Dust Bowl Research Paper

It all started with a drought in the Midwest in the 1930s. “The great western explorer”, John Wesley Powell, “determined that 20 inches of rain annually was the minimum for successful farming.”(Doc. E). High Plains Regional

A Texas sheep herder stated “Grass is what counts. It’s what saves us all- far as we get saved…. Grass is what holds the earth together.” (Document B). Grass saved men, women, and children because the grass helped produced oxygen. “Grass is what holds the earth together” (Document B) means the grass holds the dirt in the ground, however, when farmers used the higher quality machines to harvest crops, the machines would rip the grass out of the ground and then dirt flew in the air. So much of the dirt flew in the air when the grass was pulled out that children died from “dust pneumonia”.  Mechanization, a drought, and the significant loss of grass are three  main causes that led to the horrible disaster in

In the 1930’s America had a lot of hard times and one of them was the Dust Bowl.The Dust Bowl was part of the great depression in America.A lot of farms, cities, and families were hit by the Dust Bowl and it affected their life. The Dust Bowl started on Thursday, April 18, 1935 and it happened in the western states of the U.S. and it went to the southern Great Plains. What reasons made the Dust Bowl occur? There were three main causes for the storms and the Dust Bowl that was created: destruction of Prairie Grass, mechanization, and lack of rainfall.

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

The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to

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.

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 some cases, school was cancelled because of these storms. In the same year, slightly after noon on January 21st, a dust storm was reported that rose up to 10,000 feet in the air with winds that blew 60 miles per hour. According to Duncan, the local weather bureau called it “awe-inspiring” and “most spectacular”. An Associated Press reporter gave the Dust Bowl its name the day after Black Sunday, which was the worst dust storm reported (Ganzel). These storms were so devastating that people had to cover their faces with wet rags in fear they would get dust pneumonia, a deadly condition where dirt would clog up the lungs (Klein). They were also fearful of being caught outside of their house in the middle of a dust storm, because the storms rolled with thousands upon thousands of fine particles of dirt that would completely block out the sun, and no light could penetrate the blanket of darkness (Ganzel). The residents of the Great Plains couldn’t even escape the dust inside their own homes. The dust would somehow percolate through the tiniest of cracks, crevices, or gaps in the walls, windowsills, and door frames (Duncan 51). These deadly storms were also capable of producing so much static electricity between the ground and the airborne dust that even a simple handshake could initiate a spark so powerful it would knock them to the ground (Klein). The entire region of the Plains was affected, and eventually the entire country (Ganzel).

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

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

One of the most devastating and influential events in American history was the Dust Bowl. This catastrophe occurred in 1930s during the Great Depression. All across the Great Plains, a disaster was formulated by a combination of factors; some of these factors included little to no precipitation, light weight soil, and high wind speeds. Without plant roots holding down the earth, major dust storms or “black blizzards” would sweep through the farming regions blinding and killing cows and destroying any chance of future crop. This resulted in majority of agricultural based families moving.

The Dust Bowl was known as the Dirty Thirties, it was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe droughts and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion caused by the phenomenon. The drought and erosion the Dust Bowl affected was 100,000,000 acres. The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their house and their farms. The panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma touched a little parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. There is a little rainfall, light soil and high winds.

Before these changes, which enabled this devastating event, they received less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. To put that into perspective, on average, Massachussetts gets, 43.76 inches of precipitation per year. Since the soil was so dry, the farmers election not to rotate their fields and to not use soil erosion prevention methods, allowed volatile soil, which lacked minerals and moisture and to be wafted into the air and carried for thousands of miles. At one point, some part of a dust cloud had reached 100,000,000

The Dust Bowl was caused from drought, erosion, and over using the land. For example the book mentions “Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day…”(Lee,5) .It affected farmers in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas but the storm affected nearly every farmer from all over the country. For example the farmer Mr.Cunningham didn’t have much money so, “The Cunninghams never took anything they can’t pay back…”(Lee, 22) .The Dust Bowl caused tens of thousands of families to abandon their homes.