The
Dust Bowl, or the
dirty thirties, was a period of severe
dust storms causing major ecological and
agricultural damage to
American and
Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940), caused by severe
drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without
crop rotation or other techniques to prevent
erosion. It was a man-made disaster caused by an abnormally severe drought combined with the deep plowing of the virgin
topsoil of the
Great Plains, which killed the natural grasses. Such grasses normally kept the soil in place and moisture trapped, even during periods of drought and high winds.
During the drought of the 1930s, with the grasses destroyed, the soil dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastwards and southwards in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean. The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000&_160;acres (400,000&_160;km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.[1]
The storms of the Dust Bowl were given names such as Black Blizzard and Black Roller because visibility was reduced to a few feet (around a meter). The Dust Bowl was an ecological and human disaster. It was caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Millions of acres (hectares) of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes. Degradation of dry lands claimed peoples' cultural heritage and livelihoods. Hundreds of thousands of families from the Dust Bowl (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found conditions little better than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages. John Steinbeck later wrote the classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and also Of Mice and Men about such people.
The event's major cause was the expansion of agriculture and inappropriate methods of cultivation, which in turn has been linked to the proliferation of small farms promoted by the Homestead Act (arguments relying on this claim note that larger farms would have instituted the environmental safeguards that were inefficient in the short-term for smaller farms). The catastrophe, which began as the economic effects of the Great Depression were intensifying, caused an exodus from Texas, Oklahoma, and the surrounding Great Plains, with more than 500,000 Americans left homeless. One storm caused 356 houses to be torn down.[2] Many Americans migrated west looking for work, while many Canadians fled to urban areas such as Toronto. Two-thirds of farmers in "Palliser's Triangle", in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, had to rely on government aid. This was due mainly to drought, hailstorms, and erratic weather rather than to dust storms such as those occurring on the U.S. Great Plains.[3] Some residents of the Plains, especially in Kansas and Oklahoma, fell ill and died from dust pneumonia and malnutrition.[citation needed]
