How did people survive the Dust Bowl?

When people first started to settle in North America, they found out that land in certain states was much better than in others. The green pastures of the eastern coast allowed the mass production of staple crops and the rich mineral deposits on the western coast saw hundreds of mining towns and resources being produced from the ground, but the south-central states had things a little more difficult.

The land was very flat and open and only good for one thing, which was raising cattle. The lack of top water and dryness of the southern states led to the land being covered in nothing but grass and small scrubland plants, and couldn’t support a woodland or anything that needed a lot of water. Raising cattle here wasn’t a problem until two major factors came into play, which saw a massive increase in the region’s population and in turn, its cattle farms.

The American Civil War ended in 1865, and four years later the first transcontinental railroad was completed, allowing people to move freely around the country in huge numbers. This led to many people settling in the southern states and producing the only thing they could do with the land they had, leading to the land being over-grazed by too many cattle. After a few problems in the late 1800s with drought and harsh winters killing off animals, the answer to this was to just use more space until, in 1904 and 1909, acts were passed which allowed new settlers access to huge portions of land for growing crops instead.

(A photo taken after a recent storm, a scene that people had to deal with on a regular basis)

When people heard they would be granted massive amounts of land for growing crops, they swarmed to the area, all looking for one of the 320-acre plots they were promised. Starting from the early 1900s, the southern states of Texas and Oklahoma saw the introduction of mechanized farming equipment like tractors, which now made it possible for a small number of people to manage a huge amount of land without increased labor costs.

The profits seen by the farmers in the earlier years caused even more people to come to the area and do the same thing. However, most of these people didn’t have a good understanding of farming practices and ended up stripping the land of its much-needed natural plants. The weather during the 1920s was especially good for farming and it rained more than average giving a false sense of confidence to the farmers, but this came to an end in the summer of 1930 which saw the first of a series of drought summers.

The beginning of the Dust Bowl

There were 3 main droughts throughout the 1930s, which came in 1934, 1936, and a two-year drought between 1939 and 1940. During each of these, the crops suffered greatly from the lack of water but the real problem came from the bad farming practices of the state’s inhabitants. They would frequently plow deep into the soil and remove all of the natural plants in the process, most of which were types of deep-rooted grass that held the soil in place and stored moisture through long periods of no rain.

(The area of the dust bowl, spanning across 100 million acres of land)

Now the people of the southern states found themselves surrounded by endless miles of flat land with no crops and nothing to hold the bone-dry soil in place. High winds could sweep across the plains with no woodland to block them, and nothing to hold the dry topsoil in place. This caused dust clouds the size of entire cities to swirl around the open plains, covering everything in its path in a thick layer of choking dust.

The gap between the major drought years was also very dry and didn’t allow any of the land to recover. The other thing that made it worse was the complete destruction of the topsoil by the constant removal of nutrients through excessive farming. This turned the soil into nothing but dry sand-like dust, making it much easier to blow around and cause damage.

Beginning with the first major drought in 1934, thousands of people lost their farms and livelihoods and were either kicked off the land for not being able to pay rent or had to leave the area because of the risk of starvation. The Dust Bowl affected around 100 million acres of land and by 1936, was causing a level of economic damage to the country at the rate of $25 million per day, the equivalent of over half a billion dollars in today’s money.

(Storms came frequently and would cover everything in a thick layer of dust)

The worst affected areas were the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, but the dust storms spilled over into several surrounding states. The storms in the central areas of the Dust Bowl were so bad that one storm caused such severe damage that 350 houses had to be torn down afterward. It wasn’t possible to build replacement houses during the storm and by the middle of the Dust Bowl years, over 500,000 people were made homeless.

Starting at the beginning of the first draught, around 3.5 million people left the central states and mostly migrated to the west to work as laborers in any place that would take them, but this led to several new problems.

Running into the great depression

Between 1929 and 1939, The United States ran into an extreme economic downfall that affected the whole world but nowhere suffered as much as the people of the US. The stock market crashed and millions of people lost their jobs, which also caused food prices to fall and meant farm labor could no longer be afforded. All the people who left the areas of the Dust Bowl now found themselves in a new place with no housing available, no jobs, high prices for food, and having to compete with the other tens of thousands of people arriving on a regular basis.

(The great depression ran from 1929 until the start of WW2 in 1939 and saw mass unemployment across the country, something the people escaping the Dust Bowl had to deal with)

How did people who stayed in the Dust Bowl area survive?

Leaving wasn’t an option for everyone, and there were those who already owned their homes and couldn’t be kicked off the land, but at the same time found it impossible to sell a home in the middle of a dust bowl. Those who chose to stay were either lucky enough to have enough money to buy food elsewhere or had a job in a different industry that wasn’t affected, like mining and construction.

In certain areas, people could still grow crops when the dust storms weren’t as bad, but they were very limited and consisted of nothing more than a small vegetable garden at best. Mass starvation was happening throughout the region and people resorted to eating tumbleweeds, boiling them into a soup to try and extract anything that could be considered food. Anything that could be hunted or caught was eaten, including rats and wild birds, but most of the animals either migrated away from the storms or hid in their layers, often dying themselves from starvation.

(An abandoned homestead showing a landscape impossible to grow crops in)

To protect themselves from the dust, people would only go outside in between storms and wear cloth masks over their faces to try and filter out the dust. Wet sheets were hung over doors and windows and people would constantly have to wipe down surfaces with wet clothes to not stir up the dust inside the house. Many people developed breathing problems throughout the dustbowl years but it isn’t clear how many of them died as a direct result.

How did the Dust Bowl end?

(A photo from 1942 showing people living in the heart of the Dust Bowl area, but it would take a few more years until everything was back to normal)

The problems started before the first major drought hit in 1936, and during his first 100 days in office after being elected in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a series of programs designed to solve the problem. As the years passed and things got worse, the number of programs to solve the problem increased and new organizations got on board, offering many different approaches to the problem.

The effort that made the most difference was the planting of 200 million trees in a giant band between Canada and Abilene Texas. This stopped the winds from building up to the level of being able to rip topsoil off the ground and increased groundwater in the areas it covered. Equally important was a series of programs to improve and conserve the soil quality, which included new farming and fertilization methods, and the resettling of farmers from the worst affected areas to newer and more farmable land.

The US government also bought 6 million pigs and sent the meat to the poor and homeless in an attempt to slow the rates of starvation, and ordered hundreds of thousands of cattle from other countries to replace those that died during the storms. By the end of 1936, these efforts had made a big enough difference for people to come back to the region, though not at the rate they did before the Dust Bowl happened.

Slowly over the following years, the ground returned back to levels that could support crops, but this time people were made aware of the dangers of overfarming and stripping out certain natural plants. The Dust Bowl is officially recognized as ending in 1936 due to the efforts made to stop the huge dust storms from happening when people were able to start returning to the area on mass, but it didn’t completely get back to normal until 1939 when the start of the second world war began.