Children of the Dust: An Okie Family Story

by Betty Grant Henshaw, Sandra Scofield (Editor), Victoria Smith (Introduction)

Betty Grant Henshaw was born into a large family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era. For years her father, Bill, worked himself to exhaustion, trying to earn enough to provide for his wife and nine children and to buy his own small farm, but he was never able to get ahead. Other family members had joined the great migration of Okies to California. Finally yielding to pressure from others, with some reluctance Bill piled his family in the Ford pickup and set off along Route 66 for the Golden State.There the family found abundant opportunities to work, but work often meant back-breaking labor in the fields for dirt-cheap wages in hundred-degree heat. Bill did his best to shield his family from the brutality of the fields. His abiding respect for work, which he cultivated in his children, led his family through difficult times. In the end, although he missed Oklahoma, Bill was proud to find that the Grants could thrive in any soil.

Genres: Biography

229 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2006

Reviews

[Kari]

Detailed memoir from the dust bowl. The author remembered wonderful things like: every farm had a particular kind of salve that had been sold by a traveling salesman and that the women in Oklahoma had a "thing" about dressing at a respectable level - interesting at a time when people had to resort to making clothes from flour sacks. Good read.

[Katie]

I enjoyed this collection of stories. Some made me laugh, some made me cry, some made me stop and reread the story because it seemed unreal that it really happened! What I loved most was how rich this family was with love.

[Kristlr]

Enjoyable read and written in a similar style of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books.

[Kate]

A wonderful story of a family taking care of itself and each other in very hard times.

Evocative, and well-written.