dirt.

Anything loose, banked up around something or blew away.

It would drift up the side to the barn so you could walk up on the roof of the barn.

You know, you just walk up, like you had a ladder there.

It would be dirt.

The storms had pushed dried up Russian thistles, tumbleweeds across the open ground by the hundreds of thousands.

Wherever they piled up against barbed wire fences.

They created eddies in the wind, and the dirt accumulated.

Thistles got in the fence, and then the sand got in the thistles.

So consequently, what cattle was still alive walked over the fence.

Every place over the fence.

You could almost walk over most of.

Where the dirt and sand hadn't piled up.

The land had been swept clean of topsoil.

It was bare.

It was hard.

You could take a broom and sweep it just like you could a wood floor.

It was hard, just like cement.

So you could walk out on your farm.

And instead of finding dirt, you found this hard pan layer on the top.

Impossible to cultivate.

Your dirt would be in somebody else's farm or a county away.

You know, the dust was so bad that the cattle died.

They found small herds of cattle that were just filled up with dir in their lungs and their noses.

I can remember seeing our cows nose that were just mud on the end, where they tried to breathe and couldn't.

They died of suffocation.

Whatever wildlife was out there died of suffocation.

But animals also simply wandered away not knowing where they belonged, and would climb over these dust drifts and be lost.

So it was really devastating for livestock in terms of loss of life.

Housewives nurtured their gardens with well water, but the abrasiv winds, the shifting dirt, even sometimes the charge of static electricity in the air, often killed the vegetable their families were counting on.

A storm would come and there would be absolutely nothing left of it.

And mother tried her best to keep that from happening.

She would dig holes to plant tomatoes in so that the wind wouldn't cut them off until they got bigger and stronger to where they might might have some tomatoes then.

And she dug deep rows to put anything in.

And of course, sometimes they would fill up with dirt.

After surveyin the residents of Mead, Kansas, a reporter calculated that the average damage from a single storm was $25 per home.

What couldn't be measured, he said, was the loss of disposition of the housewives.

My mother was very clean.

Her house was always clean an she tried to keep us kids clean.

She would take all of her curtains down one day and wash them and hang them back up.

A dir storm would come in that night and they were just like they were before she washed them.

And that went on day after day after day.

And once, you know, what are you would hear of some woman that just couldn't take it anymore.

And she admits suicide.

It blew that dirt into the attic of the house.

And a lot of times when we would get up in the morning, you could look up at the ceiling, and if there was a spli or between boards or whatever, that dirt would just be coming right down like this on the table.

And when we'd get up in the morning, a lot of time they would be saved from an inch to five inches of dirt just piled down like that.

And you clean that off and you eat and you eat the dirt.

If it's there if it isn't, well, you do good.

When we set the table, we always set the plate upside down.

Glasses or cups, whatever was upside down.

And still as I coul turn them over and shake them, look at before you put anything in them.

My famil thinks that I'm kind of stupid, and I guess I am, but I still, if I get a glass out of a cabinet, a wrenc and out of order, I can have it.

When we would go to bed at night, sometimes a storm would come in, and when we got up the next morning, our covers would be completely covered with dust, and the only clean place on our pillo would be where our headed laid dust to eat and dust to breathe, and dust to drink.

Dust in the bed and in the flour bin on dishes and walls and windows and hair and eyes and ears and teeth and throats, to say nothing of the heaped up accumulation on floors and windowsills.

After one of the bad days.

This wind driven dust, fine as the finest flour, penetrates wherever air can go.