[Of all the grim events of the Depression years,] the floods of 1935 were most spectacular. This month, seventy-three years later, they and the Dust Bowl they so rudely interrupted are still topics of conversation in towns all along the Republican River.

Small wonder. In the space of only 20 days, four floods swept through the Republican River valley, the biggest one a killer surge following a storm that dumped 24 inches of water in six hours between Flagler and the Kansas line.

“We’d had five years of drought before that flood,” Mrs. Verylron Williams told me one afternoon sitting around a table in the municipal museum in McCook, Nebraska. “And then, after it, we got another five years of drought. So over the ten year period, we got average rainfall. We just got it all at one time.”

What she remembered most, she said, was “how hard it was to believe something could come so quickly and be so terrible.”

She was 15 at the time, the youngest by far of four girls, and the only one still at home on the farm—“right on the river”—outside Culbertson, where the river makes a slight feint to the north, just west of McCook.

“It had been raining for weeks,” she said. At first, it seemed like a blessing, dampening the huge drifts of dust and grit that had been blasting across the prairie for years, daily reminders of Depression and drought. But the rain didn’t stop and then the river rose and then the ground became saturated, and her mother warned her father that water was starting to flow across the flat surface of the earth, not just down the gullies and washes. She started out to take care of the livestock, and watched, shocked, as the river snatched a group of calves. “Then,” she said, “it came for the cows, too.”

By five in the morning of May 30, 1935, the river was at the door of Verylron Williams’ parents’ home. “I was sleeping upstairs when mother and father came to get me. They said, ‘We have to go now.’ But when I went down the stairs, the water was already in the house. We waded through water up to here”—she indicated her waist—“and got up to a neighbor’s. It was on top of a hill. There were already nine people there. Then right after we got there, a man came riding up from the south and said he couldn’t go any further, so that made 13 of us.”

They were on the highest ground around, so the small group thought they might be safe. But suddenly, as they watched, a wall of water eight feet high roared down the valley. The flood’s increase caught them by surprise and sent them sprinting across the farmyard. “You had to run if you were going to stay out of it,” Mrs. Williams said.

By now, the river was in full flood, the water level rising uphill in some places at 10 miles per hour or more, faster than most men can run. Houses, cars, wagons, barns, sheds, livestock, people, whole towns washed past them. The group dashed from the farmhouse to a barn and finally up to a granary. “It was the only building bolted to its foundation,” she said. “It was just a little building with a wall dividing it down the middle.” The water followed. “So we all climbed up into the rafters, the men on one side and the women on the other.” It was about 11 in the morning.

Her perch was next to a small, shuttered opening where a window had once been. Looking down, she could see the river slowly climb the walls. They all knew that if the water rose high enough to reach them, there would be no place higher to go but heaven. From time to time, one of the rafter-clingers would ask her to open the shutter and take a look. She would open it a crack and peer out across the valley. “It was like an ocean.” By then the river was four miles wide, and the plains had become the turbulent sea it had been in prehistoric days.

Below her, the little wooden building swayed and groaned. One wall went, then another, leaving behind just the timber frame to which they all clung desperately. “We just didn’t know what we’d do if the water went any higher.”

But it didn’t, and at 8 the next evening, they came down out of the rafters and into the mud. When the Williams family finally went back to their farm, the house had floated “a block or two” downstream. For farmers already hard hit by calamity after calamity, “it was complete devastation,” she said.

“It must have been like New Orleans,” I said. We were meeting a few weeks after hurricane Katrina had struck the Gulf. “Did Mr. Roosevelt send some help?”

She looked at me like I’d just put on a stupid party hat. “Oh goodness, no! The government? We never even thought of that. We just went back to work.”

The summer of 1935 was a disastrous year elsewhere in America—including Florida, where on Labor Day one of the strongest hurricanes on record struck the Keys and wiped them clean, killing more than 400 people.

But in the American Midwest, the Republican River flood was disaster enough, changing the towns, jobs and lives of the people who lived there forever….