April 14, 1935 was an unusually clear Sunday. The dust storms that had tormented the Great Plains for weeks had briefly subsided, and people went out under a blue sky for the first time in a while, hanging laundry and returning from church. Then, that afternoon, a black wall rising like a mountain range began to roll in from the northern horizon. Flocks of birds fled ahead of it, and when the wall swallowed the towns, broad daylight turned into pitch-dark night. Later called “Black Sunday,” this single day became the most iconic scene of the Dust Bowl, the dust catastrophe that blanketed the American heartland over a decade.
A Black Wall That Swallowed a Clear Sky
The storm that day formed over central Nebraska and swept rapidly southward. According to records from the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Norman, wind speeds reached roughly 65 to 100 km/h (40 to 60 mph). The wall arrived at the eastern Oklahoma Panhandle around 4 p.m., at Boise City around 5:15 p.m., and at Amarillo around 7:20 in the evening.
The most terrifying part was the moment the light vanished completely. Visibility fell to virtually zero for about 12 minutes at Amarillo and about 20 minutes at Stratford, Texas. Testimony that “you could not see the hand right in front of you” came from all over. Witnesses said the wall of dust rose more than 300 meters (1,000 feet), but that was an estimate made by eye rather than a precise measurement, so its exact height is hard to know.
Strong static electricity crackled inside the dust. Car electrical systems shorted out and engines died, and many people waited out the storm inside cars stalled in the middle of the road (PBS). The next day, Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger, covering the region, put the phrase “dust bowl” into print for the first time, and the term soon hardened into the name for the entire disaster.
Where the Deep Roots Were Stripped Away
The stage of 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, much of this land is semi-arid grassland where annual rainfall falls short of 250 mm (10 inches). It was never suited to wheat, a crop that demands ample water.
What had long guarded this dry land was perennial native grass. Plain as it looked above ground, that grass sent dense roots deep into the soil, firmly binding the topsoil and its moisture. This intricate mesh of roots, holding the soil so it would not blow away even in drought, was an order designed to let the semi-arid grassland protect itself. The balance that God had planted in this barren land was easy to overlook, yet it in fact upheld the entire ecosystem of the Great Plains.
That balance was overturned within a single generation. As World War I sent European demand for wheat soaring and prices climbed, farmers plowed up millions of acres of native prairie. Cultivated land across the Llano Estacado of Texas doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled again between 1925 and 1930. As tractors and combines spread, expanses no human hand could have managed were quickly turned into wheat fields. The trouble was that shallow-rooted annual wheat took the place of the deep-rooted perennial grass that had been torn out. When drought came during the winters and fallow seasons, after the wheat was harvested and bare ground lay exposed, the topsoil that had lost its anchoring roots simply lifted into the wind.
When Drought and Dust Fed Each Other
The drought began in the summer of 1930. The first recorded dust storm struck on September 14, 1930, and the drought went on to peak three times, in 1934, in 1936, and in 1939-40. Parts of the High Plains stayed parched for as long as eight years, and regular rains did not return until the autumn of 1939. A storm that raged for three days from May 9 to 11, 1934 dropped about 12 million pounds (roughly 5,400 tons) of dust on Chicago, and the dust drifted east all the way over New York and Washington, D.C.
So was this catastrophe the fault of the sky, or of people? Science does not settle on either side. The team led by Martin Hoerling at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory holds that the 1930s Dust Bowl drought, unlike the 1950s Southern Plains drought, was triggered not by a clear oceanic signal such as sea surface temperatures (SST) but by random variability of the atmosphere itself. That is why this drought was especially hard to foresee.
