Bill Ganzel. Marie [Braught] Johnson and Frank Braught on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. The Dalles, Oregon, July 1979

[Flora Evans, Vernon’s wife, is the sister of Marie and Frank, and they made the trip together. Ervin Zimmerman is deceased.]

"Well, we was all without jobs here at the time. The jobs was so few and far between that you couldn’t buy a job. We had friends that we knew out in Oregon, and we decided we was going to go out there and see if we could find work. We had $54 between the five of us when we started out, and when we got to Oregon, I think we had about $16 left. We had absolutely no idea what we was agoing to do.

"We got out around Missoula, and we was having a good time. There was this car sitting alongside the road and a guy sleeping in it, so we honked and hollered at him, having a big time. Pretty soon this car was after us. Well, we seen he had an emblem on the side of the car, and we’d heard they was sending ’em [the migrants] back, wasn’t letting ’em go through. So we thought, ‘Here’s where we go back home.’ He motioned for us to pull over. Anyhow, he come over and introduced himself—Arthur Rothstein was his name— and said he was with the Resettlement Administration. This "Oregon or Bust’ on the back end was what took his eye. He asked us if we cared if he took some pictures of us. That fall or winter, why, these pictures started showing up in the different magazines and papers.

"In the winter of ’45, my father passed away. I come back and kind of took over the farm and helped out here. I’ve been here ever since. We’ve had our ups and downs, I guess. I’ve been hailed out probably five, six times, and dried out three, four years, and one year we rusted out."

—VERNON EVANS

"My dad used to walk the floor when those dust storms were blowing and say, ‘There’s a lot of real estate exchanging hands today.’ The year before we left, my dad had a corn crop going pretty good. The grasshoppers hit, and dad went to town and bought corn knives for all us kids. He figured if we’d get that corn chopped down and piled up for fodder, the grasshoppers would leave it alone. [Crying.] Well, they didn’t. We worked, butter we couldn’t keep ahead of them. They ate it right in the shock. They ate every bit of it. I don’t even like to think about those days. We had friends who had come out to Oregon the year before, and they’d write back what a great country it was. There was grass up to the cow’s belly, and there was fruit trees for the picking. And there was work in the fruit orchards. We had nothing, came with nothing.

"We go back to South Dakota every once in a while to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. No way! No way! I just get that feeling every time I go back, like it used to be. I know it’s not quite that bad any more, but … no way. I tell Vern and Flora all the time they should have stayed out here."

—MARIE JOHNSON