The Dust Bowl

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The Dust Bowl
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Dust Bowl Map
Name five states the Dust Bowl affected.
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Causes of the Dust Bowl

• Poor agricultural practices and years of
  sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl.
• Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and
  planted to wheat.
• During the years when there was adequate
  rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops.
• But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened,
  the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing
  would grow.
• The ground cover that held the soil in place was
  gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields
  raising billowing clouds of dust to the skies.
• The skies could darken for days, and even the
  most well sealed homes could have a thick layer
  of dust on furniture. In some places the dust
  would drift like snow, covering farmsteads.

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Effects of Dust Bowl
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(No Transcript)
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Quote from a farmer

• "I felt I was becoming a slave to the land. But I
  held on to the thought that this land had to be
  stopped from blowing. Often I was so full of dust
  that I drove blind, unable to see even the
  radiator cap on my tractor or hear the roar of
  the engines. But I kept driving on and on, by
  guess and instinct. I was making my last stand in
  the Dust Bowl."
• If you had been part of one of these farm
  families during the '30s, do you think you would
  have wanted to stay on your farm or leave? Why or
  why not? What would you lose by leaving? What
  would you gain?

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Abandoned Farm
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Waiting for Rain

• "...Everyday I scanned the sky, looking for signs
  of the rain that would save my wheat from ruin.
  One after another, neighbors saw their crops
  reach a condition beyond hope of salvage."

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Dust Cloud approaching city
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Walking in a Dust Storm
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Leaving the Dust Bowl

• The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in
  American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had
  moved out of the Plains states of those, 200,000
  moved to California.

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Mother and Children escaping the Dust Bowl
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The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel written by John
Steinbeck in 1939. The realistic novel tells the
story of poor folks, leaving the Dust Bowl, and
moving on. He follows the Joad family and
describes the hardships of life as migrant
agricultural workers in the 1930s in the United
States. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.
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As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The
Grapes of Wrath
"And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico from Nevada
and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out,
tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and
hungry twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a
hundred thousand 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 pull, 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."
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1997 Dust Storm
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Removing Eroded Soil