Black Blizzards of the Dust Bowl

– ‘The End of the World Is Coming!’

It was a tectonic shift of two eras. The great age of the bison and the free Indians who hunted them gave way to the Manifest Destiny with its own kind of stampede – the surge of white settlers on the Great Plains. Hunting grounds emptied of bison gave way to farms that would be emptied of crops from dust storms caused by unsustainable agricultural practices, and both disasters bore the stain of human causation – ignorance, greed and misplaced faith. And out of both arose the resilience and inventiveness of the American spirit in overcoming adversity and adapting to change.

The Dust Bowl is widely considered to be the greatest man-made ecological catastrophe in the United States. Ideas, we know, have consequences, and Manifest Destiny was one that would eventually and unintentionally wreak havoc on the heartland.

In simplest terms, the phrase conveyed a belief that expansion of the nation’s boundaries to the Pacific was God-ordained, inspiring many adventurers to leave the crowded East for the West. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, the government gave up to 160 acres of free land to farmers who promised to live on it, improve the land and farm for five years or more.

Among the ranks of settlers seeking greater freedom and land ownership were whites, African-Americans and European immigrants. The prospect of new beginnings on a vast new frontier fanned dreams into reality. Railroads replaced covered wagons, making widespread settlement possible, and “in the 1880s and ‘90s farmers began to crowd the ranchers, and wheat began to replace cattle,” according to Britannica. Weather and climate on the semi-arid plains is highly variable, with seasons of drought and rain, but the first wave of settlers came in years of plentiful rain.

An offspring of the notion of a divine imperative to drive westward expansion is seen in another popular and unfortunate slogan: “Rain follows the plow.” It also served to “dispel the rumor that the middle of America was not good for farming,” as explained in a homestead blog. The slogan was coined by Charles Dana Wilber in his 1881 book The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the Northwest:

“Suppose (an army of frontier farmers) 50 miles, in width, from Manitoba to Texas, could acting in concert, turn over the prairie sod, and after deep plowing and receiving the rain and moisture, present a new surface of green growing crops instead of dry, hard baked earth covered with sparse buffalo grass. No one can question or doubt the inevitable effect of this cooling condensing surface upon the moisture in the atmosphere as it moves over by the Western winds. A reduction of temperature must at once occur, accompanied by the usual phenomena of showers. The chief agency in this transformation is agriculture. To be more concise. Rain follows the plow.”

And so they plowed, destroying 5.2 million acres of deep-rooted prairie grass to plant corn and the crop best suited to the region, wheat. But they didn’t know that those tall prairie grasses were nature’s way of protecting the topsoil.

As you can see, a perfect storm is gathering and growing in year after year of prolonged drought – nearly the entire decade of the 30s – and with the drought came dust, huge, rolling, rising walls of dust across the Great Plains smothering cattle, cars and even people. The dust storms lasted from one hour to three and a half days. Jennifer Robinson points out the terrible effects on people and animals: “The dust was beginning to make living things sick. Animals were found dead in the fields, their stomachs coated with two inches of dirt. People spat up clods of dirt as big around as a pencil. An epidemic raged throughout the Plains: they called it dust pneumonia.”

The worst storm came on April 14, 1935, a day called Black Sunday. With a cold front from Canada colliding with warm air over the Dakotas, the temperature plunged more than 30 degrees, and the raging wind created “a dust cloud that grew to hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet high as it headed south,” according to the History newsletter.

In an article in the New Republic, Avis D. Carlson gives a graphic picture: "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk…. The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions."

One woman, interviewed in Burns’ The Dust Bowl, exclaims, “We saw this cloud coming in black, black dirt, and I’ll never forget what my grandmother said – she said, “You kids run and get together. The end of the world’s coming!”

Dust storm in Rolla, Kansas on Black Sunday, April 14, 1935
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs)

Aftermath of dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936
(Photo by Arthur Rothstein, Courtesy Library of Congress)

With lands and livelihoods destroyed, farmers and their families left the Plains in droves, migrating from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico hoping to find work farther west. In all some 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl region, with about 300,000 of them headed for California looking for jobs. You can listen to soul-stirring portions of their stories and songs, recorded in 1940 by Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin. Todd was commissioned by the Library of Congress to travel throughout California’s central valley and produce oral histories of the refugees, the region that’s the setting for John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath.

This the region of the affected states. The Dust Bowl area is in brown; the areas affected are in yellow. The red mark is Frederick, Oklahoma.
(The Legal Genealogist)

"Broke, baby sick, and car trouble!" Missouri migrant family's jalopy breaks down near Tracy, California.
(Photo by Dorothea Lange, 1937, Library of Congress)

Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, a series of measures was launched to aid suffering Americans and prevent future ecological disasters, though the effects weren’t immediate. Programs like the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Soil Conservation Service, the Taylor Grazing, and the Shelterbelt Project helped farmers to become self-sustaining; they enriched and protected the soil, planted two million trees and fought wind erosion. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration created jobs for millions of unemployed Americans.

An enduring FSA program that brought the Dust Bowl and the Depression before the eyes of Americans and continues to do so was “a visual encyclopedia of American life,” as described by Roy Stryker. As the administrator, he hired a team of eleven photographers to take pictures of people everywhere in America, but especially rural America. These high-quality photographs are found on multiple internet sites and are in the public domain.

An Oklahoman boy during a dust storm, 1936
(Photo by Arthur Rothstein, Wikipedia)

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