On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people. It’s unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Some people developed “dust pneumonia” and experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. Dust worked its way through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and furniture. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.īillowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. Some of these carried topsoil from Texas and Oklahoma as far east as Washington, D.C. Population declines in the worst-hit counties-where the agricultural value of the land failed to recover-continued well into the 1950s.ĭuring the Dust Bowl period, severe dust storms, often called “black blizzards,” swept the Great Plains. The economic effects, however, persisted. Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.īy 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres-an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas-was rapidly losing its topsoil. Severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains in 1930. The Dust Bowl, also known as “the Dirty Thirties,” started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation-especially in the Southern Plains. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. In desperation, farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.Ĭrops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. But as the United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices plummeted. Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. A series of wet years during the period created a further misunderstanding of the region’s ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn’t be reached by irrigation. This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny-an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. Many of these late 19th and early 20th-century settlers lived by the superstition “rain follows the plow.” Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains. 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. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |