It was a terrible time for the people in the United States’ Great Plains when a seemingly endless drought followed excessive plowing of the soil and caused the earth to let loose it’s hold on it’s very skin. The stripped red soil boiled up into the air, infiltrating every crevice it could find, inanimate or alive.
The Dream
Wheat was a treasure crop in the 1920s. With more and more farmers owning tractors and combines they were seeing greater yields and profits than ever before. As a result they planted more wheat, and still more wheat. They expected the world market to continue buying it up as they had in the first few years of rapid production. 1931 saw record wheat crops and profits. Things were looking good.
The Market Over Flow
The market became glutted with wheat and prices plummeted in July of 1931. Farmers who made 68 cents a bushel in July 1930 made scarcely 25 cents a bushel a year later. Many farmers went broke and abandoned their fields all across the region. Throughout the decade people would be starved out of their homes. John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes Of Wrath” was published in 1939 and offers a vivid description of this desperate time.
“And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand.” John Steinbeck, “The Grapes Of Wrath”.
The Term Paper on The Hispanic Market In The United States
Pan Boricua: Developing a Market Strategy For The Hispanic Market in the United States Pan Boricua Inc. was formed back in 2001 when Auriel Rivera and Franco came up with a plan to export Puerto Rican bread to the United States. Their major product was pan sobao which is bread that is known for its unique flavor and texture; and it’s made in Puerto Rico. An opportunity was identified when several ...
The Ruined Land
The other part of the problem was that the grasslands were considered worthless and were plowed under so that farmers could grow rich off of wheat. But it turned out that the roots of those scrappy dried out plains grasses were all that was holding the earth together. Without their established root systems firm in the soil, the fierce Midwestern winds blew the dirt right out of the ground. More and more farmers deserted the region, unable to carry on.
The Weather
As fate would have it, the weather turned crazy on the farmers that remained. The skies opened up and dumped tons of water on the plains, washing people out of their homesteads. As soon as it got through raining, the dirt blew in, ruining buildings and granaries. When all that damage was done, the blizzards tore down from the north, freezing property, bodies and spirits.
Dust Storms
Each summer in the early 1930s brought more drought to the region. The heartless winds would fling dirt into drifts several feet high against anything that stood in its path. The insides of houses were nearly as full of dirt as the outsides. Opening the windows to let in air to relieve the oppressive heat invited more dirt than already managed to creep in on its own through any unguarded crevice. People crammed every cranny with scraps of cloth and paper, trying, and failing, to keep out the relentless dirt. They tied dampened bandanas over their mouths and noses and wore goggles if they had to go out of doors. They flapped wet gunny sacks through the air indoors to try to settle the dirt so that they could breathe. Outdoors fences, tractors and walls were buried and hidden beneath drifts of dirt. Livestock suffered and died.
The Crops
In 1932 the ground was too rock hard from the drought to anyone plant their crops until September. Then came an early frost. The resultant crops were still spindly and small by the time the hard spring freezes came about. 22 days of dirt storms devastated much of that sorry yield. 1933 started with a devastating dirt storm which killed most of the remaining wheat, such as it was.
The Essay on Sand Dust Storm in China
It carries as much as 875 metric tons of dust particles per cubic kilometre of air” (Dirks 2010, 392). 2. 2 Location Strong dust storms hit Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan. (2010 China drought and dust storms 2010) 2. 3 When did it happen? It happened on March 22, 2010. (2010 China drought and dust storms 2010) 2. 4 What caused the ...
In early February the temperature plunged 74 degrees in just 18 hours in Boise City, Oklahoma. Temperatures stayed below freezing for a few days and broke just in time for yet another dirt storm. Records show 139 days of dust and drought in 1933.
In 1934 the Dust Bowl got the notice of the rest of the country when a dust storm blew all the way from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas to Washington DC and New York. There were fewer tornadoes that year than the year before, but now they got record setting heat that killed hundreds of people in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Colorado.
Black Sunday
In 1935, on a Sunday that started out fine and glorious, there came a frantic fleeing of birds which could not fly out of a dense dark cloud of dirt that soon engulfed the landscape. This, the worst storm yet, earned that day the name “Black Sunday”. By now all those who could not take the pressure had either moved far away from this desolate land, or died in it. On this bleak Sunday, many of the people who had managed to survive so far believed the end of the world was at hand. For hours they were trapped indoors unable to see a step ahead through the dirt outdoors.
Aftermath
Finally toward the end of the thirties, the weather extremes and tornados subsided. The area remains harsh but those years of the 1930s were excessive. In the years following the Dust Bowl, people set about learning how to conserve and prevent the devastation caused by the loosened soil. Farmers now are taught how to rotate crops and plant soil protecting plants to save the land from another devastation like the Dust Bowl. Droughts in the region have not produced the devastation of the Dirty Thirties.
Sources
1. http://www.usd.edu/anth/epa/dust.htm
The Dust Bowl: W.E.R.U. Wind Erosion Research Unit
2. http://www.uwec.edu/Academic/Geography/Ivogeler/w111/dust.htm
3. http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/dust/low.html
Between the Wars: The Dust Bowl
4. http://www.ultranet.com/~gregjonz/dust/dustbowl.html
History of the Dust Bowl
