The Dust Bowl

by Rachel Pierce



         A quote from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath:
         "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. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."

          The Dust Bowl is largely known as a series of intense, damaging dust storms in the 1930's that spread throughout the American and Canadian prarie lands.

          It is said that the majority of damage from these storms occurred from 1930 to 1936, but storms lasted well through the entire decade.

          These storms had a couple of causes. During this time, there had been years of extensive farming on the land without the use of crop rotation or forms of irrigation that would have helped prevent erosion. All this dirt in the Great Plains was exposed because of grass removal during plowing. These factors, coupled with severe drought, caused soil to dry out and form a sort of dust that easily blew in large, dark clouds.

          It was recorded that the effects of such dust storms were impossible to live with. It was impossible to keep homes clean because the dust was so fine and blew so strong that it could penetrate even the smallest cracks of a door or window.

          "The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "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... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions.

          The more widespread struggle of the Great Depression occurred during this time as well. With the storms creating deplorable living conditions and the farm land impossible to utilize, many Americans fled their homes in these areas and traveled westward. This was one of the greatest migrations in American history. Millions of Americans migrated west in search of a life rid of the dust storms and economic disaster that surrounded them.

Works Consulted