The Dust Bowl was an ecological phenomenon that occurred during the 1930’s in the Great Plains of the United States, across a vast region from Texas to Nebraska. It was a decade filled with dust storms and ravished with draught, it is sometimes referred to to as the “dirty thirties”. Thousands of humans and animals died during this time, and hundreds of thousands fled. After the Civil War ended, the U.S. government encouraged its citizens to push the frontier and to cultivate land further and further west. This was called “Manifest Destiny”. In 1862 the Homestead Act was passed which granted settlers 160 acres of wild, public land. The Homestead Act was revised again in 1909 to further encourage migration west, this act lead to a massive flux of new and inexperienced farmers moving onto the plains. The people, who might have had some experience farming on the east coast, believed the saying: “Rain follows the plough”. These new farmers were also encouraged to turn the land by politicians, land speculators, and scientists who all believed that working the plain’s semi-arid ecosystem would prompt changes in its climate and make the soil even more conducive to farming. So plough they did, thousands of acres. Coincidentally, a series of wet years followed which only reinforced their preconceptions about how to manage the land on the plains. Things were going well, and the people were encouraged so they ploughed more land to expand their farm and maximize yield. From about 1910-mid 1920s wheat was expensive to buy within to U.S. so America outsourced to Europe to buy any wheat. This was expensive and inefficient so the government U.S. farmers to work harder, bring up production and expand to meet the demands of our population. When the Great Depression hit in 1929 wheat prices dropped and had to work even harder just to break even. But this was quickly becoming impossible when the drought hit the plains in 1931 and crops were failing. It didn’t get better the following year, and the year after. With all the prairie grass ploughed and pulled from the soil and nothing else to hold it together, the fine, eroded soil blew away in the wind storms. This created massive dust storms and caused further economic collapse. The dust was so fine that it would enter people’s houses through any seal no matter how tight and leave a film of dust on the entire house. People would often go to bed with a wet rag over their mouth and nose to keep the dust from getting in their lungs. Which was a real killer during the Dust Bowl, Dust pneumonia killing thousands. Not only was it penetrating, but it was in extreme quantity and severity. Settlers would have to shovel the dust from their doors and walks just to get in and out. Dust would literally blacken the sky. Severe storms, called “Black Blizzards” would blow all the way to the Atlantic coast and leave a dusting on ships ported the the bays. On May 11, 1934 a dust storm 2 miles high blew 2000 miles east and blotted out both the capitol building in Washington D.C. and the Statue of Liberty in New York. After four years of “cultivated” land on the plains being ripped of its topsoil in the unrelenting dust storms, an estimate of 135 million acres of land (just under the size of Texas) was made useless for farming...or most plant life at all for that matter. The worst dust storm to date occurred on April 14th, 1935 when a wall of sand and dust blew from the Oklahoma Panhandle traveling east. Reports in the news called it “Black Sunday”. It is estimated that 3 million tons of topsoil blew off the Great Plains that day. The Dust Bowl got its name from Black Sunday. |