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MARK STEIL: In the days just before the big November 12, 1933 dust storm, the Huron newspaper, The Huronite, was filled with stories about the Holiday Association's three-week-old national farm strike. It was supposed to bring higher grain, livestock, and dairy prices, but instead brought mostly violence, picketing, some deaths, and many arrests.

The strike's hope was fading for South Dakota farmers, to be replaced by even darker days. The soil was bone dry and beginning to blow. On November 12, a strong dry cold front crossed the state. Northwest winds gusted to 60 miles an hour and kicked up enough dust to block out the sun. The Huronite called the midday darkness of the 12th more intense than that of night and ranked the dust storm with the famous blizzard of 1888 in the state's weather records.

Dust storms were common after that. The desert-like sand drifted as high as 10 feet. Anna Kittleson was living on her family's farm near Clark when the dust storms began. She remembers one in particular-- it may have been the November 12, 1933 storm-- and how the dust clouds at first raised her father's hope.

SPEAKER: I can see him yet standing by the greenery. And he said, there's a big black cloud out West now. I think we'll get some rain. And when it come, it was wind and nothing but black dust. And we had to light the lamps at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

MARK STEIL: Clara Albrecht lives in Huron. She remembers watching dust storms approach the farm where she and her husband, Fred, lived. She says the reddish-brown dust cloud rolled as it approached.

CLARA ALBRECHT: In the distance, you'd see this coming. It was just like a barrel. And it's dirt and dust and sand and everything that it could pick up. And it'd come through the yard. It would make the static electricity on the windmill would just fly.

MARK STEIL: Ida Schultz, now of Mitchell, was in fifth grade at a country school when a blizzard of dust rolled in.

IDA SCHULTZ: It was in the middle of the afternoon, and a dust storm came up. And it just was as black as night. And the teacher, I remember, lit a kerosene lamp. And we just figured we'd have to stay there the rest of the night. And then, later in the afternoon, we saw these dim little headlights coming in, and it was my dad.

MARK STEIL: The report in The Huronite newspaper on the November 12 storm included this dispatch from the nearby community of Iroquois, titled "Worst in History." "The dust was so dense and so fine it sifted in everywhere a breath of air penetrated. The insides of storm windows were covered with a fine dust. The window sills inside the house were thickly laid with dirt. Curtains gave off clouds of dust, and footprints were left wherever one walked."

NORM CHAMBERLAIN: There was nothing out here on the prairies to stop the dirt from blowing.

MARK STEIL: Norm Chamberlain lives in Huron.

NORM CHAMBERLAIN: We didn't have tree belts. We didn't have anything to keep the soil from blowing away.

MARK STEIL: The dust storms brought desperate times. Many more farmers went broke. Anna Kittleson remembers that only two or three families in her rural neighborhood managed to keep their farms during the '30s. Her dad was one of them. But the strain of the tough times showed.

SPEAKER: I could see him walking the floor in the kitchen, walking the length of the floor and wondering what he should do. You know, everything was drying up. Trying to hang on to his cattle. And then we had cholera in the pigs. So we had to burn the straw stack with all the pigs that had died.

And you know, when you lose everything, you don't know what to do. And he was a hard working man. And you know, it was really rough.

MARK STEIL: Many farm families left South Dakota. Others tried again at some other dusty farmstead. Sharply etched memories remain of how dust outlined a baby left for a few minutes on what was a clean white sheet, of dinner tables set with upside down plates and cups, of dust-caused pneumonia, of tumbleweeds piled house high, of cattle kept alive on Russian thistles, a farmland stripped forever of its best topsoil.

The Sunday, November 12 storm rolled east, affecting nearly all of the Midwest, carrying South Dakota topsoil to Chicago. There were already several farm foreclosure notices in the pages of The Huronite when the storm struck. The dust would cause thousands more. I'm Mark Steil reporting.