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From the time she was a young girl, Caroline Henderson dreamed of having a piece of land she could call her own. The eldest child of a prosperous Iowa farm family, she studied languages and literature at Mount Holyoke College, where her senior class prophecy predicted that her future would be found "somewhere on a western ranch." In 1907, Caroline followed that dream to the Oklahoma panhandle. She took a job teaching school in Texas county, staked out a homestead claim on a quarter section of land, and moved into a one-room 14'x16' shack, which she dubbed her "castle." "Out here in this wilderness," she wrote to a college friend, "has come to me the very greatest and sweetest and most hopeful happiness of all my life."

A year later, she married Will Henderson, a farmer and former cowboy she'd hired to dig her well. They soon had a daughter, Eleanor, and Will built an addition to their home. During the wheat boom, they were relatively prosperous, allowing them to expand their land to a full section (640 acres). Caroline grew flowers, had a telephone installed, and subscribed to a daily newspaper. With the bust, they lost the phone, the paper, the garden, their farm animals, and all their crops.

Between 1931 and 1937, Caroline attracted a national following as a writer when a series of her letters and articles was published in the prestigious magazine Atlantic Monthly. In her "Letters from the Dust Bowl"--originally written to her friend Evelyn in Maryland--she provided a portrait of the farmers who stayed to face the stark conditions on the southern plains, writing in turn about the daily occurrences on her farm and the harsh realities of eking out an existence in a land of dust and Depression.

When their daughter was old enough for college, Eleanor chose to attend Kansas University. She earned both a Bachelor of Arts degree and an M.D. at Kansas. Meanwhile, Caroline helped pay her daughter's educational expenses by moving to Lawrence with her. The two shared an apartment, and Caroline found work teaching school. Caroline also found time to enroll in some graduate courses and earned an M. A. degree from Kansas in 1935.

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Caroline traveled to Oklahoma by herself in 1907

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Caroline traveled to Oklahoma by herself in 1907

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She apparently loved cats!

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She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1901.

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Will and Caroline Henderson's wedding photograph

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Will and Caroline Henderson's wedding photograph

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They were married in 1908 in Texas County, Oklahoma.

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The Hendersons' thriving pre-Dust Bowl cornfield

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The Hendersons' thriving pre-Dust Bowl cornfield

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Caroline is pictured here looking out at her healthy farm.

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PART ONE of Caroline Henderson's June 30, 1935 letter to her friend Evelyn

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PART ONE of Caroline Henderson's June 30, 1935 letter to her friend Evelyn

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DEAR EVELYN: —

Your continued interest in our effort to 'tie a knot in the end of the rope and hang on' is most stimulating. Our recent transition from rain-soaked eastern Kansas with its green pastures, luxuriant foliage, abundance of flowers, and promise of a generous harvest, to the dust-covered desolation of No Man's Land was a difficult change to crowd into one short day's travel. Eleanor has laid aside the medical books for a time. Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is an almost hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. 'Visibility' approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor. I keep oiled cloths on the window sills and between the upper and lower sashes. They help just a little to retard or collect the dust. Some seal the windows with the gummed-paper strips used in wrapping parcels, but no method is fully effective. We buy what appears to be red cedar sawdust with oil added to use in sweeping our floors, and do our best to avoid inhaling the irritating dust.

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In telling you of these conditions I realize that I expose myself to charges of disloyalty to this western region. A good Kansas friend suggests that we should imitate the Californian attitude toward earthquakes and keep to ourselves what we know about dust storms. Since the very limited rains of May in this section gave some slight ground for renewed hope, optimism has been the approved policy. Printed articles or statements by journalists, railroad officials, and secretaries of small-town Chambers of Commerce have heralded too enthusiastically the return of prosperity to the drouth region. And in our part of the country that is the one durable basis for any prosperity whatever. There is nothing else to build upon. But you wished to know the truth, so I am telling you the actual situation, though I freely admit that the facts are themselves often contradictory and confusing.

