Hopelessness sticks to these grainy black-and-white photographs like grit at the back of your throat on a dusty day. Sitting in museum archives and tucked into the middle of history books, some of the photos have tiny, wind-blasted buildings in the background, while others feature worn-out farm equipment, half-buried fences and a smattering of weeds. All of them have dirt: blown into drifts and mounds and stretching desolately to a bleak horizon.
Hope was sandblasted away by an ecological and economic disaster that cut prairie agriculture to the bone and left scars that took a generation to heal.
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Those years of devastation are called the Dirty Thirties and 70 years later they still loom over prairie culture.
When drought paid a particularly nasty visit three years ago, the ominous comparison was inevitably made: “It’s worse than the Thirties.”
When an old-timer refuses to pay the money for a badly needed new television, even though her bank account is comfortably full, the excuse is made: “She lived through the Thirties, don’t you know?”
It is a cultural yardstick against which all else is measured.
“You could call it a watershed decade,” says Bill Waiser, a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
“Up until 1930, Saskatchewan was booming, Saskatchewan was the prairie powerhouse, we were the third most populous province in Canada. And it was in the 1930s that things turned sour for awhile.”
The same was true for central and southern Alberta, but in that province, farmers also had to contend with drought in the 1920s.
“Farm abandonments in the 1920s in Alberta about equalled the legendary losses in Saskatchewan in the 1930s,” says David Jones, an historian in the education department at the University of Calgary.
Jones also argues that Alberta suffered more in the 1930s than is commonly believed. For example, census Division 5, which is centred on Hanna, Alta., and stretches south to the Red Deer River and east to the Saskatchewan border, suffered 3,800 farm abandonments in the 1930s, while the worst-hit census division in Saskatchewan lost only 1,800 farms.
“And that’s not generally known,” Jones says.
Farm abandonments in general are a misunderstood part of the Dirty Thirties, contends Paul Voisey, a history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Contrary to popular belief, Voisey says Alberta and Saskatchewan didn’t suffer debilitating population drains in the 1930s. A comparison of the 1931 and 1941 national censuses reveals that Saskatchewan’s farm population fell to only 515,000 in 1941 from 564,000 in 1931. Alberta’s farm population increased to 383,000 in 1941 from 373,000 in 1931, which Voisey attributes to migration to the park belt and Peace River region.
“It’s after World War Two that they all leave the farm,” Voisey says. “That’s when the massive rural depopulation takes place. And it’s not because of depression. It’s because of much greater opportunity in the cities.”
In the 1930s, however, there were no such opportunities. A farm family that moved into town would have had to pay rent and buy food, but they would have had no money to do that. If they stayed on the farm, they could live for free because the banks eventually gave up trying to collect mortgage payments and the municipalities gave up trying to collect property taxes. There was also the possibility of growing potatoes and carrots and butchering the occasional hog and chicken, something that would have been out of the question in town.
“There just wasn’t a viable economic alternative to staying,” Voisey says. “So if you could stay at all, you stayed.”
In fact, Waiser says that in the first half of the decade the rural population actually grew because urban residents, hit hard by unemployment, thought prospects might be better in the country. He says the number of farms in Saskatchewan increased in the first half of the decade and the population continued to grow until 1936.
The misconceptions surrounding farm abandonments and rural population are part of a larger mythology that has grown up about the 1930s, which Voisey says was an effort to transform the decade into a great learning experience for the next generation.
“There was this general notion that we were all in this together or that we all had nothing and we shared it,” he says. “So there’s this mythology about the great sense of camaraderie and neighbourliness and community and so on during the Depression.”
While this may not have been entirely false, Voisey says it is certainly a more romanticized version of what actually happened.
Jones says nowhere is this mythology more apparent than in how the one-room schoolhouse has been remembered. While those country schools are now idealized as sources of integration and togetherness, Jones says their role was much more divisive.
As farm families fled the hardest-hit areas of southeastern Alberta, the decades-long trend toward larger school divisions began. This prompted bitter fighting between communities that wanted to keep their schools, seriously fraying the social fabric of rural Alberta.
