The Dust Bowl: Drought Was Nothing New on the Plains, So Why Did the 1930s Turn to Dust?

April 14, 1935, was an unusually clear Sunday on the American Great Plains. It was Palm Sunday (NWS Norman), and with the dust storms of the past several weeks finally quiet, people went outside under a blue sky to catch up on chores and go to church (PBS). But in the afternoon the temperature dropped and birds began chattering nervously. Soon a black wall, rising like a mountain range, rolled in from the northern horizon, and the moment it reached town, midday turned darker than midnight. Remembered as “Black Sunday,” that day became the defining image of the Dust Bowl, the disaster that buried the south-central plains of the United States in dust throughout the 1930s.

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Yet something here does not add up. Drought was nothing new on the Great Plains. The region naturally swings between long droughts and wet spells of similar length (Wikipedia). Researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explain that, by the standards of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the drought of the 1930s was not meteorologically extreme, and that the drought of 1856–1865 may have brought a sharper drop in rainfall. Yet no earlier drought had produced dust storms like these (Columbia LDEO). If drought was nothing new, why were the plains of the 1930s alone buried in dust? The answer lies not in the sky but in the ground, in the place where the grass roots had disappeared.

A Black Wall on a Clear Sunday Afternoon

That day’s dust storm rode a cold front moving south. The dust rose over central Nebraska in the mid-morning and raced south along the front, finally dying down near the Mexican border around 4 to 5 a.m. the next day. In half a day, a strip of land about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) long and 300 to 500 miles (480 to 800 kilometers) wide was covered in dust (NWS Dodge City).

The black cloud hit Dodge City, Kansas, at 2:49 p.m. The Weather Bureau’s log at the time estimated its height at 500 to 600 feet (150 to 180 meters) and its speed at 50 to 60 miles per hour (about 80 to 95 kilometers per hour), and recorded that “the onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror and the worst, while it lasted, ever known here.” Hundreds of birds fled ahead of the cloud, and after the storm passed, small birds lay dead on the ground (NWS Dodge City). In Canadian, Texas, as the front passed, the temperature plunged from the 80s Fahrenheit (about 27 to 32 °C) into the low 60s (about 16 to 17 °C) (NWS Dodge City).

The black wall reached Beaver in the Oklahoma Panhandle around 4 p.m., Boise City around 5:15 p.m., and Amarillo, Texas, at 7:20 p.m. (NWS Norman). In Amarillo, visibility stayed at zero for 12 minutes. An observer in Stratford, Texas, wrote that it turned “black as night at 5:40” and “stayed so for 20 minutes then got so you could see about 10 feet away and stayed so all night” (NWS Norman). Witnesses said they could not see a hand held in front of their faces.

Inside the dust, static electricity built up so strongly that it disrupted the ignition systems of cars (NWS Norman). One cattle dealer recalled that he nearly lost his wife that day. Her car was shorted out by the electricity, and as she walked home she lost her way in the dust. She found her way back to the road only by following the moving headlights of his truck as he drove back and forth (PBS).

The next day, the disaster got its name. Robert Geiger, a Denver-based Associated Press reporter, had been caught in the storm near Boise City with a photographer and waited two hours before filing his story. On April 15, newspapers printed the line “Residents of the southwestern dust bowl marked up another black duster today.” This is generally regarded as the first use of the term “Dust Bowl” (NWS Norman; Wikipedia). Some accounts say the phrase was added by Edward Stanley, the AP’s Kansas City news editor, while he was rewriting Geiger’s story (Wikipedia). The term first described the area where the dust blew; today it names the whole disaster.

Land Held Together by Grass Roots

The stage for the Dust Bowl was the High Plains west of the 100th meridian. Centered on the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and reaching into New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, this is a semiarid grassland that receives less than 20 inches (510 millimeters) of rain a year, and much of the grassland turned into wheat fields received no more than about 10 inches (250 millimeters). The drought and erosion affected about 100 million acres (400,000 square kilometers) (Wikipedia). The winds were fierce as well.

What had long protected this dry land were hundreds of native grasses such as buffalo grass and blue grama. In the words of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the grasses were what kept this land, visited by long dry spells roughly every twenty years, from turning into desert. Their tangled roots held the topsoil in place and kept it from blowing away to expose the dense hardpan beneath (NEH). When drought came, the grass might dry out and turn brown, but it survived while its roots kept their grip on the soil. On the surface it looked like unremarkable prairie, yet beneath it lay a web of roots finely made to endure wind and drought. The balance God had planted in this harsh land was easy to overlook, yet it quietly held the Great Plains together.