Early in May, with no more grass or even weeds on our 640 acres than on your kitchen floor, and even the scanty remnants of dried grasses from last year cut off and blown away, we decided, like most of our neighbors, to ship our cattle to grass in the central part of the state. We sent 27 head, retaining here the heifers coming fresh this spring. The shipping charge on our part of the carload was $46. Pasture costs us $7.00 for a cow and calf for the season and $5.00 for a yearling. Whether this venture brings profit or loss depends on whether the cattle make satisfactory gains during the summer and whether prices remain reasonable or fall back to the level that most people would desire. We farmers here in the United States might as well recognize that we are a minority group, and that the prevailing interest of the nation as a whole is no longer agricultural. Hay for the horses and the heifers remaining here cost us $3 per ton, brought by truck from eastern Oklahoma.

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The day after we shipped the cattle, the long drouth was temporarily broken by the first effective moisture in many months —about one and one-quarter inches in two or three gentle rains. All hope of a wheat crop had been abandoned by March or April.

Contrary to many published reports, a good many people had left this country either temporarily or permanently before any rains came. And they were not merely 'drifters,' as is frequently alleged. In May a friend in the southwestern county of Kansas voluntarily sent me a list of the people who had already left their immediate neighborhood or were packed up and ready to go. The list included 109 persons in 26 families, substantial people, most of whom had been in that locality over ten years, and some as long as forty years. In these families there had been two deaths from dust pneumonia. Others in the neighborhood were ill at that time. Fewer actual residents have left our neighborhood, but on a sixty mile trip yesterday to procure tract repairs we saw many pitiful reminder of broken hopes and apparently wasted effort. Little abandoned homes where people had drilled deep wells for the precious water, had set trees and vines built reservoirs, and fenced in gardens —with everything now walled in half buried by banks of drifted soil, told a painful story of loss and disappointment. I grieved especially over one lonely plum thicket buried to the tips of the twigs, and a garden with fence closely built of boards for wit protection, now enclosing only a hillock of dust covered with the blue-flower bull nettles which no winds or sands discourage.

It might give you some notion of our great 'open spaces' if I tell you that on the sixty-mile trip, going by a state road over which our mail comes from the railroad, and coming back by Federal highway, we encountered on one car, and no other vehicles of an sort. And this was on Saturday, the farmers' marketing day!

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The coming of the long-desired rain gave impetus to the Federal projects for erosion control. Plans were quickly made, submitted to groups of farmers in district gatherings, and put in operation without delay. The proposition was that, in order to encourage the immediate listing abandoned wheat ground and other acreage so as to cut down wind erosion the Federal Government would contribute ten cents per acre toward the expense of fuel and oil for tractors feed for horses, if the farmers would agree to list not less than one fourth the acreage on contour lines. Surveys were made promptly for all farmers signing contracts for either contour listing or terracing. The latest report states that within the few weeks since the programme was begun in our county 99,986 acres have beenughed or listed on these contour lines —that is, according to the lay of the land instead of on straight lines with right-angled turns as has been the usual custom.

The plan has been proposed and carried through here as a matter of public policy for the welfare of all without reproach or humiliation to anyone. It should be remembered that 1935 is the fourth successive year of drouth and crop failure through a great part of the high plains region, and the hopelessly low prices for the crop of 1931 gave no chance to build up reserves for future needs. If the severe critics of all who in any way join in government plans for the saving of homes and the restoration of farms to a productive basis could only understand how vital a human problem is here considered, possibly their censures might be less bitter and scornful.

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At any rate the contour listing has been done over extensive areas. If rains come to carry forward the feed crops now just struggling up in the furrows, the value of the work can be appraised. The primary intention of the plan for contour listing is to distribute rainfall evenly over the fields and prevent its running off to one end of the field or down the road to some creek or drainage basin. It is hoped that the plan will indirectly tend to lessen wind erosion by promoting the growth of feed crops, restoration of humus to denuded surfaces, and some protection through standing stubbles and the natural coverage of weeds and unavoidable wastes. One great contributing cause of the terrible dust storms of the last two years has been the pitiful bareness of the fields resulting from the long drouth.

