The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that struck the southern Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s. The hardest-hit region included the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring parts of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

The disaster had both natural and human causes. Several years of drought dried out the soil at the same time that millions of acres of native prairie grass had been plowed under to plant wheat. The deep roots of the prairie grasses had once held the soil in place and trapped moisture even during dry years. Once that grass was gone, the exposed topsoil could simply blow away when the winds came.

Farmers had expanded their fields rapidly during and after the First World War, when wheat prices were high and new tractors made it possible for a single family to plow far more land than before. When prices collapsed at the start of the Great Depression, many farmers plowed even more land in an effort to make up for their losses, leaving still more soil unprotected.

The worst storm, remembered as Black Sunday, swept across the plains on April 14, 1935. Witnesses described a black wall of dust that turned day into night and forced people to take shelter wherever they could find it. Dust from the plains storms reached as far east as Washington, D.C., and fell on ships in the Atlantic Ocean.

The storms drove roughly two and a half million people out of the plains states by 1940. Many of these migrants traveled west to California, where they found low wages, crowded camps, and hostility from local residents.

The federal government responded with new programs to conserve the soil. The Soil Conservation Service, created in 1935, taught farmers to plow along the contours of the land, to rotate their crops, and to plant long rows of trees as windbreaks. These practices, together with the return of normal rainfall, helped to end the Dust Bowl by the early 1940s.
