The Dust Bowl

The “Dust Bowl” was a series of dust storms that swept over the great plains of the USA. This happened during the “Great Depression.” Things were already bad when no jobs were available and stock markets crashed, but the “Black Blizzards” made it even worse by killing livestock and crops.

According to www.pbs.org, in 1931 the rain stopped coming to replenish the soil with water and the farmers kept plowing the soil. They had no idea that a powerful dust storm was headed their way carrying millions of tons of stinging, blinding black dirt that will sweep across the Southern Plains. Texas, Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico were all in grave danger of a series of enormous “Black Blizzards” called the “Dust Bowl.” The drought hit first in the eastern part of the country in 1930. In 1931, it moved toward the west. By 1934 it had turned the Great Plains into a desert.

Ernie Pyle, an eyewitness account of the Dust Bowl said, “If you would like to have your heart broken, just come out here, It is the saddest land I have ever seen.”

People tried to escape the Dust Bowl by migrating to California, but some people found ways to survive it by putting wet clothes over their mouths or using gas masks to protect them from breathing in all of the floating dust that was covering the land. After the “Great Dust Storms” were over, people learned their lesson and began rotating their crops so the soil had time to replenish its nutrients and planted trees to keep the soil from starting another dust storm.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Dust-storm-Texas-1935.png

www.pbs.org cite 2

www.pbs.org cite 1