THE FIRE ENGINE DRIVER (Excerpt from The Washita Breeze, Bessie, Oklahoma, January 19, 1906)
Tag: Oklahoma
{Amazing old film & pics} Woody Guthrie describes his personal experiences in the 1930s dust bowl
I can understand now why they thought it was the end of the world – sitting in the dark for hours, day after day – it’s hard to imagine Sallisaw, Sequoyah County, Oklahoma. Oklahoma drought farmers. “Nothing to do. These fellers,” said one of them, “are goin to stay right here till they dry up […]
On a day in 1889, Oklahoma’s landscape was changed forever
On a cloudless sunny morning with a comfortable breeze blowing from the south, an event took place that changed the barren land of Oklahoma forever. On April 22, 1889, thousands of potential settlers from all over the world lined up to participate in the Oklahoma land rush. The rushers massed along the line by 9:00 […]
Homelessness in Oklahoma in 1939 – photographs from the Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dry land farming methods to prevent wind erosion. Farmer and sons walking in the face of […]
Historic interview & pictures with actual Immigrants who traveled to Oregon, New Mexico and California with vintage photographs
Great Depression and Dust Bowl Between the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, families had no other course but to leave the prairie lands and immigrant to the western states to become migrant workers. Below are vivid photographs documenting the difficulties they encountered on the road and interviews by the WPA with four men, Wayne […]
He used bad English but got five dollars a second for talking. Who was he?
He was born to a prominent Cherokee Nation family in Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma), four miles from a tiny, little place called Oologah on Dog Iron Ranch. Both of his parents were part Native American, his father one-eighty and his mother one-fourth. For years his father sat in the councils of the Cherokees as […]
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 1939 where homelessness was severe
Homelessness in America has always been a problem, but in the 1930s after the Great Depression and the during the drought years of the Dust Bowl, people suffered severely. Family living in a community camp, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Father was in the hospital with broken back received when he fell from roof on which he was applying […]
