The Dust Bowl

In the 1930s, the American and Canadian prairies were hit by a series of intense dust storms that wrecked the region's farming and natural environment. This event, known as the Dust Bowl, came about because of a severe drought combined with human mistakes—settlers had stripped away the natural topsoil and failed to use farming techniques suited to dry land, which left the soil vulnerable to wind erosion. The drought arrived in three separate waves—1934, 1936, and 1939 to 1940—though some parts of the High Plains stayed dry for up to eight years. The crisis made an already struggling agricultural economy even worse.

The Dust Bowl has inspired many cultural works, such as John Steinbeck's novels *Of Mice and Men* (1937) and *The Grapes of Wrath* (1939), Woody Guthrie's *Dust Bowl Ballads*, and Dorothea Lange's photographs of migrant families, most famously *Migrant Mother* from 1936.

The area most affected lies mainly west of the 100th meridian on the High Plains, where the landscape ranges from rolling hills in the north to the flat Llano Estacado. Elevation climbs from about 2,500 feet in the east to 6,000 feet near the Rocky Mountains. This region is semiarid, getting less than 20 inches of rain each year—enough to support shortgrass prairie but not much else. It naturally swings between long droughts and unusually wet spells. In wet years, the soil can produce abundant crops, but in dry years, harvests fail. High winds are common here too. Early European and American explorers considered this area unsuitable for farming and called it the Great American Desert, since it lacked surface water and timber.

The U.S. government encouraged settlement and farming on the Plains through the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave settlers 160-acre plots. After the Civil War ended in 1865 and the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, waves of migrants and immigrants arrived, greatly expanding the land under cultivation. An unusually wet period led many to believe that "rain follows the plow"—a phrase used by real estate promoters—and that the climate had permanently changed. Cattle ranching was the first major agricultural activity, but harsh winters in 1886, a short drought in 1890, and overgrazing pushed landowners to plow more land for crops.

To help farmers work marginal arid land, the government later offered larger plots: 640 acres in western Nebraska under the Kinkaid Act of 1904, and 320 acres elsewhere under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. European settlers poured in at the start of the 20th century. Another spell of wet weather seemed to confirm that large-scale farming was possible. Meanwhile, new technology like mechanized plows and combine harvesters allowed farmers to work bigger fields without hiring more labor.

But farmers didn't understand the Plains' ecology. In the previous decade, they had deeply plowed the virgin topsoil, destroying the native deep-rooted grasses that held soil and moisture even during drought and high winds. The rapid spread of small gasoline tractors and combines encouraged the conversion of arid grassland—some areas got no more than 10 inches of rain a year—into cropland. When the 1930s drought hit, the loose soil turned to dust. Strong winds blew it into enormous, sky-darkening clouds called "black blizzards" or "black rollers." These dust clouds traveled across the country, reaching the East Coast and cities like New York and Washington, D.C. On the Plains, visibility sometimes dropped to three feet or less. Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger witnessed the "Black Sunday" blizzards on April 14, 1935, in Boise City, Oklahoma; his editor, Edward Stanley, coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting the story.

Originally, "the Dust Bowl" referred to the geographic area hit by the dust, but today it usually means the event itself (sometimes called the "Dirty Thirties"). The drought and erosion affected 100 million acres centered on the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, plus parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. Tens of thousands of poor families—unable to pay mortgages or grow crops—abandoned their farms. By 1936, losses reached $25 million per day. Many of these people, often called "Okies" because many came from Oklahoma, moved to California and other states, only to find that the Great Depression had made conditions there nearly as hard as what they had left. The combined effects of World War I and the Russian Revolution had earlier reduced global wheat supplies, raising prices and encouraging farmers to plow up even more land.