“People would move their damn schools, they would move their kids to go to school and they would have fights over schools, and when a school left, it would destroy the community,” Jones says.
“People went through hell trying to continue education for the kids.”
Waiser says another myth is that the drought of the 1930s was an aberration that took the country by surprise. Like Jones, he points to the severe drought of the 1920s, which devastated southwestern Saskatchewan as well as southeastern Alberta.
“We didn’t discover drought in the 1930s.”
There’s no doubt, however, that what the Prairies experienced in the 1930s was a particularly nasty form of drought, which James Gray, in his book Men Against the Desert, describes as “the longest siege of atrocious weather since, in all probability, the times of Joseph in Egypt.” Voisey says the ecological disaster was worsened by a world economic depression that started at the same time and dealt the Prairies a triple knockout.
“Things in the economy that suffered the worst were commodities and Canada was a big commodity producer. And the worst commodities of all were agriculture and Canada was a big agricultural producer. And the worst agricultural commodity was wheat. So they were right at the leading edge of the worst of the collapse.”
The drought roughly followed the Palliser Triangle, with Saskatoon as its apex and extending south into southeastern Alberta and southwestern Manitoba. Good crops were grown outside of this triangle in the 1930s but collapsing prices made them all but worthless. Even in the triangle, farmers began the decade optimistically and Waiser says large crops were grown in the early 1930s.
“The ecological problems only compounded another more important problem and that was depressed commodity prices,” Waiser says. “That’s the real culprit in the early 1930s.”
The first drought occurred in 1929 and by 1931, some parts of Saskatchewan had experienced three consecutive crop failures. On
Aug. 1,1931, the Canadian Red Cross launched an appeal for food and clothing for farmers hit by this catastrophe.
The rain returned on the western side of the Palliser triangle in 1932 and crops were excellent, but prices were so low that a farmer with a 400 acre farm was facing returns of $320 or less.
“Having survived three successive crop failures, the returns from the 1932 crop were so shattering to morale that dust bowl farmers tended to remember 1932 as one of the great disaster years,” Gray writes.
Rain fell again in the spring of 1933 and the crop started well, only to be destroyed by grasshoppers.
Soaring temperatures, hail and wind tortured farmers in 1934. The decade’s infamous dust storms began in earnest that year and local fairs were cancelled because no one had any produce to exhibit.
It rained in the spring of 1935 and crops began well, but the dust blew harder than ever. An unprecedented deep freeze fell over the Prairies during the winter of 1935-36, followed by a record heat wave in 1936. City newspapers kept a running score of deaths caused by the heat, while gigantic dust storms left the Palliser triangle in a continual haze.
“By the second week in July, the crop was gone,” Gray writes.
The same happened in 1937, which many observers consider to be the worst year of the Dirty Thirties. The crop looked good in early June, only to succumb by the end of the month to heat and dust that extended as far north as Prince Albert, Sask.
Waiser says the devastation was particularly cruel in 1937 because prairie farmers could only peer through the dust in dismay as the economic depression began to lift in the rest of the country.
The drought ended that autumn, long after the crop was gone, and rain continued to fall the following spring. Unfortunately, that crop was destroyed by grasshoppers and rust, and Voisey argues the region didn’t see significant economic recovery until 1942.
Gray claims that the return of rain in 1938 wasn’t enough on its own to reverse the desertification of the southern Prairies.
In Men Against the Desert, he says a return to viable farming was made possible only by efforts of those such as the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, which organized the formation of community pastures, dugout construction and other reclamation projects.
Gray gives the farmers themselves special credit for their role in helping invent equipment, readily adopting new farming practices and persevering against a relentless foe.
Waiser says the farmers’ refusal to give up is one of the most striking aspects of the Dirty Thirties, especially those who moved north to start over again in the parkland belt and forest fringe.
“There is still faith in the land that things are going to be better next year and they’ll get on a quarter section and things will work out, which is remarkable, when you think about what many families went through, and yet they still have the strength to face down this adversity and start over again.”
Perhaps hope didn’t disappear after all. Perhaps it simply moved somewhere else for a time.