I am not wise enough to forecast the result. We have had two most welcome rains in June —three quarters of an inch and one-half inch. Normally these should have been of the utmost benefit, though they by no means guarantee an abundant feed crop from our now sprouting seeds as many editorial writers have decreed, and they do nothing toward restoring subsoil moisture. Actually the helpful effects of the rains have been for us and for other people largely destroyed by the drifting soil from abandoned, unworked lands around us. It fills the air and our eyes and noses and throats, and, worst of all, our furrows, where tender shoots are coming to the surface only to be buried by the smothering silt from the fields of rugged individualists who persist in their right to do nothing.

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A fairly promising piece of barley has been destroyed for us by the mere' less drift from the same field whose sands have practically buried the little mulberry hedge which has long sheltered our buildings from the north west winds. Large spaces in our pastures are entirely bare in spite of the rains. Most of the green color, where there is any grazing, is due to the pestilent Russian thistles rather than to grass. Our little locust grove which we cherished for so many years has become a small pile of fence posts. With trees and vines and flowers all around you, you can't imagine how I miss that little green shaded spot in the midst of the desert glare.

Naturally you will wonder why we stay where conditions are so extremely disheartening. Why not pick up and leave as so many others have done? It is a fair question, but a hard one to answer.

Recently I talked with a young university graduate of very superior attainments. He took the ground that in such a ease sentiment could and should be disregarded. He may be right. Yet I cannot act or feel or think as if the experiences of our twenty-seven years of life together had never been. And they are all bound up with the little corner to which we have given our continued and united efforts. To leave voluntarily to break all these closely knit ties for the sake of a possibly greater comfort elsewhere —seems like defaulting on our task. We may have to leave. We can't hold out indefinitely without some return from the land, some source of income, however small. But I think I can never go willingly or without pain that as yet seems unendurable.

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There are also practical considerations that serve to hold us here, for the present. Our soil is excellent. We need only a little rain —less than in most places—to make it productive. No one who remembers the wheat crops of 1926, 1929, 1931, can possibly regard this as permanently submarginal land. The newer methods of farming suggest possibilities of better control of moisture in the future. Our entire equipment is adapted to the type of farming suitable for this country and would have to be replaced at great expense with the tools needed in some other locality. We have spent so much in trying to keep our land from blowing away that it looks foolish to walk off and leave it, when somewhat more favorable conditions seem now to 'cast their shadows before.' I scarcely need to tell you that there is no use in thinking of either renting or selling farm property here at present. It is just a place to stand on —if we can keep the taxes paid —and work and hope for a better day. We could realize nothing whatever from all our years of struggle with which to make a fresh start.

We long for the garden and little chickens, the trees and birds and wild flowers of the years gone by. Perhaps if we do our part these good things may return some day, for others if not for ourselves.

Will joins me in earnest hopes for your recovery. The dust has been particularly aggravating to his bronchial trouble, but he keeps working on. A great reddish-brown dust cloud is rising now from the southeast, so we must get out and do our night work before it arrives. Our thoughts go with you.

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Everything now depends on whether a definite change of moisture conditions occurs in time for people to sow wheat for 1936. The 'suitcase farmers' that is, insurance agents, preachers, real-estate men, and so forth, from cities near or far —have bet thousands of dollars upon rain, or, in other words, have hired the preparation of large areas of land all around us which no longer represent the idea of homes at all, but just parts of a potential factory for the low-cost production of wheat if it rains. A short time ago a big tractor, working for one of these absentee farmers across the road from our home, accidentally hooked on to the cornerstone of the original survey and dragged it off up the road. All these many years that stone has marked the corner of our homestead. I have walked past it hundreds of times as I have taken the cows to their pasture or brought them home again. Always it has suggested the beauty of the untouched prairie as it was when the surveyors set the stone, the luxuriant thick turf of native grasses, ——grama grass, buffalo, and curly mesquite, the pincushion cactuses, straw-color and rose, the other wild flowers which in their season fulfilled the thought of Shakespeare: —

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die.

