<P> During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky . These choking billows of dust--named "black blizzards" or "black rollers"--traveled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C. On the Plains, they often reduced visibility to 3.3 feet (1.0 m) or less . Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, to witness the "Black Sunday" black blizzards of April 14, 1935; Edward Stanley, Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting Geiger's news story . While the term "the Dust Bowl" was originally a reference to the geographical area affected by the dust, today it is usually used to refer to the event, as in "It was during the Dust Bowl". </P> <P> The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km) that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas . </P> <P> The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty - stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached US $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to US $440,000,000 in 2017). Many of these families, who were often known as "Okies" because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left . </P> <P> The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by Dorothea Lange . </P>

Where did the okies go during the dust bowl