Sowing Catastrophe

The cause, horror, and legacy of the American Dust Bowl

For 20,000 years, the American Great Plains thrived as a vast grassland ecosystem.  Rolling expanses stretched across the plains of Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, Nebraska, Kansas, eastern Colorado, and northeastern New Mexico.  The land received little rain yet resisted erosion as the tall grasses bound soil with deep roots, held moisture, buffered winds, and provided habitat for a complex web of species.

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres of federal land in the American West to settlement.  It granted 160 acres to any U.S. citizen or intended citizen who paid a small filing fee and agreed to live on the land, build a dwelling, and farm it for at least five years.  The law aimed to encourage westward migration and development.

Farmers began tearing up the grasslands of the southern High Plains in overlapping waves that spanned several decades.  In the late 1800s, after the Homestead Act and the spread of railroads, settlers started farming parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado.  In the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, however, ranching and open-range cattle remained dominant until the early 1900s.  Some small-scale plowing took place in the 1880s and 1890s, but droughts quickly forced many families to abandon farms, leaving ranching as the main livelihood.

The Kinkaid Act of 1904 encouraged settlement of the Nebraska Sandhills by granting 640-acre claims—four times larger than those offered under the original Homestead Act—on the belief that larger plots were necessary for ranching and dryland farming in the arid High Plains.  Thousands moved in, but many soon discovered that even 640 acres could not sustain families in such fragile, drought-prone land.  By 1909, the Enlarged Homestead Act doubled claim sizes to 320 acres across other regions of the Plains, drawing settlers deeper into the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and western Kansas.

In the 1910s through 1920s, rain fell, and farmers uprooted the native grasses and planted wheat.  World War I drove wheat prices way up to $2.16 per bushel in 1917.  Farmers rushed to plow grassland for profit.  Mechanized tractors replaced horse-drawn plows, allowing vast areas to be converted to cropland.  By 1925, millions of acres of native prairie had been destroyed.  In places like the Llano Estacado of Texas and New Mexico, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920.  Then from 1924 to 1929, land in the Texas Panhandle that was plowed under for wheat tripled, from 876,000 to 2.5 million acres.

When the Great Depression struck, wheat prices collapsed to under 40 cents a bushel by 1931, and farmers, desperate for income, plowed still more land.  This final wave of overproduction left the soil fully exposed when drought arrived.  Little did farmers know that in addition to wheat, they were sowing the seeds of catastrophe.

They ripped away the grasses and destroyed the native ecosystem that held soil during droughts and wind. They left land bare after harvests and burned crop stubble. The topsoil lay exposed.

Timothy Egan writes in The Worst Hard Time:

The wheat came in just as the government had predicted: a record in excess of 250 million bushels nationwide. The greatest agricultural accomplishment in the history of tilling the land some called it. The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the Southern Plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie grass. A web of perennial species evolved over 20,000 years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land. 33 million acres stripped bare in the Southern Plains. And what came from that transformed land—the biggest crop of all time—was shunned, met with the lowest price ever. The market held at nearly 50% below the amount it cost farmers to grow the grain. By the measure of money, which was how most people viewed success or failure on the land, the whole experiment of trying to trick a part of the country into being something it was never meant to be was a colossal failure.

Beginning in the early 1930s, drought returned and crops failed.  Wind eroded the exposed topsoil and whipped up massive dust storms.  The first recorded storm blew on September 14, 1930.  It reduced visibility to near zero and shorted out car ignitions with static electricity.  Shaking someone's hand could deliver a shock capable of knocking a man to the ground.  Motorists dragged chains behind cars to ground the charge.

By 1934, dust storms overwhelmed the region.  In May, one event dropped 12,000 tons of dirt on Chicago.  Boston, New York City, D.C., and ships 300 miles off the Atlantic coast were covered in dust.  Soil fell as red snow over New England.  Farmers sealed doors with putty, hung wet sheets on windows, and wedged rags under thresholds.  The dust soiled food, buried homes, and filled lungs.

