Those who witnessed the great American dust storms of the 1930s never forgot the sight. Across the Southern Plains region, wave after wave of suffocating blackness shut out the sun and the stars, choked out crops and vegetation, and left behind barren vistas. The destruction was so sudden and complete that many people assumed that the biblical Day of Judgement had arrived. One witness remembered her grandmother seeing the huge cloud rolling towards them and yelling, “You kids run and get together, the end of the world’s comin’” (“The Dust Bowl: Preview” 00:00:52 – 00:00:58).
For millions, these storms would mark a type of end: the end of their lives as they had known them. As one of the most widespread and prolonged disasters in US history, the tragic story of the Dust Bowl paints a bleak picture of how the high price environmental mismanagement can exact on both individuals and their communities. Dust storms had always been a part of life on the arid and semi-arid flatlands of the Great Plains. The land was a place of extreme weather with terrific winds and extreme temperatures; periodic dust storms were normal and expected; however, in the spring of 1932, the character of these dust storms began to change.
The new, increasingly frequent “black blizzards” were larger, stronger, and much more devastating. When reporting on the phenomenon in the Lubbock Evening Journal, Robert Geiger dubbed the areas affected by the storms “the Dust Bowl,” a moniker that became synonymous for the entire tragedy (Alchin). One storm that came to personify the entire crises was the massive monster that burst out of South Dakota on April 14, 1935, a date that quickly came to be called “Black Sunday.” At over 1,000 miles wide and up to two miles tall, “the granddaddy of em’ all” is the largest dust storm in history and traveled about one-thousand-five-hundred miles before breaking up over the Gulf of Mexico (Marrin 63).
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Texan A.D. Kirk vividly recalled seeing the storm coming: I noticed a low dark line of what I first thought was a cloud along the northern horizon. … As I watched, it got taller and spread from the west to the east horizon. … The front of the cloud was a rolling, tumbling, boiling mass of dust and dirt about two hundred feet high, almost vertical, and as black as an Angus bull. There was no dust in the air above it or in front of it. It came across the prairie like a two-hundred foot-high tidal wave, pushed along by a sixty-mile-per-hour wind. … After the front passed, the darkness rivaled the darkness inside a whale resting on the bottom of the ocean at midnight (Marrin 64).
After the horror and destruction of that one day, few would have believed that this storm was merely the beginning of sorrows; eight more years of storms were still to come. Several factors led to the extreme severity of the Dust Bowl disaster. The first factors were natural: heat and drought. Beginning in the early 1930s. record-breaking heat waves of up to 118 degrees Fahrenheit sucked the moisture out of the land. Rainfall was also unusually scare over much of the United States, including the Great Plains region. Thousands died of heatstroke, and food supplies diminished rapidly as crops withered in the sun-baked fields. Writer Meridel Le Sueur described the average sweltering day: “…The houses were closed up tight, the blinds drawn, the windows and doors closed. …Through all these windows eyes were watching- watching the wheat go, the rye go, the corn, peas, potatoes go. Everywhere in these barricaded houses were eyes drawn back to the burning windows looking out at …food slowly burning in the fields” (Marrin 64).
In addition, the dry heat gave birth to billions of grasshoppers that blanketed the land like a biblical plague, eating anything green that had survived the drought. Human actions further exacerbated the disaster. In the late 1800s, waves of new settlers began arriving in the Great Plains. These new arrivals plowed up millions of acres of drought-resistant grasses to plant cash crops like corn and wheat, which had shallow root systems highly dependent on regular rainfall or irrigation. Stripped of the hardy grasses, the land was left bare when the inevitable time of drought came, with nothing to hold down the soil.
Albert Marrin summarized the causes of the Dust Bowl this way in his book Years of Dust: “ …all the elements for disaster came together in the 1930s: drought, heat, sod-destroying farming methods, and annual cash crops. When the winds came, the ground cracked and the dust became airborne. And so, the dust-storm catastrophe of the 1930s was no natural disaster. It was manmade” (61). Natural factors combined with an utter failure in environmental planning created a disaster that reshaped both the land and its people. The persistent storms upended the lives of everyone who lived in the affected areas regardless of whether they choose to stay or leave.
Loss was inescapable: at least seven-thousand people directly died from the storms, over two million lost their homes, and almost everyone lost their friends, family members, livelihoods, and way of life. Those who stayed were prisoners of the dust storms, which came suddenly and usually without warning, trapping residents wherever they happened to be for the duration of the storm. Many unfortunate enough to be trapped outside suffocated. Those who survived the storms struggled through basic activities like sleeping, breathing, and cooking.
To escape the sweltering temperatures and suffocating grime, families covered their faces with wet sheets and rags. In some areas, the Red Cross began passing out gas masks leftover from World War I to aid in breathing. The little food available had to be to cooked at high temperatures so that the rising hot air lifted the dust away. All food had to be stored in tightly covered containers to avoid contamination and dishes had to be keep upside down. The dust was inescapable, blanketing anything and everything. Author Avis Carlson remembered his experience during the Dust Bowl writing, “The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face. People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. …for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk. …We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions” (Hook 98).
Long-term effects from inhaling dust created new, devastating health problems; many people fell ill with silicosis, a fatal lung disease where the dust acts like shards of glass, cutting the lungs to shreds (Marrin 73). The people who fled encountered a different set of difficulties. Often called “Okies” because many were from Oklahoma, those who left often endured a nomadic existence, wandering from place to place looking for work with only the possessions that could be stuffed into their vehicles. The places they fled to rarely welcomed them, viewing them competitors for the few jobs available in a country ravaged by the Great Depression. Many families went west to states such as California, Washington, and Oregon, which they had heard lacked farm workers. Faced with an overwhelming flood of migrants, the city of Los Angeles even sent 136 deputies to the California border to turn newcomers away.
Woody Guthrie, the American folk singer described the living conditions of many of the migrates: “They was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of families of people living around under railroad bridges, down along the river bottoms, and in old cardboard houses, and in old, rusty beat-up houses that they’d made up out of tote sacks and old dirty rags and corrugated iron that they got out of the dumps and old tin cans flattened out, and old orange crates” (Smithsonian). It seemed as if an entire generation had been lost to the storms.
People were not the only casualties of the storms. The animal population also endured mass casualties and almost unimaginable suffering. When a dust storm swept over the landscape, many animals had no place to take shelter and were engulfed by the sea of dust. Eyes were plastered shut, blinding cows, birds, sheep, and horses. Sightless cattle often wandered around until they collapsed with exhaustion, and numerous panicked birds died when they smacked into unseen buildings (Marrin 73). Additionally, starvation was an issue with little feed or plants to graze on. Countless animals starved or were put down because their owners had nothing to feed them.
Even animals who were given feed often starved because the sand they ingested with the feed wore away their teeth, eventually leaving them unable to chew. Not all animal suffering, however, was directly caused by the dust storms. When dust bowl families found themselves inundated by massive swarms of migratory jackrabbits desperately looking food, residents worked together to herd the rabbits into small enclosures and beat the hapless creatures to death with clubs (Jackrabbit). Death and destruction appeared inescapable for all.
Communities disappeared, friends were separated, and an entire generation experienced the pain of loss and displacement, a type of diaspora within their own county. Proud, self-sufficient families become beggars as ordered life disappeared into the wind. Ironically, in stripping away of the native vegetation to build a better life, the farmers of the Dust Bowl ultimately stripped themselves of their futures on the land. They unwittingly created the conditions that turned their dreams into dust.