That balance was overturned within a single generation. The U.S. government encouraged settlement of the plains through the Homestead Act, and a few unusually wet years in the early twentieth century reinforced the belief that this land was suited to farming. When World War I and the Russian Revolution cut the world’s wheat supply and drove prices up, farmers greatly expanded their cropland. On the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920 and then tripled again between 1925 and 1930. As small gasoline tractors and combines spread, prairie on a scale no one could have broken by hand was rapidly plowed under (Wikipedia).

The problem was that shallow-rooted wheat replaced the deep-rooted perennial grasses that had been torn out. The native grasses could survive drought; the wheat could not. When the rain failed, the wheat shriveled and died, leaving bare soil fully exposed to the wind. The Columbia researchers describe this as the ultimate cause of the wind erosion and dust storms of the 1930s (Columbia LDEO).

Drought Fed the Dust, and Dust Fed the Drought

The Great Plains turned unusually dry beginning in the summer of 1930. The first recorded dust storm struck on September 14, 1930, and the drought peaked in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940. Parts of the High Plains endured drought for close to eight years (Wikipedia). A two-day storm that began on May 9, 1934, dropped about 12 million pounds (5,400 tonnes) of dirt on Chicago, and the dust went on east through Cleveland and Buffalo to cities on the Atlantic coast (Wikipedia). In the worst years, dust cut visibility to less than a mile on as many as one day in four, and more soil was lost to wind erosion than the Mississippi River carried to the sea (Columbia LDEO).

So was this disaster the sky’s fault or people’s fault? Scientists do not settle on either one. Explanations already differ on why the drought itself began. Martin Hoerling’s team at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory found that the 1950s drought on the Southern Plains was driven mainly by global sea surface temperatures, but that the 1930s Dust Bowl drought most likely began with random changes in the atmosphere rather than ocean conditions. That, they added, is why watching the oceans alone may not give early warning of such a drought (NOAA PSL). Meanwhile, the team of Ben Cook, Ron Miller, and Richard Seager pointed out that while 1930s sea surface temperatures did produce a drought, they alone produced one that did not match what actually happened (NASA GISS).

The climate model experiments this team published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2009 are revealing. A model driven only by 1930s sea surface temperatures produced a drought centered in the southwestern United States, but it could not reproduce the observed drying of the central and northern plains or the unusual heat in the middle of the continent. When the researchers added the loss of vegetation from crop failure and the new dust rising from bare ground, a drought appeared with a location and strength similar to the observations. The vegetation loss explained the heat in the north, while the dust made the drought stronger and moved its center northward. The team concluded that human-degraded land likely did more than cause the dust storms: it also amplified the drought, turning “a modest SST-forced drought into one of the worst environmental disasters the U.S. has experienced” (NASA GISS).

Here is how dust can strengthen a drought. Dust hanging in the air reduces the sunlight reaching the ground, which leaves less energy to evaporate water from the surface, and less rain falls. And as southwesterly winds carried the dust northward, the center of the drought shifted north along with it (Columbia LDEO). Bare ground made dust, dust deepened the drought, and the deeper drought exposed still more bare ground: a feedback loop. Still, the researchers note that the drought would have occurred even without people, and that because the actual amount of soil lost in the 1930s is poorly known, just how large the human role was remains a topic for further research (Columbia LDEO).

Livelihoods Buried in Soil, Lungs Filled with Dust

The damage did not stop at the land. By 1936, losses had reached $25 million a day (in the money of the time), and in many regions more than 75 percent of the topsoil had blown away by the end of the 1930s (Wikipedia). According to an analysis by economist Richard Hornbeck, by 1940 farmland values had fallen 28 percent more in high-erosion counties, and 17 percent more in medium-erosion counties, than in low-erosion counties (Wikipedia, citing Hornbeck 2012). The harm lasted. In more-eroded areas, changes in farming recovered less than 25 percent of the initial gap, and the economy adjusted mostly as many residents left (Hornbeck 2012).

