Great Depression

The Great Depression is the economic and social backdrop to the family rupture in Perry Smith’s childhood. In the account preserved by his father, Tex John Smith, the Depression coincides with the loss of the family home life, a struggle to support Perry, and years of separation from his other children.

Family Separation

After Flo Buckskin left for San Francisco with the children, Tex later went looking for them. In San Francisco he was barred from seeing them at school, but met Perry in the schoolyard; Perry wanted to leave with him, though Tex returned him to his mother. Perry’s account likewise recalls his father visiting and then going away. When Perry was six, his mother placed him in institutional care. The narrative presents these episodes as part of a prolonged family separation during the Depression, not as a single moment of rupture.

Poverty and an Unsettled Home

After the parents’ divorce, Tex received custody of Perry and took him to live with him. He was working for the Works Progress Administration at very low wages and had a small home and some property, but eventually sold the property. Father and son then lived in a house car, and Perry attended school as often as circumstances allowed. The combination of scarce income, sold property, and mobile housing gives the Depression a concrete place in Perry’s childhood: it shaped the practical conditions under which his father tried to care for him.

Place in Perry’s Recollection

The book sets this hardship against an earlier period of family life on the rodeo circuit. Tex and Flo retired from rodeo work after illnesses, settled near Reno, and later separated amid conflict; Flo left for San Francisco when Perry was six. Perry’s remembered childhood thus moves from admiration for his parents’ performances to separation, disrupted care, and economic insecurity. The Depression is not treated as a full economic history, but as the period framing those changes and the precarious life Tex and Perry made together.