The Dust Bowl Summary

During the 1900’s a lot of devastating events occurred that led to the Dust Bowl. Some of these events were the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Specifically, the 1930’s was a period that held very severe dust storms. The dust storms remained extremely critical for about 6 years; this period of time became known as The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had tremendously negative effects on both the people in the region and the land in which the dust storms were located.

In “Black Blizzard” from Scholastic Scope it describes how people survived the Dust Bowl during The Great Depression. Dust storms could be as high as 7,000 feet and were similar to tidal waves, but made from dirt, dirt so thick that people would be able to taste it and could suffocate from inhaling it. States on the Great Plains, such as Kansas and Oklahoma, suffered from hundreds of these destructive storms that destroyed the land, economy, and forced people to move west, mainly to California. In the early 1900’s people moved to the Plain states and successfully grew crops and raised cattle, destroying something they didn’t realize would save their lives. When farmer’s invaded they wiped out the native grasses and replaced it with cash crops,

David C. King describes the dust bowl as a region and moment in the mid-1930s where hundreds of thousands of square miles were ambushed with dust storms after years of drought (6). Larason believes that the storms were caused by over cultivating farm land. When the farmers removed too much grass then cultivated the dirt until it was a fine

Imagine living on a farm out west during the 1930s. In the middle of a series of terrible dust storms. The dust storms were so horrific, children were dying from “dust pneumonia” which was a result of breathing the dust in. These dust storms would trap plains settlers in their homes for hours, days at a time. This series of dust storms is better known as the Dust Bowl. It forced 3 million settlers out of their homes. Drought, increased mechanization, and destruction of grass all lead to the Dust Bowl.

During the 1930s, the United States faced various struggles such as The Great Depression- a time in which farmers suffered severely through many challenges. One of the challenges faced by farmers was the Dust Bowl tragedy; a dust storm affecting many farms throughout the midwest. The tragic Dust Bowl was a consequence due to lack of rainfall in the dry prairie lands, decreasing crop growth, and overproduction in farming causing more exposed land. It occurred because of advancements in farming technology, drought in the Great Plains, and the harvesting of grasslands.

The Dust Bowl brought about substantial negative effects on the economy and agriculture of the Great Plains and aggravated what was left of the American economy during the great Depression. The dust storms ruined everything on the Great Plains including crops and entire farms, hence ruining the careers and livelihoods of many farmers (Egan, 2). As a consequence, the American economy collapsed even more during the Great Depression. The help of the government and training on better farming techniques greatly helped the farmers to get back on their feet. A combination of human actions and environmental factors were responsible for causing the dust storms and in turn, the Dust Bowl made numerous people abandon their homes, suffer, and eventually

The Dust Bowl occurred during The Great Depression in the 1930's. Which was an especially dreadful time for it to happen. Many people were impoverished or were on the brink of poverty. Making the man-made natural disaster all the more devastating.

In the years leading to 1930, the Great Plains experienced a healthy amount of rain. The drought began in 1930 when the rain ceased. That year proved tough for farmers in the Great Plains, but they had no idea what was yet to come. In 1931, dust storms began to sweep through the Great Plains. Behind the dust, families stayed hidden inside their homes using wet clothes and such to guard the window sills and door frames. The families affected by the Dust Bowl were trapped inside of their homes for the six years of raging dust storms. The Great Depression was a number of years that consisted of workers being laid off, no job openings available, and an overall economic low in the United States. The Great Depression, which started in the years leading up to the drought, resulted in poor living conditions, including little to no income, scarce food, and unclean water. The Dust Bowl amplified those conditions for the affected families. (Steinbeck, Lewis, “Dust Bowl”

The Dust Bowl had a negative effect on agriculture during The Great Depression that affected people in horrible ways. “The grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. However, as a drought that started in the early 1930s persisted, the farmers kept plowing and planting with increasingly

The economy was not the only thing drying up during the 1930s as a horrific drought took over the Great Plains at the same time. The drought turned the topsoil to loose dust that was carried away with the wind. The resulting dust storms were so large and destructive they made their way all the way to the East Coast. Many of the people in the Midwest were farmers who were left with no way of providing for themselves and without a place to live. This left many of them homeless and in need of government aid. The Dust Bowl was one of the worst disasters in United States history as it displaced millions of people, caused disease, and

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 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. Carloads, 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

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl was a series of devastating events that occurred in the 1930’s. It affected not only crops, but people, too. Scientists have claimed it to be the worst drought in the United States in 300 years. It all began because of “A combination of a severe water shortage and harsh farming techniques,” said Kimberly Amadeo, an expert in economical analysis. (Amadeo). Because of global warming, less rain occurred, which destroyed crops. The crops, which were the only things holding the soil in place, died, which then caused the wind to carry the soil with it, creating dust storms. (Amadeo). In fact, according to Ken Burns, an American film maker, “Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone. "Unless something is done," a government report predicted, "the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert." (Burns). According to Cary Nelson, an English professor, fourteen dust storms materialized in 1932, and in 1933, there were 48 dust storms. Dust storms raged on in the Midwest for about a decade, until finally they slowed down, and stopped. Although the dust storms came to a halt, there was still a lot of concern. Thousands of crops were destroyed, and farmers were afraid that the dust storm would happen

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.