The Dust Bowl Odyssey By James West Davidson And Mark Lytle

Egan also describes the physical effects of the Dust Bowl, in which many children and weak adults suffered, from diseases such as dust pneumonia, livestock’s insides were packed with soil, thus blocking their stomachs and so they died of starvation. People couldn’t hug or even hand shake because the static electricity was enough to knock someone down. He also described the way of life they had, in which in order for dust to not leak into houses, they had to seal cracks around the windows and the door with wet sheets, and however the next day they still had to throw away the soil with a shovel. In order to discharge the static electricity in cars, they had to trail chains. Many were affected economically when they started losing their savings; banks, schools, and businesses closed. Black Sunday, on April 14, 1935, became the worst dust storm ever witnessed. Egan describes the story of a man who was lost in this storm; he became blind for the rest of his life. Temperature raised up to 141 degrees, such weather increased the population of rabbits, grasshoppers, tarantulas, and black widows. These insects were killed with boiled water and, “on Sundays, a mob of people with clubs herded rabbits into a corral and smashed their skulls.” Egan shows a similarity between the homesteaders’ thirst for extreme harvest and the grasshoppers devouring the rest of what was left in the plains,

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

Because of the Dust Bowl, many peoples’ lives in the midwest were drastically changed, and California experienced a surge of refugees looking for agricultural opportunities. Because of this, many families, just like the fictional character Merliah, were forced to take jobs that required hard labour and not much pay. Merliah, a girl of 10 years old, watched, stunned, as dark clouds rolled in, and the wind whistled, making trees bend at its will. It was only 2 in the afternoon, but anyone could’ve thought it was midnight. That afternoon, Merliah watched as her father corralled all the cattle into a ditch. He was going to shoot them. Merliah covered her eyes as she heard the gunshots echo into the distance. In the morning, she put on a dust mask and jogged to get to school, afraid she would become stuck in a dust storm. Although this was Merliah’s life, everyone around her was experiencing the same things. Dust, storms, poverty-- they were what were on everyone's’ mind.

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

Other asylums included Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico. The vast majority of Dust Bowl migrants stayed on the West Coast permanently.

A few people that lived through it and that are still living today, even talked in interviews. The Dust Bowl has been stated to be one of the most depressing times that negatively affected people living through it in a personal way. “The Dust Storms began in 1932 and would eventually cover more than 75% of the country and severely affect all of the prairie states”. (30 Dust Bowl Facts: US History For Kids**)The dust bowl lasted for almost a decade, but eventually as the years passed, the dust bowl finally stopped in spring in the the year 1939. It’s a smart idea to remember the dust bowl and to try to not make the same mistake again, that would cause The Dust Bowl to happen

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

"10 Things You May Not Know About the Dust Bowl." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 08 Feb. 2016

In the 1930’s the cities Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and fell into a severe drought. They drought had lasted almost a decade, and on top of that the states had big dust storms. All the states got dust storms so much we all started to call them to“Dust Bowls.” Unfortunately not everyone could get up and move, most farmers were forced to stay. Since the farmers had to stay they had to make the most of what they had. The had no water for the crops, farm animals, or themselves.

“As a ‘double whammy’ of drought and depression deepened on the Great Plains, more and more farmers gave up or were forced off of their land” (Winter). According to Bart Robinson, an eyewitness, “Many people thought it was a plague” (Robinson). The migrant workers started moving away. “When pioneers headed west in the late 19th century, many couldn’t resist the lure of the tall grassy land in the semiarid Midwestern and Southern plains of the United States” (“Black Sunday”). Many people did travel to other states. Though “the exact scale of migrants is unknown but it’s estimated that up to 400,000 Southwesterns moved west during the 1930s and to 300,000 moved into California a decade earlier” (Sander). Dust Bowl refugees found roots in California (Winter). “Sometimes they found work, but mostly they found heartbreak and anger” (Robinson). They had once “owned profitable farms. Then they had nothin’ but hunger and dirt and two cents a barrel” (Robinson). Some migrant workers had trouble finding houses within their price range. “Many of the migrant workers lived in labor camps”

In 1934-1936 the actual Dust Bowl happened. This was when the massive and deadly storms hit the prosper and growing Midwest Panhandle. In 1936, a more severe storm spread out of the plains and across most of the nation. The drought years were followed with record breaking heavy rains, blizzards, tornadoes and floods. In September 1930, it rained over five inches in a very short time in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The flooding in Oklahoma was accompanied by a dirt storm, which damaged several small buildings and other farm structures. Later that year, the regions were hit again by a strong dirt storm from the southwest until the winds gave way to a blizzard from the north.

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the years of the 1930’s, which affected the Midwestern people, an example the farmers, which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. John Steinbeck wrote in his novel from 1939 The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, Caravans, carloads, and homeless. Totals of 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 people. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural

The printed work of the Dust Bowl written by Donald Worster tells of the devastating man-made events that occurred between 1929 and 1939. Worster described this time in history as the darkest moment life in the southern plains encountered in the twentieth-century (4) which was a time where drought, poverty, and famine were of concern. Worster also ties the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl and said that the same society produced them both because of the weakness of America (5). He strongly believes that the Dust Bowl was not a disaster created by nature, but a crisis created by man due to capitalism. Dust Bowl gives a powerful stance on how man ignored the limits of the land which led them into the dirty thirties; however, his beliefs cause him to disregard the disaster as the fault of nature, and specifically blamed man.

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

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck