Portraits of true grit: Amazing black-and-white photos capture the everyday struggles of Oklahoma farmers fighting to survive the Dust Bowl.

Oklahoma 1932

When the first dust storms blew through Oklahoma in 1932, few people in the state could foresee the catastrophic devastation that clouds of sands carried aloft by the hallowing winds would bring to the region over the next decade. 

Massive dust storms that swept through the Southern Plains caused severe erosion by blowing off millions of tons of topsoil in southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, leaving farmers destitute. 

By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the rich topsoil to the winds, leaving the fields barren and the farmers destitute.

Tough times: Four families, three of them related, with 15 children, from the Dust Bowl in Texas, at impromptu overnight road camp

Meagre livelihood: John Barnett feeding livestock on his farm in 1942

Survivors: Dust Bowl farmer John Barnett (left) , his wife Venus (center), and their three children: Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9

Unbreakable: Venus Barnett trying to raise vegetables in garden of family farm in the Dust Bowl for a second time after a windstorm blew the first seedlings away

Daily struggles: Farmer's wife Mrs Venus Barnett and son Lincoln in room of their worn farmhouse, Oklahoma, 1942

Barren land: Oklahoman agriculturists work on way to fix the Great Plains region's catastrophic erosion problem in 1942

Desperate times: Harvesters hitchhike on route 64 en route to a wheat harvesting in the Dust-Bowl ravaged state of Oklahoma in 1942

Devastation: The great clouds of dust that swept through the Southern Plains in the 1930s buried structures and rendered once-fertile soil barren

Sand-choked wilderness: Sagebush and sand surround John Barnett's house and farm buildings. There is no topsoil left on the 160 acres. He grows rye and fodder in sandy loam For some, the phrase ?Dust Bowl? conjures a place: the Great Plains, but a Great Plains of abandoned homes, ruined lives, dead and dying crops and sand, sand, sand. For others, the phrase denotes not a region but an era: the mid- to late-1930s in America, when countless farms were lost; dust storms raced across thousands of miles of once-fertile land, so huge and unremitting that they often blotted out the sun; and millions of American men, women and children took to the road, leaving behind everything they knew and everything they'd built, heading west, seeking work, food, shelter, new lives, new hope.

Hardy: Countless farming families, like this Oklahoma clan pictured in 1942, stayed behind in the Dust Bowl, suffering through the very worst of the decade and fighting for ever