A Gof-Forsaken Place : Folk Eschatology and the Dust Bowl

On an idyllic Sunday in April 1935, people from Lubbock, Texas, to Topeka, Kansas, went on picnics, planted gardens, visited neighbors, and attended church. Communities had been punished with depression and drought, yet on that spring day Plains men and women felt assured that peace and safety had returned. Suddenly in midafternoon the air turned cold, and people noticed then that the sky had become filled with birds, fleeing from some unseen force. Fifteen-year-old Ida Mae Norman, driving home from a Palm Sunday church service with her family, saw a thin strip of black on the horizon north of Guymon, Oklahoma. Seconds later, they were enveloped in a wall of dust. She later recalled: I was so frightened. I thought the world had come to an end. She feared that the foreboding dust storm might be a signal for Armageddon.