Chapter One: Mean Clouds Summary and Analysis

The farmers of the 1930s in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the area wedged between Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico were "dry farmers". They had no irrigation system or water reservoir. When there wasn't sufficient rain, the farmers had to depend on bank loans or money they could get for selling their farm equipment to survive on. In 1931, there was a drought that seemed unending. Cornstalks and other crops wilted in the oppressive sun and heat. The farmers in the region were already economically strapped from the Great Depression, two years before. Even before the drought, most farmers had a tough time paying their bank loans. When the prices for crops fell, a thousand families a week were losing their farms to banks.

Remarkably, by 1936, it had only rained a few times in the prior five years...