Dust Bowl Research Paper

Gabrielle Payne
Ms. Molise
10/10/13
Causes of the Dustbowl
In the year 1930 America’s economy was in a state of depression. The last thing America needed at this time was a catastrophic event to destroy the economy even more, but that is exactly what they got. The “Dust Bowl” drought is one of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States drought which devastated the United States central states region known as the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl worsened the already depressed American economy in the 1930's, causing millions of dollars in damages. What caused this catastrophic event that put the central states in such a state of poverty?
You cannot understand the Dust Bowl without understanding the ecology of The Great
Plains. The plains are wavelike, gently sloping down from the Rocky Mountains towards the East. The Great Plains have not always been as dry as they are today. In fact it is believed that the plains formed from a shallow inland sea. They believe this because they have found fossils of sea shells and fish. The small slope is caused by the buildup of soil and stones washed down from the Rockies. There are trees, mostly cottonwoods, which grow along the river banks in the Great Plains. The Great Plains has extreme, violent weather. The weather can change from heavenly to hell like weather in just one moment. Since there are no trees to block the wind, the wind blows continuously. At times the wind can blow up to 100 miles per hour. Depending on the season, the wind brings burning up heat that you do not get relief from for days, even at night. This heat puts the people who live in The Great Plains in agony. The heat dries up streams, animals die of thirst, and plants shrivel up quickly. (Albert Marrin) With this already cruel weather the last thing that the people of The Great Plains needed was a shattering event like the Dust Bowl.
During early European and American exploration of the Great Plains they thought that the land was unsuitable for farming. The region was known as the Great American Desert. The lack of surface water and timber made the region less attractive than other areas for pioneer settlement and agriculture. Since very few people wanted to farm there, settlement was encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862. In Years of the Dust it tells us that “In 1862 “ […] “Congress passed the Homestead Act” […] “This law offered 160 acres of land to any citizen…” (Marrin) The Homestead Act was a great thing for many farmers. In the book, The Dust Bowl, it is said that “America has always been a land of opportunity, and the opportunity was never greater than in 1862 when the United States passed the Homestead Act.” (Sandler) With the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, numerous amounts of new immigrants arrived in the Great Plains, and cultivation increased. This caused over 11.3 million acres of land to be plowed in a very short amount of time. Then, during the 1920s, an unusual wet period in the Great Plains led settlers and the federal government to mistakenly believe that "rain follows the plow". This phrase was quite common in the 1930s. This phrase caused the farmers to believe that the climate of this region had changed permanently. (Schubert) Before the Dust Bowl began, more than 5 million acres of new farmland had been plowed, although not all of it had been used. As a decade of rains on the Great Plains ended, a long drought began, lasting throughout the 1930s. (Capital Journal)
During the decade long drought, they thought that all they needed is rain. Caroline Henderson, A survivor of the dust bowl confesses “”We dream of faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture, but we wake another day of wind and dust hopes deferred.”” (Sandler) The Dust Bowl was caused by a horrendous decade-long drought and because of the favored agricultural method. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country, parts of Mexico and Canada, and was notorious for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains. It might not have been as bad if the farmers would not have continued plowing and planting on a massive amount of land, even after there was a drought. (Sandler) Rain is a key to farming. In The Years of Dust they tell us how rain controlled everything and they are correct when they say “Rainfall decides what, if anything, will grow.” (Marrin) Farmers from the 1930s planted wheat where the grasslands used to be. The soil was already prone to being blown but the grass held the soil and moisture in the ground during droughts, but the wheat did not. So when the farmers plowed the grass up it caused for the now exposed dirt to be whipped upwards by the high speed winds. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare over winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thus depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation. When severe drought struck the Great Plains region in the 1930s, it exposed the increased risk for erosion that was created by the farming practices in use at the time. The drought dried the topsoil and over time it became friable, reduced to a powdery consistency in some places. Without the indigenous grasses in place, the high winds that commonly occur on the plains were able to create the massive dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period. (Marrin) It was the worst environmental disaster in US history, resulting from years of land that was not farmable and destroyed native grasslands that held soils in place. (Sandler) The year was 1931—the beginning of the Dust Bowl.
For the next nine years, massive clouds of dust and dry soil swept across the nation, from Texas to Washington, DC, blackening skies, ruining farmland and leaving millions homeless. The dustbowl was by far the most catastrophic man made event in the United States. It is descried to us as it “Blew all night and still blowing almost black. It is a terrible feeling to be in this blackness. You don’t know what is going on outside and you imagine all kinds of things. It is so still, it just blows and blows but as if there was no wind, just rolling clouds of dust...”
(Babb)
In 1930 they were very convinced that wheat prices would continue to rise and rain would continue to fall. Beginning in 1920s, they had a new mechanical plow called “disc plow”. This plow was quite different from any other plow the farmers had seen. The Original horse-driven plows of the earlier farmers had cut deep down into the earth, barely breaking the top soil. This produced large clumps of earth that provided a barrier against the constant prairie winds. Then, when the disc plow came out, it cut much shallower into the ground pulverizing the topsoil into fine dirt. After weeks, this resulted a layer of dust settling on the fields. The farmers were not worried about the dust, at first, because they thought the rain would take care of that. Therefore they continued to plow as much acreage as quickly as possible. The problem only got worse, causing a massive, man-made disaster. (Sandler)
Another thing that caused the Dust Bowl was the irregular tropical sea surface temperatures during the 1930s, then the interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface increased its severity.
The cold Pacific water increases drought occurrence in the United States and southern South America. The cold Atlantic irregular temperatures increases drought occurrence in southern Central America, northern South America, and central Africa. The warm Pacific and Atlantic water generally lead to reversals of the drought and a rainy period increases described with the corresponding cold water. Therefore another main cause of the dust bowl was abnormally cool surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean because this caused a drought which was a major cause of the catastrophic event. (American Meteorological
Society)
You would think that we would have learned our lesson the first time that we had an event that caused thousands to leave their home and force millions to fight for their life and home, but we did not. A second dustbowl occurred in the 1950’s. The second time around it was caused mainly by the same factors in the 1930’s. The dust bowl could not be described better than when Steinbeck stated “from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; …families…dusted out…. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless—restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do—to lift, to push, to pick. To cut—anything, any burden to bear for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land” (Steinbeck)

Journal Sources
"Dusting off the Dust Bowl." Capital Journal. N.P., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013
"Impact of Common Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies on Global Drought and Pluvial Frequency." American Meteorological Society. N.P., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.
Siegfriend, Schubert. "On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl." (n.d.): n. page. Web.
Internet Sources
"The Dust Bowl - What Caused the Dust Bowl in the US Midwest in the 1930's?" About.com Weather. N.P., n.d. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.
"The Nature Conservancy. Protecting Nature. Preserving Life. ™." When the Dust Settled. N.P., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.
"Dust Storms in the 1930s Dust Bowl." Dust Storms in the 1930s Dust Bowl. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2013
"About The Dust Bowl." About The Dust Bowl. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2013
Book Sources
Babb, Sanora. Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2004. Print
Marrin, Albert. Years of Dust: The Story of the Dust Bowl. New York: Dutton Children's, 2009. Print.

Martin W. Sandler. The Dust Bowl through the lens.