Dust Bowl: Heart-Wrenching Photos depict the Life in United States during the Dirty Thirties by Dorothea Lange

In April 1935, AP reporter Robert Geiger put a name to a catastrophe already years in the making. He called it the “Dust Bowl” — a term that captured what drought and wind had done to the south-central United States. The American and Canadian prairies had been stripped bare. High winds launched walls of choking dust across a corridor stretching from Texas all the way to Nebraska. People and livestock died. Crops failed. The land itself was being eroded and carried away.

Three major drought waves struck the High Plains — in 1934, 1936, and again between 1939 and 1940. Some regions endured drought for up to eight straight years. Dryland farming practices had left the topsoil exposed and vulnerable, with no vegetation to hold it down against the wind. The result was a landscape of drifting sand, buried fences, and abandoned homes.

The physical damage to the land was staggering. In the Coldwater District of Texas, north of Dalhart, drifting sand buried fence posts and piled up against buildings. Fields that once grew crops sat barren. Some farms were still occupied — their owners stubbornly holding on — while neighboring properties had already been abandoned. Across Hall County, Texas, land that once supported twelve farm families had been left completely empty.

By 1933, thirteen million Americans were out of work. The Great Depression had already gutted the economy before the dust storms made things worse. Families had no savings, no fallback. For farming communities across the Midwest and Southwest, drought and debt combined into an impossible situation. Approximately 3.5 million people left the Plains states between 1930 and 1940. More than 86,000 moved to California in just over a year.

Migrants came from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Wherever they came from, they were called “Okies,” “Arkies,” or “Texies” — catch-all labels for the displaced. They loaded everything they owned into worn-out cars and trucks and followed the crops, moving from harvest to harvest with no fixed home and no guarantee of work.

Photographer Dorothea Lange stepped out of her studio and into this world. She began documenting displaced workers on the streets and highways of California, developing a working method that set her apart. She learned how to put her subjects at ease, and she recorded their words alongside her photographs. Names, ages, where they came from, what they had lost — she preserved these details in her titles and annotations. The result was not just photography. It was testimony.

Along California’s roadsides and in makeshift camps, families with children lived without shelter, without clean water, and with no reliable income. Near Bakersfield, one family of twenty-two people — having faced thirty-nine evictions — set up camp in the open, looking for work in the cotton fields. Near Calipatria, around eighty families from the Dust Bowl squeezed into an auto camp, paying fifty cents a week each. The only work available was agricultural labor.

The shelters people lived in were whatever they could piece together — tarps, scrap wood, tents, and the vehicles they arrived in. Some dug into the earth or leaned corrugated metal against trees. Children hauled water from ditches. Families cooked over open fires. These were not temporary inconveniences. For many, this was daily life for years.

Mexican field workers in the Imperial Valley faced their own grinding poverty. Their homes in the Brawley slums were rough structures with minimal water access. A field worker in Holtville fashioned shoes out of an old tire. One Mexican father of six worked in the Imperial Valley fields with nothing to suggest any safety net. These workers were not migrants in the Dust Bowl sense — many had lived in the region for years — but their conditions were just as desperate.

The federal government responded to the crisis by commissioning documentary work through the Farm Security Administration. Photographers, writers, and musicians were hired to record what was happening. FSA camps for migrant workers were established across California, offering nursery schools, medical care, and basic shelter. Nurses treated sick children. Young mothers gave birth in hospitals with FSA assistance. At Tulare County’s FSA camp, rows of prefabricated steel shelters housed families who had lost everything.

Despite the misery, many migrants showed remarkable adaptability. Census Bureau data and a 1939 survey of roughly 116,000 families who had arrived in California during the 1930s showed that only 43 percent of Southwestern migrants had worked on farms before leaving. The majority were professionals or white-collar workers. Those who came from farming backgrounds often moved into semi-skilled or higher-skilled jobs over time, achieving greater social mobility than if they had stayed behind. By the end of the Dust Bowl era, migrants as a group had generally fared better than those who never left.

On the outskirts of Salinas, California, a fast-growing settlement of lettuce workers sprang up — mostly migrants from Oklahoma. Fathers and sons built their own houses, often working alongside tents and trailers on the same lots. Mail boxes lined roads where weeks before there had been nothing. New communities were being hammered together out of scrap lumber and determination, on the fringes of a state that had not exactly welcomed these arrivals.

Beyond government photographers, the Dust Bowl drew in independent artists. John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath brought the plight of displaced farm families to a mass audience, drawing partly on field notes by FSA worker Sanora Babb. Ironically, Steinbeck’s success led to Babb’s own novel on migrant workers, Whose Names Are Unknown, being shelved. It was not published until 2004. Woody Guthrie traveled alongside displaced Oklahoma farmers on the road to California, absorbing their folk and blues traditions and eventually recording his Dust Bowl Ballads — earning him the name “Dust Bowl Troubadour.”