Dust pneumonia sickened entire communities.  Children gasped for air as parents applied desperate home remedies like kerosene-lard mixtures or grease rubbed on chests. "In desperation, some families gave away their children," one survivor wrote.  In parts of Kansas in 1935, one-third of deaths came from respiratory illness.

Livestock suffered too.  Horses ran mad.  Cattle died in fields.  Farmers cut them open and found their stomachs stuffed with sand and dust.  They choked, suffocated, or starved.

People swallowed grit.  They tied wet towels over their faces just to breathe at dinner.  The dust coated their dishes, beds, hair, teeth, and lungs.

On April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday, the worst dust storm of the Dust Bowl swept across the southern Great Plains.  By mid-afternoon, a massive black cloud of topsoil, driven by winds up to 60 miles per hour, rolled over parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.  The storm blotted out the sun, plunging towns into darkness so deep that people could not see their hands in front of their faces.  An estimated 300 million tons of topsoil blew east that day.  Men, women, children, and animals choked on the thick wall of dust that rose 10,000 feet into the sky.  The apocalyptic cloud of grit produced enough static electricity to power New York.  Black Sunday became the symbol of the Dust Bowl’s destruction.  It unleashed a fury that has never been duplicated.

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All told, 125 million acres were turned to wasteland. 2.5 million people fled the region in one of the largest environmental migrations in history.

But the choking dust storms weren't the only trouble facing the farmers of the plains.  Farmers faced a cascade of ecological plagues.  By 1935, jackrabbits driven from the grasslands by hunger swarmed farm fields.  They devoured what little green remained.  Communities organized “rabbit drives,” corralling the animals into pens where volunteers clubbed them to death.  In western Kansas alone, 269 drives between 1934 and 1936 killed over two million jackrabbits.

Grasshoppers soon followed.  Swarms grew so dense that people shoveled them off the ground. Cornstalks disappeared within hours, fields stripped clean as if incinerated by fire.  Authorities responded with an arsenal of remedies: 80,000 pounds of bran laced with sodium arsenate and molasses, flames set to infested ground, tractors dragging heavy rollers to crush insects.  Yet the pests kept coming.  They laid eggs in the bare soil, hatched anew, and swept through again.  By tearing up the grasslands and destroying natural habitat for predators (in addition to shooting and poisoning coyotes), they had removed the checks that once kept balance in the ecosystem.  Without birds, snakes, and coyotes, the grasshoppers and rabbits proliferated.

The battle against grasshoppers escalated into a full campaign.  The National Guard was called in.  Crews spread poison by truck and by air, sometimes at the rate of 175 tons per acre.  Civilian Conservation Corps workers joined in spreading the arsenic-based pesticides.  In the Oklahoma Panhandle, 80 state trucks operated around the clock, hauling and dumping poison.  Roads became slick with the carcasses of crushed insects.  But the toxins killed indiscriminately, wiping out soil life and insects essential to renewal.

Promising rains had hinted at recovery, yet the combination of poison, dust, and returning winds destroyed those fragile gains.  By the fall of 1935, the region had lost an estimated half a billion dollars in crops to drought, grasshoppers, and dust storms.  Five years into the disaster, the southern Plains showed no improvement.  Over a hundred million acres had lost most of their topsoil, and nearly half of that land could no longer be farmed at all.

Could the soul be returned to a corpse left to the winds? Could Comanche ever ride free again, lords of the tattered plain? Could Bison ever find a home on land that had given up its grass? Could the turf that evolved over eons, tailored by nature's calibrations to take fire, drought, eternal wind and cold into its life cycles ever be restitched to sterile ground? The land all around Roosevelt's parade route showed signs of terminal disorder. How to explain a place where black dirt fell from the sky? Where children died from playing outdoors? Where rabbits were clubbed to death by adrenaline-primed nesters still wearing their Sunday school clothes? Where grasshoppers descended on weakened fields and ate everything but doorknobs? How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts? Where static electricity made it painful to shake another man's hand? Where the only thing growing that a human or a cow could eat was an unwelcome foreigner: the Russian thistle? How to explain 50,000 or more houses abandoned throughout the Great Plains, never to hear a child's laugh or a woman's song inside their walls? How to explain nine million acres of farmland without a master? America was passing this land by. Its day was done.

