The Dust Bowl

Southern Great Plains, USA · 1930 to 1936 · Disaster

Severe drought and decades of deep ploughing stripped the topsoil from the southern plains. Huge dust storms, the 'black blizzards', buried farms and reached as far as the East Coast. Hundreds of thousands of families left Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, many heading west to California.

What happened

In the decades before the 1930s, farmers ploughed up millions of acres of native grassland on the southern Great Plains to grow wheat, encouraged by high prices and a run of wet years. The deep-rooted prairie grasses that held the soil in place were gone.

When severe drought struck in the early 1930s, the bare topsoil simply blew away. Vast dust storms, known as black blizzards, rolled across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico, turning day into night. On 'Black Sunday', 14 April 1935, a single storm carried an estimated 300,000 tonnes of soil. Dust from the plains fell on Washington DC and on ships in the Atlantic.

Crops failed and farms were foreclosed in the middle of the Great Depression. Around 2.5 million people left the Plains states during the 1930s, many travelling west to California, where they were dismissed as 'Okies'. Their story was told in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and in Dorothea Lange's photographs for the Farm Security Administration. The federal government responded with the Soil Conservation Service and millions of shelterbelt trees.

Part of a collection

• When nature struck. Volcanoes, earthquakes, storms and droughts that destroyed cities, moved whole populations and changed how people build and plan.

Around the same time

• The Wall Street Crash, New York City, USA, 1929
• The Golden Twenties, Berlin, Germany, 1924 to 1929
• The atomic bombings, Hiroshima, Japan, 1945
• Independence and Partition, Delhi, India, 1947

Earlier: The Wall Street Crash, 1929 · Later: The atomic bombings, 1945

Further reading

Encyclopedia article: Dust Bowl (en.wikipedia.org)