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Dust Bowl Research Paper

Decent Essays

Zacheriah Anderson
The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was considered one of the worst droughts in America in the past century.
The drought was brought on by changing climate in the mid-west; the drought during the Dust
Bowl affected nearly two-thirds of the country along with parts of Mexico and Canada.
Let’s take a look back to the early 1800’s when there were a large amount of settlers moving west looking for new farmland.White Americans moved into the western part of the country and claimed land on what was then traditionally used by Native Americans, also called
Indians. While the Indians fought to keep their land, they lost and the government forced them to move onto reservations. Settlers came from the East by the thousands in search of new …show more content…

(www.manythings.org/voa/history.131)
By the early 1900’s farmers were faced with many more problems, the first was overproduction. People in America thought there was so much land that they did not worry about cutting down trees and digging up rich topsoil, then moving on when drought struck their land.With new farming techniques producing greater yields of crops, the amount of land being farmed dramatically increased.This meant that there was a larger amount of crops going to the market, while some might think this is a great thing, it was not, and too much food and not enough consumers caused the prices to fall quickly. For the consumer this seems like a great thing, but this was bad for the farmer, lower prices meant that the farmer had to grow enormous amounts of food to just to recoup the money he had spent and to gain enough profits to make it through the winter. This was bad for the land as many farmer dug up the land, replanted …show more content…

With the prices of crops so low, this meant the farmer’s income was low. Many farmers abused the land for generations; this was because they didn’t know any better.
The Dust Bowl as we know from our history books was the name that was given to an area in the west known as the Great Plains that was devastated by drought in the early years of the Great Depression.The Great Plains region covered most of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.It stretched into parts of Missouri, Colorado and New Mexico.So while this land was rich with a thick grassy root system that held it together, after many generations of poor farming practices and thousands of acres of flat grassland being plowed, the soil no longer had the grassy root system. So in 1934 when the drought hit the Great Plains, which lasted 3 year, the winds picked up the once fertile strong topsoil and turned it into what people then called a
“Black Blizzard.” These dust storms caused cattle to choke as they had nowhere to run and no way to get fresh clean air.People fled to their homes for shelter from the dust and some even left the land behind in search of new land.Many farmers were not prepared for nature’s

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