Out of the Dust

Out of the Dust

Throughout the Dust bowl in the 1930’s it was difficult to make a house into a home for some families. These times brought financial hardships forcing many people to move and head to California in hopes of finding a better life. While reading “Out of the Dust” by Karen Hesse you find that family was the most important aspect of life during the Dust Bowl. Throughout the book you read how a young girl develops her sense of belonging through tragic events showing her the real meaning of family. As a young girl growing up the Dust Bowl became very influential in her understanding of life and how difficult things can be. Another particular point in the book where a terrible accident claims the life of her mother shapes her life and contributes to other decisions Billie Jo, the young girl, makes. Through these decisions and her perceptions of home life Billie Jo decides to run away from the one place she knew as home and away from the dust before she became dust and find a better life out in the world. These events become the major milestones of the book.

The Dust Bowl is a natural phenomenon that was not created over night and has been the result of previous years. The farmers had been helping out with World War II and in doing so have over planted crops in the fields. Due to the nature of the situation the farmer had not begun rotating crops or leaving native grass areas in order to use them later for fertile grounds. This caused the grounds to no longer produce crops the way they had done so in the beginning. By the early 1930’s the Great Depression had hit the country causing a severe drought throughout the land. The primary area that was affected by this was the Great Plains states, from the Rocky Mountains eastward to the high plains. (Montana) The dust bowl made it hard for farmers to have a healthy relationship with their families with the worries of how they were going to care for their crops. With no rain coming down the dirt that the...