Plows and drought turned prairie topsoil into black blizzards
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s blasted American and Canadian prairies with storms that wrecked farms and lungs. Homestead Acts had pushed settlement onto arid High Plains west of the 100th meridian; when drought hit, over-plowed sod became airborne, and culture from Steinbeck to Woody Guthrie recorded the exodus.
The worst-hit land lies mostly beyond the 100th meridian on the High Plains, rolling in the north and pancake-flat on the Llano Estacado, climbing from about 2,500 feet in the east to 6,000 feet at the foot of the Rockies. Washington lured farmers there with the Homestead Act of 1862 and its 160-acre plots; after the Civil War and the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, settlers poured in. Later laws enlarged grants to 640 acres in western Nebraska under the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and to 320 acres across the plains in 1909.
High wheat prices during the First World War and the Russian Revolution drove a ploughing boom, and farmland on the Llano Estacado doubled between 1900 and 1920. Gasoline tractors let farmers rip up deep-rooted native grasses that had held soil and moisture through dry spells. Then, after a wet 1920s, drought arrived in the summer of 1930; the northern plains endured four of their seven driest years since 1895. Later analysis tied the drought to ocean temperature anomalies, with Pacific surface temperatures exerting the most direct influence.
The first recorded storm struck on 14 September 1930, a black or grey cloud rolling along the ground so thick people lost sight of their hands. A November 1933 storm stripped South Dakota fields, and a two-day storm from 9 May 1934 carried off enormous amounts of plains topsoil. On Black Sunday, 14 April 1935, a clear, still, warm day ended when a cold front from Canada drove a wall of dust south across the plains. Associated Press editor Edward Stanley coined the phrase Dust Bowl while rewriting reporter Robert Geiger's account of that storm.
Drought and erosion touched about 100 million acres centred on the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. After one storm alone, more than 350 houses had to be demolished, banks foreclosed on homesteads, and over half a million Americans lost their homes. Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Dorothea Lange's 1936 Migrant Mother photograph preserved the catastrophe, while Kansas researchers later promoted a hay method to restore native grass.
Source: Dust Bowl
