I understand what you are saying but I would add, for those who stayed and suffered thru the three year drought, how many actually believed it would last three years and had any thought on how to deal with it?
No blame. A man’s got to make a living. If you’re born into farming and there hasn’t been any drought lately, how’s one to know one might come?
I might add, on the other end of the scale, consider California. Apparently there are these events called “atmospheric rivers” which are infrequent, but dump enormous amounts of water when they occur. Something close to that happened there last winter (or maybe the winter before) where a multi-year drought was followed by so much rain that a major earth dam came very close to collapsing as the spillway was topped.
Maybe today, with historical perspective, one could blame authorities for not maintaining the dam. But in the 30’s, in Oklahoma, only recently converted to farming, who knew?