The Horrors of the Dust Bowl

On Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935, a black wall of dust a thousand feet high rolled across the southern Great Plains and turned the afternoon into night. The next day, a reporter named it the Dust Bowl. Almost everything most Americans believe about it is wrong. This is the real story: the 1909 homestead expansion and the belief that rain follows the plow, the Great Plow-Up of the wheat boom, the black blizzards, dust pneumonia, rabbit drives, and static electricity strong enough to stall cars. The homesteaders like Caroline Henderson who stayed when most people assume everyone fled. Why the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath, and the woman in the Migrant Mother photograph, were not actually from the Dust Bowl. How Hugh Hammond Bennett used a dust cloud over Washington to create the Soil Conservation Service, how the Shelterbelt planted hundreds of millions of trees, and why the Ogallala Aquifer that ended the Dust Bowl is running out beneath the same fields today. Sources: Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979) Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) Caroline Henderson, Letters from the Dust Bowl, ed. Alvin O. Turner (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, history of the Soil Conservation Service and Hugh Hammond Bennett James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Oxford University Press, 1989) U.S. Geological Survey, High Plains (Ogallala) Aquifer water-level change reports Library of Congress, Dorothea Lange Farm Security Administration photographs dust bowl, the dust bowl, horrors of the dust bowl, black sunday 1935, black blizzard, dust storm, great depression, 1930s america, okies, grapes of wrath, route 66, woody guthrie, dorothea lange, migrant mother, caroline henderson, hugh hammond bennett, soil conservation service, shelterbelt, great plow up, dust pneumonia, oklahoma panhandle, texas panhandle, great plains history, ogallala aquifer, american history documentary, homestead act, depression era history, farm history, kansas history, oklahoma history