Out of desperation, the federal government expanded its interventions.  Hugh Bennett’s Soil Erosion Service, established in 1933 and renamed the Soil Conservation Service in 1935, led the charge.  Bennett’s scientists mapped soils, took aerial photographs of eroded lands, and experimented with new practices. They taught farmers to plow along contours, rotate crops, plant cover crops, leave stubble on fields, and build terraces.

The government also purchased worn-out farmland, paying about $2.75 an acre to reclaim abandoned homesteads—a paltry sum, but there were no other offers for the degraded land.  In total, 2.25 million acres were acquired, with buildings cleared and fences removed so drifting soil would not pile against obstacles.

In a desperate attempt to fix what American agriculture had broken, 1 million acres of this land were returned to Native American communities, who, after all, had been stewarding the grasslands of the Plains for millennia before the white man's plow.  Native peoples such as the Cherokee understood that if they cared for the land, it would provide food for the bison, which would nourish them.

For the rest of the land, re-grassing became a priority.  Scientists tested seeds from the Gobi Desert and Sahara, alongside native buffalo grass, prized for its drought resistance and deep roots.  Buffalo grass had evolved over millennia to withstand high winds and low rainfall.  Restoring it meant restoring the natural armor of the Plains.

Alongside these measures, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration launched the Great Plains Shelterbelt, an ambitious plan to plant a green wall of trees across the heart of the Dust Bowl.  From Canada to Abilene, Texas, crews planted over 200 million trees—cottonwoods, locusts, hackberries, ashes, walnuts, pines, and Chinese elms.  The project cost $140 million, which was only 15% of the initial projection. It consisted of intermittent trees running about 1,150 miles north to south and 100 miles wide.  In the sheltered areas, wind speeds dropped by up to 80 percent, and the roots held the soil in place.  Agricultural yields increased by 12-15% as a result.  Some wildlife returned, including birds, which helped control some pest populations naturally. The trees created microclimates around them.

By 1937, the first winter’s plantings had survived, and as spring storms returned with their ferocious winds, crews pressed forward again. Though rains would ultimately bring some relief in 1939, it was the efforts in soil conservation and ecological restoration that gave the Plains a chance to recover.  The Dust Bowl had revealed, at immense human cost, the fragility of life on the grasslands and the need to work with nature rather than against it.

The High Plains never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl.  The land came out of the 1930s scarred, though parts healed.  In all, the government bought 11.3 million acres of ruined farmland and converted much of it back to grass.  Even so, some tracts remain barren.  Today, three national grasslands occupy the core of the old Dust Bowl, where buffalo grass grows again among abandoned farmsteads.

Yet losses remain stark.  Prairie chickens, once abundant, have declined nearly 80 percent since the 1960s.  The largest restored tract, Comanche National Grassland in Baca County, spans over 600,000 acres, with plans to reintroduce bison.  Still, Native tribes did not regain their ancestral hunting grounds. The Comanche remain confined to a small Oklahoma reservation, though they regard the shortgrass prairie as rightfully theirs under treaty.

Franklin Roosevelt’s grand shelterbelt project planted nearly 220 million trees, but most have vanished. Farmers tore many out to plant wheat when rains returned in the 1940s and wheat prices rose—as if they'd learned nothing.  Others withered in later droughts.  And later, with the rise of huge tractors, many trees were removed because they were in the way of the large equipment's turning radii.

Farming once defined the nation, yet today, less than one percent of Americans work the land.  On the Plains, the farm population has dropped by more than 80 percent. Subsidies created during the New Deal to support families now largely prop up corporate agribusiness.  Some farms collect $360,000 a year in subsidies.  This encourages crop overproduction, pushing prices down and small farms out of business.  Today, 3 billion dollars a year of taxpayer money subsidizes cotton farming, grown mainly for export to China, where it's turned into cheap clothing, then shipped back to the US shelves of Walmart and the like.

