in tents two years...Most of the women you see in the camps are going without shoes or stockings...It's fairly common to see children entirely naked". She reported that the most common causes of death in West Virginia were tuberculosis, asthma, typhoid, diphtheria, pellagra, and malnutrition. Many people in West Virginia where she reported "had been living for days on green corn and string beans—and precious little of that. At the Continental Hotel in Pineville, I was told that five babies up one of those creeks had died of starvation in the last ten days...Dysentery is so common that nobody says much about it." About the people of Appalachia, Hickok wrote that they were patriotic, religious and of "pure Anglo-Saxon stock", and she found them "curiously appealing". At the same time she criticized them for their apathy observing that they were willing to accept their fate as what God had intended for them. In the summer of 1933, she reported that 62 percent of people in the eastern counties of Kentucky were living on federal relief while another 150,000 people depended upon relief payments from the state government to feed their families. On 12 August 1933, the Commonwealth of Kentucky stopped relief payments because of a lack of funds, leading people going to the relief offices to find them closed and then wandering away silently. Hickok wrote: "I cannot for the life of me understand why they don't go down and raid the Blue Grass country". From Iowa, she wrote to Hopkins in October 1933 that the Depression "is 10 or 12 years old out here" and Sioux City was a "hotbed of the Reds". The same month she wrote from Minnesota that the farmers were growing unhappy with President Roosevelt as one farm leader told her: "We were promised a New Deal...Instead, we have the same old stacked deck". In a letter to Eleanor from North Dakota she stated: "These plains are beautiful. But, oh, the terrible, crushing drabness of life here. And the suffering, for both people and animals...Most of the farm buildings haven't been painted in God only knows how long...If I had to live here, I think I'd just quietly call it a day and commit suicide....The people up here are in a daze. A sort of nameless dread hangs over the place". In Morton County, North Dakota, Hickok left a church and found several farmers huddled