The cornerstone has also suggested the preparation for human occupation —the little homes that were so hopefully established here, of which so very few remain. After twenty-nine years, eight places in our township, out of the possible 136 (excluding the two school sections), are still occupied by those who made the original homestead entry. And now the stone is gone and the manner of its removal seemed almost symbolic of the changes that appear inevitable.

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Caroline and Will in front of their garden in the 1920s

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Caroline and Will in front of their garden in the 1920s

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The garden is abundant and both Caroline and Will are holding cats.

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Perhaps the many books on pioneer life with the usual successful and happy outcome have helped to give a wrong impression and perpetuate the idea that country people live on wild game and fish and fruits and in general on the free bounty of heaven. Many people have no idea of the cash expense of operating a farm to-day, or the work and planning required to the wheels going round, to say nothing of a decent living or suitable education for the children. This year we are keeping a separate account of expenses for car, truck, and tractor, all of which are old and frequently in need of repair. I fear we shall be horrified and discouraged by the close of the year. Not that I should willingly return to the long, slow trips of fifteen miles to town in a jolting wagon. Not that I want to take it out of the flesh and blood of horses in the hot heavy work of seed time and harvest —if they come again. But we can't combine the modern methods of work with the income of our early pioneering, when $200 used to cover all of a year's expense.

At present this great southwestern plains region, most of which has been perseveringly tilled during the fall and winter so as to cut down the loss by wind erosion even if the wheat proves a disappointment, seems to be lying asleep like the princess in the fairy tale. Perhaps you can share with us the painful longing that soon the enchantment may be broken, that the deliverer may come with the soft footfalls of gentle rain and waken our homeland once more into gracious, generous life.

Perhaps it is a sin to parody anything as beautiful as Ulysses. Yet as we gray, lonely old people sit here by the fire to-night, planning for the year's work, my thoughts seem bound to fall into that pattern.

It may be that the dust will choke us down;
It may be we shall wake some happy morn
And look again on fields of waving grain.

So good night, dear friend, and a happier to-morrow.

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Since I wrote to you, we have had several bad days of wind and dust. On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. Nothing that you see or hear or read will be likely to exaggerate the physical discomfort or material losses due to these storms. Less emphasis is usually given to the mental effect, the confusion of mind resulting from the overthrow of all plans for improvement or normal farm work, and the difficulty of making other plans, even in a tentative way. To give just one specific example: the paint has been literally scoured from our buildings by the storms of this and previous years; we should by all means try to 'save the surface'; but who knows when we might safely undertake such a project? The pleasantest morning may be a prelude to an afternoon when the 'dust devils' all unite in one hideous onslaught. The combination of fresh paint with a real dust storm is not pleasing to contemplate.

We must try to get this mailed tomorrow. It has been a terrible week, with one day of almost complete obscurity, and others when only a part of the sun's rays struggled through the gloom with a strange bluish luminance. On such days each little wave of the troubled water in the stock tank glitters with a blue phosphorescent light. When I dip out a pail of water to carry to the hen-house, it looks almost as if it were covered with a film of oil. On days like this, when William Vaughn Moody's expression 'dust to eat' suggests a literal danger, we can't help questioning whether the traits we would rather think of as courage and perseverance are not actually recklessness and inertia. Who shall say?

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Part Two- " Since the very limited rains of May in this section gave some slight ground for renewed hope, optimism has been the approved policy."
The quote, " Since the very limited rains of May in this section gave some slight ground for renewed hope, optimism has been the approved policy." is similar to the book "Of Mice and Men" because the author writes about optimism and hope for their new life they want to create for themselves at the farm.