People’s bodies broke down too. Breathing fine dust for long periods could cause “dust pneumonia,” in which the lungs fill with dust and the air sacs become inflamed. High fever, chest pain, coughing, and difficulty breathing followed (NWS Dodge City). The Dodge City Weather Bureau log for April 24, 1935, ten days after Black Sunday, records Red Cross officials reporting 17 deaths in Kansas from dust pneumonia and three from dust suffocation (NWS Dodge City). In Ken Burns’s documentary, Floyd Coen recalls the day his little sister died of dust pneumonia. As she died in one room of the family’s two-room house, he lay sick with the same illness in the other (NEH). There are, however, no official death statistics for the Great Plains in the 1930s. The Columbia researchers explain that hundreds, if not thousands, may have died of dust pneumonia, but the exact number is not known (Columbia LDEO).

The People Who Went West

Those who had lost their livelihoods packed up. The Columbia researchers explain that about three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought, and about half a million of them moved to other states, almost all to the West (Columbia LDEO). Estimates of the number who left the Plains states between 1930 and 1940 range from 2.5 to 3.5 million (NWS Dodge City; Wikipedia), and in just over a year, more than 86,000 people headed to California (Wikipedia).

They were often called “Okies,” but not all of them were farmers driven out by dust storms. According to a 1939 survey by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics of about 116,000 families who arrived in California in the 1930s, only 43 percent of the migrants from the Southwest had been doing farm work just before they moved, and nearly a third were professional or white-collar workers (Wikipedia). The Dust Bowl migration was a movement shaped by the Great Depression as well. John Steinbeck drew heavily on the field notes of writer Sanora Babb, then a Farm Security Administration worker, to write The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the novel’s account of the Joad family’s hard road west has kept the wounds of that era in memory (Wikipedia).

Learning Again How to Hold the Soil

The disaster changed the way the nation treated its land. At the center of that change was Hugh Hammond Bennett, known as “the father of soil conservation.” He had warned since 1928 that soil erosion was a “national menace,” and in September 1933 he became director of the Interior Department’s Soil Erosion Service. In the spring of 1935, while Bennett was testifying before a congressional committee on a bill to create a soil conservation agency, a dust cloud from the Great Plains moved over Washington, D.C. Bennett knew the storm was coming and used it as vivid evidence of why soil conservation was needed (NRCS). According to the National Weather Service office in Norman, he pointed out the window and said, “This, gentlemen, is what I’ve been talking about” (NWS Norman).

As a result, the Soil Conservation Act was enacted on April 27, 1935, creating the Soil Conservation Service (today’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Bennett led the agency until he retired in 1951 (NRCS). The government taught farmers crop rotation, strip farming (alternating strips of different crops), contour plowing along the lay of the land, and terracing. It also created the Great Plains Shelterbelt, more than 200 million trees planted from Canada to Abilene, Texas, to break the wind and hold soil and water in place (Wikipedia).

When the rains returned in 1939 and the dust storms died down, farmers on the plains turned to the vast groundwater beneath their feet, the Ogallala Aquifer. This aquifer, covering about 174,000 square miles (450,000 square kilometers), recharges only 0.024 to 6 inches (0.6 millimeters to 15 centimeters) a year depending on the area, while hundreds of thousands of irrigation wells draw water far faster than that. Its volume has been dramatically drawn down since 1950, and some worry that if it is pumped dry, the plains could face another Dust Bowl (NEH).

The Dust Bowl was neither the sky’s fault alone nor people’s fault alone. Drought had always come to this land, and each time, deep-rooted grasses had held the soil in place. What made the 1930s different was that those roots were gone. The stripped soil rose into the sky and deepened the drought, and an ordinary dry spell became a great disaster in American history. In the end, the recovery of the Great Plains was a process of relearning the order that people had torn away: covering bare ground, breaking the wind, and bringing back the grasses and trees that hold water. Even a handful of the soil we stand on carries a finely made order kept over long ages, and the Dust Bowl still quietly reminds us what it costs to strip it away carelessly.

References

• The Black Sunday Dust Storm of April 14, 1935 — NWS Norman
• Anniversary of April 1935 Dust Storm (Black Sunday) — NWS Dodge City
• Black Sunday — PBS American Experience
• Drought Origins Differ — NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
• Cook, Miller & Seager (2009), Amplification of the North American “Dust Bowl” drought through human induced land degradation — NASA GISS
• Did dust storms make the Dust Bowl drought worse? — Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
• Hornbeck (2012), The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl — American Economic Review
• Hugh Hammond Bennett Biography — USDA NRCS
• Children of the Dust — National Endowment for the Humanities
• Dust Bowl — Wikipedia

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