copperbadge:

Our recent transition from rain-soaked eastern Kansas with its green pastures, luxuriant foliage, abundance of flowers, and promise of a generous harvest, to the dust-covered desolation of No Man’s Land was a difficult change to crowd into one short day’s travel. […] Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is an almost hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. […] 

In telling you of these conditions I realize that I expose myself to charges of disloyalty to this western region. A good Kansas friend suggests that we should imitate the Californian attitude toward earthquakes and keep to ourselves what we know about dust storms. […]  

 In May a friend in the southwestern county of Kansas voluntarily sent me a list of the people who had already left their immediate neighborhood or were packed up and ready to go. The list included 109 persons in 26 families, substantial people, most of whom had been in that locality over ten years, and some as long as forty years. In these families there had been two deaths from dust pneumonia.

Letters From The Dust Bowl. Written in 1935 by Caroline Henderson.

I studied the Dust Bowl as an ecological and social disaster in school, and I’ve been reading about it for a few weeks as I work on the novel. But I don’t think anything is as soul-jarring as reading Caroline Henderson describe her horrific life on a farm in 1935 and seeing her say not only that she feels disloyal but that she’s been told she shouldn’t talk about it by fellow farmers.