Part 4- "It fills the air and our eyes and noses and throats, and, worst of all, our furrows, where tender shoots are coming to the surface only to be buried by the smothering silt from the fields of rugged individualists who persist in their right to do nothing."
In the quote, "It fills the air and our eyes and noses and throats, and, worst of all, our furrows, where tender shoots are coming to the surface only to be buried by the smothering silt from the fields of rugged individualists who persist in their right to do nothing,"  it uses consonance and polysyndenton.  The word and is repeated in the quote to emphasize  how dust form the dust bowl affects them.  In addition consonance is used in the phrase, "smothering silt" to demonstrate how prevalent the silt is in their life.

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1. "'Visibility' approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor."
Caroline Henderson uses the quote marks to imply how bad the visibility really is, showing how you can't really see anything, almost as if that were a fake word itself, nonexistent in a sense, and the way she describes the floor is a wonderful way to show how bad the dust on the floor can get on a bad day.
2. "The list included 109 persons in 26 families, substantial people, most of whom had been in that locality over ten years, and some as long as forty years," this sentence shows how many people moved out of a single county, even though they lived there for many years, they were forced to move. The numbers themselves show how many people gave up on there amazing effort and moved. Unfortunately it was a large number.

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Part 3: "The day after we shipped the cattle, the long drouth was temporarily broken by the first effective moisture in many months"
This is interesting because of the comedic irony and misfortune of the situation. Right after the cattle were sold it rained, meaning that the crops would thrive and they wish that they would have kept the cattle because now they can afford to keep them.

Part 6: "To leave voluntarily to break all these closely knit ties for the sake of a possibly greater comfort elsewhere"
We chose this quote because it puts into perspective how many people have the option of leaving, but choose to stay. Even if everything they own is destroyed, some people want to stay where they grew up and made their lives. Everything they know and love may be destroyed, but it is still all they know.

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Part 1: "Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the accumulations of wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is an almost hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over."
These two sentences were interesting because it showed how bad the dust clouds really got and how many precautions they really did have to take just to be able to breath. The word choice she used displayed a lot of sadness and how hopeless it really was.
Part 3: "All hope of a wheat crop had been abandoned by March or April."
The use of the word abandoned emphasizes the fact that they had given up and conveys her idea of hopelessness further.

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March 8 and 13: "On the worst one recently, old sheets stretched over door and window openings, and sprayed with kerosene, quickly became black and helped a little to keep down the irritating dust in our living rooms. "
This section shows what extreme measures were used to try and keep out the dust and how ineffective they were.
January 8: "Perhaps it is a sin to parody anything as beautiful as Ulysses. Yet as we gray, lonely old people sit here by the fire to-night, planning for the year's work, my thoughts seem bound to fall into that pattern.

It may be that the dust will choke us down;
It may be we shall wake some happy morn
And look again on fields of waving grain."

The people living in the dust bowl seem to be extremely optimistic even though nothing has improved and they hope that their condition will get better.

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Part 6- "Naturally you will wonder why we stay where conditions are so extremely disheartening."
We chose this quote because it brings up something that most people are thinking and after this they explain the decisions they made which helps the reader better understand what's going on and why. This relates to  Of Mice and Men is through the Bunkhouse. The  bunkhouse is where there are a lot of bad situations and things could be better but Lennie and George fight through it and we know the reasons why.
Part 7- "Our entire equipment is adapted to the type of farming suitable for this country and would have to be replaced at great expense with the tools needed in some other locality. "
This helps us by showing us the kinds of things these people can do to get there work done and the beliefs they have of which kind of tools they need. Some people will not care about what they need but they care because they get whatever they need for as much as they want. It relates to Of Mice and Men because in the story they care about what the need and they try to get it no matter what the cost of it.

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We found it interesting` that her articles were published into magazines. This shows that they were a popular family.