History of The Dust Bowl

The Great Plains region (southwestern Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, northern New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado) that was decimated by nearly a decade of drought and soil erosion in the 1930s was known as the Dust Bowl. The land was devastated by enormous dust storms that ruined crops and made it impossible to live there.

 

Millions of people who were compelled to leave their homes went in quest of employment in the West. The Great Depression was made worse by this ecological catastrophe, which was only relieved once the rains started to fall again in 1939 and serious soil conservation initiatives had been launched. 

 

Once upon a time, the Great Plains were renowned for their lush, productive prairie soil, which had taken thousands of years to develop. Cattlemen overgrazed the semi-arid Plains after the Civil War, packing it with cattle that ate the prairie grasses that kept the topsoil in place.

 

Wheat farmers, who settled on the Great Plains and overplowed the area, quickly took the place of cattlemen. By the start of World War I, farmers had cultivated so much wheat that they were ploughing miles and miles of soil, taking the unusually wet weather and bumper crops for granted. In the 1920s, tens of thousands more farmers moved to the region and ploughed even more grassland. The surviving native Prairie grasses were quickly destroyed by faster and more powerful gasoline tractors. However, 1930 had minimal precipitation, bringing an end to the extraordinarily wet spell.

 

A drought that lasted eight years began in 1931 when temperatures were higher than usual. The cleared ground, which was not shielded by the native grasses that originally thrived there, suffered damage from the winter's strong winds.

 

When a 200-mile-wide dirt cloud rose from the earth in 1932, the wind increased and the sky turned dark in the middle of the day. The topsoil, referred described as a "black blizzard," blasted away, trampled over everything in its path. In 1932, fourteen of these dark blizzards broke out. In 1933, there were 38. 110 dark blizzards occurred in 1934. Some of these black blizzards released a lot of static electricity, enough to short out an engine or knock someone to the ground.

 

Cattle starved or were sold if there were no green grasses to eat. Although some covered their windows with damp sheets and used gauze masks, buckets of dust nevertheless found their way inside. People have trouble breathing because to a lack of oxygen. Outside, the dust covered houses and cars like snow.

 

The region, which had once been extremely fruitful, was now known as the "Dust Bowl," a name created in 1935 by journalist Robert Geiger. As the dust storms grew in size, they spread more and more states with their swirling, powdery dust. Due to the deep ploughing of over 100 million acres of cropland, the Great Plains were turning into a desert and losing all or most of their topsoil.

 

The Great Depression's wrath was made worse by the Dust Bowl. The Drought Relief Service, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, provided relief checks, the purchase of livestock, and food handouts, however, this had no positive impact on the land. Locusts that jumped and hordes of famished rabbits emerged from the hills. Strange ailments started to appear. If one was trapped outside during a dust storm—storms that could appear out of nowhere—they would suffocate. The illness that caused people to vomit up dirt and mucus became known as dust pneumonia or the brown plague.

 

Dust storm exposure has occasionally resulted in fatalities, particularly in young children and the elderly. 

 

Thousands of Dust Bowlers packed up and moved west in search of farm employment in California after four years without rain. A great migration of people departed the Great Plains, worn out and forlorn.

 

Tenacious people stayed behind in the hopes that the following year will be better. They didn't want to live in bare-floored tent cities in the San Joaquin Valley of California with the homeless people who were struggling to find enough migrant farm work to feed their families. But when their farms and homes were foreclosed, many of them were forced to flee. In addition to farmers leaving their villages, business owners, educators, and healthcare workers also did so. According to estimates, 2.5 million people had left the states affected by the Dust Bowl by 1940.

 

Hugh Hammond Bennett, who is generally regarded as the pioneer of soil conservation, had an idea in March 1935 and presented it to Congress. Bennett, a soil scientist, had conducted research for the Bureau of Soils on soils and erosion from Maine to California, in Alaska, and in Central America. Growing up in North Carolina, Bennett had seen his father utilize soil terracing for farming, which he claimed prevented the soil from blowing away. Bennett had also seen adjacent plots of land where one patch had been misused and become unusable while the other had retained its fertility due to the presence of natural trees.

 

Bennett went to a Congressional hearing on the Dust Bowl issue in May 1934. One of the fabled dust storms made it all the way to Washington, D.C., where the conservationist was trying to explain his ideas to the Congressmen who seemed to be interested. The legislators finally breathed what the Great Plains farmers had tasted when the sun was hidden by the foreboding shadow. The Soil Conservation Act was finally approved by the 74th Congress and signed by President Roosevelt on April 27, 1935.

 

The remaining Great Plains farmers were compensated $1 per acre to attempt the newly established techniques when beginning procedures were devised. They attempted, as they needed the cash.

 

In order to prevent erosion, the initiative planned for the massive planting of 200 million wind-blocking trees throughout the Great Plains, which extend from northern Texas to Canada. Along the fencerows separating properties, native red cedar and green ash trees were put in place. By 1938, the amount of dirt being blown away was decreased by 65 percent thanks to significant re-plowing of the field into furrows, the planting of trees as shelterbelts, and crop rotation. The drought persisted, though.

 

The rain finally returned in 1939. The country once more turned golden with the production of wheat thanks to the rain and modern irrigation technology developed to withstand drought.