The Great Depression

The Texas outlaw couple Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker roamed the South and Midwest on their crime spree from 1932 to 1934 during the Great Depression. But it doesn’t appear they ever made it to North Dakota. A bank robbery in 1933 in southern Minnesota is attributed to the Barrow gang, and their exploits were front-page news in The Bismarck Tribune, including the breakout of inmates at a Texas prison farm in 1934.

Penny auctions were collective actions to help farmers during the Great Depression. When a farm was foreclosed upon and sold by the lending financial institution at auction, the crowd would conspire to bid a trivial amount and return the land and assets to the farmer. Unfortunately for many tribal members, no similar strategy was available two decades later when they were forced from the lands they had lived on for millennia to make room for the Garrison Dam and the lake it would create.

In 1936, in the midst of the "dirty thirties," August was just one in a long line of drought-stricken months. North and South Dakota were the only states…

The Great Depression of the 1930s did not feel so “great” to those suffering from unemployment, bank failures, or drought. The Depression was in full…