Depression and Dust
24 October 1929, Wall Street broke. North Dakota, already a farm state on the knife edge of weather, fell twice — prices for wheat and cattle collapsed while drought turned the western half of the country to powder. 1934 and 1936 were the cruelest years: grasses failed, cows starved, scorching winds piled dirt like snowdrifts, and grasshopper clouds ate what the wind left. More than a hundred twenty-one thousand people left the state; twelve thousand three hundred eight farms were foreclosed. was seven when the crash came, living with her aunt and uncle Geiger at Kenmare — already motherless, already given away to kin who would keep her.
1930 census told the damage in rows. Edgar P. Coss, seventy-five, unemployed at 31 Euclid Avenue on Grand Forks' Red River floodplain; widower son Charles and grandsons Charles Jr. and Clarence crowded the house with firemen's wages. Next door, Ina Pearson kept roomers — a spelling that hinted at kinship never proved. Winfield Geiger owned a Kenmare service station and a thirty-four-hundred-dollar house; Lorraine raised Delores and seven-year-old niece Winifred with two young roomers. Henry D. Geiger farmed near Cavalier in a six-thousand-dollar Sears catalog house — rural America's mail-order answer to a broken economy. William Raymond, sixty-one, no longer bought grain; he and Annie lived with son Eddie and laborers who paid rent to survive. Farmers Union cooperatives rose; the Farmers Holiday Organization blocked shipments; William Langer became governor 1933, slashed spending, embargoed grain, was convicted and removed — four governors in seven months.