How does Laura Ingalls Wilder use imagery in On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894?

Imagery:

We have been going over the bluffs, the most desolate bare hills I ever saw, without houses or fields or trees and hardly any grass.

For seven years there had been too little rain. The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged, for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was no harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.