Time trip.

[] No Rain! Ever since the southern plains of the United States were settled, those two words have been a curse upon the land. Without rain, crops don't grow, cattle die, and farms slowly disappear beneath a choking blanket of dust.

[] The most severe drought to hit the region came in the 1930s at the time of the Great Depression. The drought turned soil to powdery dust in an area of the southern plains that became known as the Dust Bowl. In wide areas of northwestern Texas, southern Kansas, western Oklahoma, and parts of New Mexico, Nebraska, and Colorado, the parched soil literally blew away from millions of acres of farmland, resulting in monstrous dust storms.

[] One of the worst of these storms began on Nov. 11, 1933, in Kansas. No rain had fallen for many months. Crops had failed. The grass was dead. As the wind grew stronger, huge dust clouds whirled up from the ground--turning the day sky into black night (photo at left). Towns turned on their streetlights in the middle of the day. People huddled inside their houses.

[] The giant storm then swept eastward through Kansas and on to other areas of the country. The sky over Chicago turned to dusty gray. Two days after it began, the storm had reached New York State and moved out to sea. Ships' crews in the Atlantic were surprised to see dust from the U.S. Midwest cover ship decks.

[] The drought continued for the next three years, and a series of windstorms whipped dust around the southern Great Plains. Whole families packed everything they owned in trucks and cars and set out for greener pastures. Since many of the migrants came from Oklahoma, they won the nickname "Okies." Nobody seemed to want the refugees. They wandered from state to state, ever westward, searching for a new place to put down roots. Many ended up in California.

[] The Dust Bowl was not entirely nature's fault. Farmers had misused the land, planting crop after crop without replenishing the soil. Cattle had overgrazed the land. Farmers had cut down trees and never replanted them. The misuse left the topsoil bare and subject to wind erosion when the rains failed.

[] Great Depression. A time of worldwide business failure and mass unemployment mainly during the 1930s. The Great Depression began with the stock market crash in 1929. Prices of stocks went down sharply. Millions of Americans lost all their savings. The following year, millions were also forced out of work. Factories closed, stores went out of business, and banks collapsed. Poverty and hunger spread. By 1933, 13 million Americans were out of work--one-quarter of the entire work force. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal--a group of government programs aimed at helping poor and unemployed people. The Great Depression did not really end, however, until the United States entered World War II (1939-1945). War production provided jobs for those who wanted work and gave a huge boost to the economy.