Dust Bowl (U.S.)

The dust bowl describes the regional environmental conditions throughout the central parts of the United States and Canada from 1931 until 1939, where soil erosion was rampant and dust storms swept across the landscape. It came from inappropriate farming techniques and resulted in an exodus of many farming families, who were left homeless during a time of general economic hardship. Many stories emanated from this period, the most famous being John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

In the period following World War I, there was a sharp increase in the U.S. population. As a result, there was more demand for food, with the result that large amounts of marginal land were developed for wheat, and also for cotton. Much land in what became known as the Great Plains—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota—was quickly sold, with some returning servicemen and others seeking the opportunity of running their own farms away from the big cities. During the 1920s these communities survived, and a few even thrived. However, the land quickly gave out.

The soil was incapable of nourishing crops for more than a few years. More importantly, the breaking of tough ground, and the destruction of native grasses that had grown in semi-arid areas for over a millennium, saw much of the topsoil carried away by water after rainstorms. Massive soil erosion resulted with the gullying of plowed land, and water full of earth running off the land during rainstorms. Strong winds then made the situation worse. The years 1933 through 1935 were unusually dry, which meant that the water tables of parts of the Plains region were sinking so low that many deep wells slowly ran dry. Thus, these farms quickly turned into desert, with vast dust storms that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. Much livestock died in the dust storms from ingesting the soil, with others unable to scratch a living afterward. From 1934 until 1939, some 500,000 or more farmers and their families were forced to migrate.

One of the states worst affected by the formation of the Dust Bowl was Oklahoma (especially the central and eastern parts of the state) where so many farms failed, it has been estimated that 15 percent of the residents of the state moved west in search of work and new opportunities. These became known as the Okies who made up as many as 300,000 of those forced off their land—from a state with a population of 2.3 million at the time. The other areas worst hit were much of southern Piedmont and parts of the upper Tennessee Valley, s some areas in the interior plateau of Kentucky and also in Tennessee, some of the older glacial till in the southern part of Iowa, and also the land covered with loess in Iowa on the east of the Missouri River. The effect on the farmland was that 44 million acres of previously cultivated soil was lost, and another 87 million acres seriously damaged.

One of the worst days that enlarged the Dust Bowl was on November 11, 1933, when a strong wind stripped the topsoil from tens of thousands of farms throughout South Dakota. Then on May 11–12, 1934, a two-day storm blew away much of the topsoil throughout the Great Plains. A third disastrous day was on April 14, 1935, when blizzards wreaked havoc throughout the United States. It was this [Page 495]storm that led an Associated Press reporter to coin the phrase Dust Bowl as the skies darkened with the dust and soil, which was collected up by the wind, was swirled around and deposited hundreds of miles eastward. Other parts of the United States, fearing a similar effect on their communities, started infilling gullies, building check dams, and also embarking on the reforestation of slopes that contained marginal farming land, as well as contour plowing and going back to strip cultivation.

...