Subsidies also encourage farmers to overproduce crops like corn, which we don't even know what to do with.  As a result, more than half of the 15+ billion bushels (840 billion pounds) of corn produced annually is either exported or turned into ethanol—which is neither profitable nor clean and takes as much energy to produce it as is gained.

Later droughts in the 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s brought dust storms but no second Dust Bowl.  Why?

One reason is the soil restoration efforts of the Soil Conservation Service. The other is cause for discomfort.  Agriculture in the Midwest today rests precariously on a foundation of artificial irrigation.  Water for crops during the 1910s-1930s on the Plains was limited mostly to rainfall, since the shallow wells and small windmill-driven pumps were weak and expensive.  But after WWII, inexpensive electricity, rural electrification, and improved centrifugal pumps became widely available.  Combined with the advent of center-pivot and linear-move irrigation in the late 1940s to 50s, it became economical to tap the largest underground water source in the US, spanning from South Dakota to Texas.  This fossil aquifer, the Ogallala, was filled up by glacier melt 15,000 years ago.  Mass siphoning of the aquifer became a buffer to drought, turning semi-arid land into productive cropland.

The Ogallala Aquifer provides nearly a third of U.S. irrigation water.  But farmers pump it eight times faster than nature can recharge it.  The aquifer declines by 1.1 million acre-feet, not per year, but every day.  That is, over a million acres filled to a depth of one foot of water—every single day.  At current consumption rates, the Ogallala could be dry by the end of the 21st century.

Hugh Bennett’s legacy stabilized the land by organizing farmers and spreading conservation practices. That system, still in place, endures as the Dust Bowl’s most lasting reform.  To this day, the National Resource Conservation Service (evolved from Bennett's Soil Conservation Service) and Forest Service plant over 20 million trees in the Shelter Belt area annually and distribute 4-6 million seedlings to farmers to plant.

The Dust Bowl teaches us that destroying native ecosystems can have downstream effects that harm not only other species but also ourselves.  It shows us that temporary profit at the land's expense is a fool's bargain.

It teaches us that we must beware of downstream consequences when we attempt to solve our problems.  The liberal use of toxic pesticides during the Dust Bowl became standard practice for the following decades, until Rachel Carson's groundbreaking work exposed their dangers.  While the worst known offenders were phased out, unfortunately, they were replaced with new classes of chemical pesticides.

And then there's that Ogallala.  One-time use water.

But the calamity also gives us hope.  Humans can organize, with the right coordination (and desperation), to at least partially repair the damage we've caused on a large scale.

The Dust Bowl blared warning signs that something was not right, until it escalated into an environmental and human tragedy that even the president couldn't ignore.

What warning signs are blaring now?

How long should we wait to respond?

In what state shall we leave the world when we depart?

Resources:

Bonnifield, P. (1979). The Dust Bowl: Men, dirt, and depression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Egan, T. (2006). The worst hard time: The untold story of those who survived the great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hurt, R. D. (1981). The Dust Bowl: An agricultural and social history. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.

Library of Congress. (n.d.). Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin migrant worker collection, 1940 to 1941. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/collections/dust-bowl/

PBS. (2012). The Dust Bowl [Documentary]. Directed by Ken Burns. Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service.  https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/

Rasmussen, W. D. (1982). Soil conservation in the United States: History and policies. Washington, D.C.: USDA Economic Research Service.

United States Department of Agriculture. (1936). Report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

United States Department of Agriculture. (2015). Dust Bowl: Drought in the 1930s. National Drought Mitigation Center. Retrieved from https://drought.unl.edu/dustbowl/

Worster, D. (2004). Dust Bowl: The southern Plains in the 1930s (25th anniversary ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Encyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Dust Bowl (1931–1939). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/

History.com Editors. (2019, November 26). Dust Bowl. History. https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl

National Geographic Society. (2019, August 2). Dust Bowl. National Geographic Resource Library.  https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/dust-bowl/

The New Yorker. (2006, February 6). The worst hard time. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/06/the-worst-hard-time