Onto this, the mark of human hands is layered. According to an analysis published in 2009 by the team of Cook, Miller, and Seager at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a climate model fed only the sea surface temperatures of the time reproduced merely a “moderate” drought skewed toward the Southwest; it could not generate the drying at the center of the continent or the northward-shifted damage that were actually observed. Only when the loss of vegetation from people plowing up the grassland, and the dust aerosols that arose from it, were included did the observed location and intensity of the Dust Bowl emerge. In other words, dust rising from bare ground itself intensified the drought and pushed its center northward, a feedback at work. Upon a drought summoned by nature, the soil stripped bare by people was layered, and the two magnified each other. Still, this account of causes is not a settled consensus so much as research that is being refined even now.
The Livelihoods and Lungs the Dust Swallowed
The damage did not stop at the land. By around 1936 losses ran to about 25 million dollars a day (in the currency of the time), and by 1940 the value of farmland in the hardest-eroded counties had fallen 28 percent. In many areas more than 75 percent of the topsoil was gone. Surface soil built up over long ages had been carried off by the wind in just a few years.
Human bodies broke down too. Breathing in the fine dust suspended in the air for long enough inflamed the alveoli, and “dust pneumonia” spread. High fever and chest pain, shortness of breath and a dry cough followed, and children and the elderly were especially vulnerable (NEH). In 1935 alone, dozens of people died of dust pneumonia in Kansas. No official mortality statistics survive for the Great Plains of the 1930s, however, so the death toll for the whole span of the disaster cannot be pinned to a single number. Even so, the surviving testimony and records make plain that the dust reached deep into people’s lungs.
Those who lost their homes packed their bags. Between 1930 and 1940 the population that left the Plains states is estimated, depending on definition, at 2.5 to 3.5 million, and more than 86,000 of them headed for California in little more than a year. They were often called “Okies,” but it is worth noting that many of the migrants were not in fact from the worst-hit areas. Lumping in the ordinary farm exodus of the Great Depression and treating them all as dust-storm refugees is at odds with the facts. In his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck depicted the weary westward journey of the Joad family, keeping the wounds of this era long in memory.
Learning Again How to Hold the Soil
The catastrophe, paradoxically, changed the very way people treated the land. At the center of it stood Hugh Hammond Bennett, called the “father of soil conservation.” He left a famous episode: while pressing a Senate committee to back a soil-conservation bill in the spring of 1935, as dust blown in from the Midwest happened to darken the sky over Washington, D.C., he pointed out the window and let the sight itself testify in his place (NRCS).
That April 27, the Soil Conservation Act was enacted, and the Soil Conservation Service (today’s NRCS) was established under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with Bennett as its first chief. The government promoted plowing along the contour and rotating crops, and paid farmers who protected their soil a subsidy of one dollar per acre. Along the “Great Plains Shelterbelt,” running from the Canadian border to Abilene, Texas, more than 200 million trees were planted to break the wind. Thanks to such efforts, the amount of blowing soil had dropped by 65 percent by 1938.
The recovery of the Great Plains was, in the end, a process of relearning the deep-rooted order that people had stripped away: covering the bare ground to block the wind, and restoring the grass and trees that hold water. It was also an effort to bring back, from the place of a steward, the balance that had been planted in this land from the beginning.
The Dust Bowl was neither the fault of the sky alone nor of people alone. On the sensitive ground of a semi-arid grassland, nature’s drought and humanity’s excessive plowing overlapped, and the stripped soil fed the drought in turn, growing into a vast disaster emblematic of twentieth-century America. And that ashen lesson still quietly reminds us that even a handful of the soil beneath our feet holds a long-kept, intricate order, and that a price follows when we strip it away carelessly.
References
- Dust Bowl — Wikipedia
- The Black Sunday Dust Storm of April 14, 1935 — NOAA/NWS Norman
- Causes of the 1930s Dust Bowl Drought — NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
- Cook, Miller & Seager (2009): Amplification of the North American Dust Bowl Drought — NASA GISS
- Black Sunday — PBS American Experience
- Hugh Hammond Bennett Biography — USDA NRCS
- Dust pneumonia — Wikipedia
- Children of the Dust — National Endowment for the Humanities