Many emigrants gave up farming, setting up shacks and tents near large cities, hoping to find a job. Their homes, built from scavenged scraps, had no plumbing and electricity and polluted water, lack of trash and waste facilities often led to outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, smallpox and tuberculosis.

Farming camps, filled with poverty-stricken migrants, dotted the countryside. But the native Californians didn’t like it pressured lawmen to break them up. When this didn’t work, vigilantes sometimes formed, beating the migrants and burning their shacks to the ground.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established governmental programs designed to conserve soil on the Great Plains. Additionally, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) was created to stabilize pricing of agricultural commodities and distribute food to families nationwide. In 1935, the  government formed a Drought Relief Service (DRS) to coordinate relief activities.

Roosevelt also ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant a huge belt of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Abilene, Texas to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil itself in place. By 1937, education programs were in place to teach farmers about soil conservation and by the following year, the conservation effort had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65 percent. However, it would be two more years, before the drought was over, and farmers could once again grow crops on the land.

One of the best literary descriptions of the time was John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, published in 1939. Awarded both the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who travel from Oklahoma to California, during the Dustbowl Days of the 1930s, trying to find a better existence for themselves.

One poignant excerpt from the book summarizes those many displaced farmers of the plains:

"And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."