Photo Galleries

As their farms and homes were buried under drifting dust, many Dust Bowl residents abandoned their farms and moved away to find jobs or farms elsewhere.

Claudene Davis, in front of her house on her high school graduation day. Notice the cracks in the wall of the house. "It's no wonder we had to fight the dust," she said. After a big dust storm, they would sometimes have to use a shovel to scoop the dust from inside the house.

Some families who left their dust-buried farms moved to California to work on the commercial farms there. These migrant families were called "Okies," since many of them were from Oklahoma, and they lived in migrant camps like this one in California.

Margaret Davis of Syracuse, Kansas took this picture of the dust storm on April 14, 1935, as it approached their house. That day would later be known as "Black Sunday," because of the seriousness of this storm.

Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder fled the territory disguised as a woodcutter because the proslavery Border Ruffians threatened to hang him.

In May 1858, proslavery settlers executed a group of their free state neighbors along the Marais de Cygne river in southeastern Kansas Territory. This event became known as the Marais de Cygne Massacre.

George S. Park, the founder of Parkville, Missouri, and owner of the Parkville Luminary newspaper, dared to speak out against the actions of the "Border Ruffians." As a result, they took revenge by breaking into the newspaper office and throwing the printing press into the nearby Missouri River.

John Brown lived in Osawatomie, Kansas Territory. He was famous for being an abolitionist (a person opposed to slavery). Brown and his sons were responsible for the brutal murder of several proslavery men near Pottawatomie, K.T. The men were called out of their homes at night and hacked to death with swords. This was just one of many incidents that earned Kansas Territory the name of "Bleeding Kansas."

Asaf Muhammad was just twelve years old when Saddam Hussein's troops invaded his Kurdish village at the end of Operation Desert Storm. He went with his family into Turkey, where they received help at a Coalition refugee camp. According to Asaf, "The Americans saved our lives."

Sgt. Jeff Moore drove trucks from military units in Saudi Arabia to deliver food and supplies to troops in enemy territory in Iraq. He described the difficulty of keeping the trucks working in the sandy conditions and what it was like to be camped in the desert as Coalition bombers flew overhead on their way to targets in Iraq.