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Chapter One: Mean Clouds

• The farmers of the 1930s in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the area wedged between Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico were "dry farmers" wish no irrigation system or water reservoir.

• In 1931, there was a drought that seemed unending.

• Even before the drought, most farmers had a tough time paying their bank loans, and when the prices for crops fell, a thousand families a week were losing their farms to banks.
• 1936, after it had only rained a few times in the prior five years in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the wind began to blow, and blew incessantly; the area was appropriately dubbed the Dust Bowl.

• The Dust Bowl encompassed the area in the "Panhandle near Goodwell, Oklahoma to the western half of Kansas, the eastern half of Colorado, the northeastern portion of New Mexico, and northern Texas."

• From 1936 through 1940, the winds blew unmercifully and devastated the farms--taking away...

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