The People of the Land

It was either April of 1934 or 1935, when Dorothea Lange was on her way home to Berkeley from California’s Imperial Valley. She had just wrapped up an assignment for the Farm Security Administration documenting migrant labor; she had been photographing workers harvesting peas in the area, which sits between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border at the state’s southern end. She stopped for gas, where she noticed a family—“very woebegone” is how she described them—and asked them about their travels.

“We’ve been blown out,” she recalled them saying. She “questioned what they meant, and then they told me about the dust storm.”

This was the first Lange had heard of people being forced from their homes and farms on the High Plains due to what would come to be known as the Dust Bowl, one of the most extreme environmental catastrophes the United States has ever endured: severe dust storms killed crops and livestock across the region, starting in 1930 and lasting nearly a decade. “All of that day, driving for the next maybe 200 miles—no, 3 or 400 miles—I saw these people,” Lange would later recall. “And I couldn’t wait. I photographed it.”

The High Plains encompass parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming, and are part of the larger Great Plains stretching from West Central Texas to the border of Canada. It’s a vast expanse of prairie, with flat grasslands unfolding far into the horizon. Prior to colonization by white settlers, Native American tribes populated the land, living primarily off buffalo that thrived on the plentiful prairie grass. But beginning in the late 1800s, homesteaders flocked to the region, claiming the land as their own and slaughtering the native buffalo. “Empty of bison and Indians, the prairie was a lonely place; it had taken less than ten years to eliminate them,” writes journalist Timothy Egan in his 2006 history of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time.

The area was less than ideal for farming, receiving little rainfall. But settlers—encouraged in part by a series of Homestead Acts that granted free land allotments to those who pledged to plow a section of it—began farming nonetheless. They tore up millions of acres of grasslands, often with mechanized plows that ground surface soil to a fine dust. In the 1930s, a series of severe droughts lasting nearly a decade struck the region, and temperatures hit historic highs, climbing to 110 degrees in some places.

The stage was now set for massive dust storms. Winds swept across the prairie, picking up unprotected, eroded soil. Darkness descended midday as towering storms rolled through the High Plains, coating everything in their path and blowing through cracks in windows, doors, and walls. (The storms generated enough static electricity to short out car ignitions.) Some residents grew sick from breathing in the dust and died; the infant mortality rate shot up. Cattle went blind, and calves suffocated shortly after being born. At its peak, in 1934, the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres.

Lange and her husband, agricultural economist Paul Taylor, both devoted themselves to documenting the Dust Bowl, often traveling together for her assignments with the FSA. “It was the Dust Bowl that made Lange an environmentalist,” writes Linda Gordon in the 2010 book Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. “Taylor would expound during their long hours on the road, but it was what [Lange] saw that crystallized his teaching into emotional understanding. Dorothea understood all things best by seeing.”

Unsurprisingly, many of Lange’s photographs of Dust Bowl migrants were portraits, unflinching but empathetic images of those mired in hardship and uncertainty. These photographs would quickly define her as a founder of modern American documentary photographic tradition. In 1964, reflecting on her fateful gas-station meeting, Lange connected the 1930s exodus of rural people from the Dust Bowl to the trend of urbanization. “These people on that rainy afternoon in April were the symbol,” she said. “They were the symbol of this tremendous upheaval like an earthquake.” In the years that followed, Lange said, the country went from “rural to urban,” making permanent for many the exodus from agricultural life.