“A slight breeze was waving the bunch grass, but all eyes were turned to the west where the soft breeze was coming from. Mrs. Fred Dahmen was the first to speak commandingly, 'We are going home, for I am scared.' She plainly showed the effect of what everyone saw over Saddle Mountains west of the Columbia River gorge. A terrible storm was forming. Mr. Domberger tried to calm people by saying, 'Naw, this is just a plain, old-time dust storm. Nothing serious. We used to have them lots of times in Nebraska where we used to live.' But this huge cloud could be plainly seen rolling up like a huge monster half a mile wide and gaining in speed and size every minute. It was so high it nearly reached the level of the mountains behind the river.”
Dust storms were once a normal occurrence for residents in the Quincy valley. While most did not reach the speed and intensity like the one in April 1908 described above by pioneer Anna M. Fleckenstein-Berner in the book “The Pioneer's Memory Book,” many have created extra work, frustration and disappointment for Quincy residents.
When settlers first arrived in the Quincy valley, dirt did not accompany the winds that blew through the area. But as settlers cleared the land, dirt and sand were stirred up and left exposed to the wind. In 1908, the lack of moisture and many acres of broken ground became the breeding ground for one of the worst storms in Quincy valley history.
The storm was first spotted at the beginning of church on the second Sunday in April. The residents of Burke scattered from church, gathered in their animals and braced for the storm.
“You could hear it roar like a mighty ocean on the beach,” recalled Fleckenstein-Berner. “It had a six mile width and the day was darkening as if the world was coming to an end. The house creaked, jerked and shivered as if the roof were going any minute. It was so bad a sandstorm, you could only see the barn 50 feet away from the house now and then between the sheets of sand. Everyone was too frightened to speak. The fires were out for safety for fear the chimney might go any time.”
When the storm finally ended Tuesday morning, buildings had moved, trees were broken or buried, crops were destroyed and two to three inches of sand covered the inside of houses.
“The memory of the 1908 dust storm, the heat and almost no crop worth harvesting in 1909 were good reasons to explain why more and more people began to leave the prairie,” wrote Faye Morris in her book, “They Claimed a Desert.” “There was hardly a month when someone loaded their belongings and left their cabin abandoned.”
As people left the area, the sagebrush began to grow back. When new settlers came to the area following the promise of irrigation, the sagebrush was once again cleared and dust storms ensued.
“More than one year during the spring, dust storms would come up,” recalled Kenneth Mattson, who first came to the area in 1945. “It would be nice in the mornings. About noon, the sun was gone, the wind would be going and so was the dust. People who had land all leveled up when the wind came up would have to re-level it.”
Farmers had to endure sand piles that buried equipment and covered roadways like snow drifts. Some had crops cut off by blowing sand.
The blowing dirt also caused frustration for housewives. Mattson recalled a friend who decided to clean her house during a reprieve from the constant wind. But, the wind came up once again, leaving a quarter inch of fine dust all over the clean house.
“One Oregon ditch rider heard the country was up and coming and wanted to see it,” said Mattson. “When he got here, he understood, cause it was up and coming.”
