Dust Bowl Ballads

A fierce drought in Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ – a region that was the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl – stirs up dust storms, memories and myths. In this parched terrain of ghost towns and abandoned ranches, the wells are running dry, but the stories continue to flow.

Around ‘the Liars’ table’ at a roadside diner in the small prairie town of Boise City, old timers and young farmers share tales of dust storms past and present, trying to outdo each other in the retelling of local legends. Voices of Dust Bowl survivors entwine with stories of today’s drought. Stories blow out like drifts of sand, embellished with fine layers of imaginative silt.

Storytelling spins out of the landscape itself. Boise City was founded on a fiction by fraudsters who enticed people to buy plots of land in a town that did not exist. Expecting elegant, tree-lined streets and fountains, the newcomers found nothing but dirt. And when they ploughed it up, the dirt soon turned to dust.

Millard Fowler (who has sa...