essay about the dust bowl

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• Smithsonian American Art Museum - The Dust Bowl
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Dust Bowl , name for both the drought period in the Great Plains that lasted from 1930 to 1936 and the section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado , southwestern Kansas , the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma , and northeastern New Mexico .

The term Dust Bowl was suggested by conditions that struck the region in the early 1930s. The area’s grasslands had supported mostly stock raising until World War I , when millions of acres were put under the plow in order to grow wheat . Following years of overcultivation and generally poor land management in the 1920s, the region—which receives an average rainfall of less than 20 inches (500 mm) in a typical year—suffered a severe drought in the early 1930s that lasted several years. The region’s exposed topsoil, robbed of the anchoring water-retaining roots of its native grasses , was carried off by heavy spring winds . “Black blizzards” of windblown soil blocked out the sun and piled the dirt in drifts. Occasionally the dust storms swept completely across the country to the East Coast. Present-day studies estimate that some 1.2 billion tons (nearly 1.1 billion metric tons) of soil were lost across 100 million acres (about 156,000 square miles [405,000 square km]) of the Great Plains between 1934 and 1935, the drought’s most severe period.

Thousands of families were forced to leave the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression in the early and mid-1930s. Many of these displaced people (frequently collectively labeled “Okies” regardless of whether they were Oklahomans) undertook the long trek to California . Their plight was characterized in songs such as “Dust Bowl Refugee” and “ Do Re Mi” by folksinger Woody Guthrie , an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck ’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The wind erosion was gradually halted with federal aid. Windbreaks known as shelterbelts—swaths of trees that protect soil and crops from wind—were planted, and much of the grassland was restored. By the early 1940s the area had largely recovered.

The Dust Bowl

Written by: paul dickson, independent historian, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain the causes of the Great Depression and its effects on the economy

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Photographs: The Dust Bowl and Rural Poverty, 1936-1937 Primary Source to have students analyze the impact of poverty during the Great Depression.

On May 11, 1934 an enormous dust storm, 1,500 miles long and 600 miles wide, was moving eastward across the Great Plains, eventually depositing 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago – four pounds for each person in the city. The particles from this storm were not the relatively insignificant kind that normally accumulate around the average house, but rather a total of 300 million tons of topsoil, parched to dust by drought and blown out of the Great Plains by a strong storm system that originated on the west coast.

The storm quickly moved into the cities to the east like Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo and then to the Eastern Seaboard. In some locales, the dust was so deep on the roads that snowplows were brought out to clear them. The storm took six hours to pass over Manhattan when it arrived there, and it brought the city to a halt. Cab drivers had to stop to remove dirt from their windshields, and commercial airplanes were grounded because of low visibility and fears that engines choked with dust would fail. In Boston, an airplane owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ventured into the storm and found that it extended over three miles (17,000 feet) into the upper atmosphere.

In its wake, the storm left a massive clean-up effort and bold headlines. “Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours” was the banner in the next morning’s New York Times . The Boston Globe carried  a front-page story reading, “Vast Dust Blanket Over New England.” The storm then blew out to sea, where people on ocean liners hundreds of miles from land saw the monster black clouds of dust billowing up from the west. One tanker captain operating many miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, reported that his ship was completely covered with a fine blanket of reddish-brown soil.

This was neither the first nor the last of the many dust storms of the 1930s, but it was the one that got the nation’s attention – the one that allowed people in the east from Richmond, Virginia, all the way north to the Canadian border to actually see, taste, and smell the phenomenon, and to suffer the respiratory distress that came along with it.

This storm was also the one that spurred legislation allowing a first step to be taken to alleviate the situation and give the dying Great Plains a new lease on life. The storm hit Washington, DC, just as testimony was being given by presidential advisor Hugh Bennett, who headed the Soil Erosion Service, a temporary government agency created to thwart the very conditions that had led to the dust storms. Bennett’s group was about to run out of money, and he was asking for new funding as well as a permanent agency to deal with soil conservation. Quickly, Congress passed legislation to create the Soil Conservation Service, which still exists today as the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The most disastrous storm yet struck the Midwest on April 14, 1935, earning that day the name “Black Sunday” and causing a writer for the Associated Press to coin the term “Dust Bowl” to describe the area where these storms originated and did the greatest damage. Crops were being destroyed and, in some cases, the dust was piling up and drifting like snow, burying homes and farm buildings.

Pictured are a father and his two sons at their partly submerged house during a 1936 dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma.

The economic effects of these storms were devastating, doubly so when coupled with the effects of the Great Depression. Unable to raise crops and pay their bills, farmers lost their land and migrated in search of work. Many families simply walked away from their farms and headed to the west coast, where they hoped to find work and where their children could breathe. Although they came from many states, not just Oklahoma, these migrants became known as “ Okies ,” which was almost always uttered as a term of disparagement.

But the question asked by Americans who had once seen the Great Plains as an earthy Garden of Eden was, “How did this happen?” Was this a disaster created by human folly and greed or just a cyclical natural occurrence an “act of God” as some believed?

The source of the dust was a great expanse of land that had once been inhabited by native peoples, native grasses, and herds of buffalo and had long existed as a sustainable environment, until it began to be settled by people moving west. In 1862, Congress had passed the Homestead Act, which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln and gave ownership of 160 acres to any person 21 years or older willing to settle on the Great Plains and farm the land for five years. When these settlers arrived, they began to plow up the native grass and the sod in which it was rooted. They were thus called “sodbusters,” and in the absence of forests to provide logs, they commonly built sod homes or “soddies” with strips of sod they lifted from the ground and piled up to form walls.

Then came the tractors and other gasoline-powered farm tools, which stripped more and more of the native grasses. This problem was exacerbated during World War I, when the high price of wheat and the needs of the Allied troops encouraged farmers to grow even more wheat, removing grass and seeding areas in the prairie states. Lands that had once been used only for grazing were being turned into wheat fields. There were even slogans that tied wheat to victory: Plant More Wheat! Wheat Will Win the War!

“The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought . . ., nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done,” writes historian Timothy Egan in The Worst Hard Time , his book about the Dust Bowl. “They had removed the native prairie grass . . . so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land – thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.”

The immediate cause of the dust storms was the drought that began in the prairie states in 1931, when a lack of rain contributed to a decade-long dry spell. Farmers found it nearly impossible to raise their crops or feed their livestock, and they began losing money. Thousands could not pay their mortgages and lost their farms. Massive quantities of sun-dried topsoil were swept up into the air. Fourteen of the resulting large dust storms, or “black blizzards” as they were known, hit in 1932, and 38 rolled across the plains the following year. Then they started coming with even greater frequency.

The uprooting, poverty, and human suffering caused by the Dust Bowl and exacerbated by the Great Depression were all notably portrayed in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath , and in the graphic images produced by Dorothea Lange and other photographers working for the Farm Security Administration. Steinbeck’s book and Lange’s photographs, including one that has been called “Migrant Mother” and “Migrant Madonna,” have endured as reminders of a time of great despair in America.

After the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, the situation gradually improved as erosion-fighting practices were introduced and took hold. Farmers more routinely implemented crop rotation to refurbish the soil, along with methods of planting and ploughing that helped topsoil stay in place. During the 1930s, an army of young men belonging to the Civilian Conservation Corps also helped solve the problem by planting trees, shrubs, and grasses across the area to hold moisture and secure the topsoil. The southern Plains began to heal when the drought ended in the fall of 1939. It was mostly natural causes, however, that eventually restored the equilibrium of the land. Once rain returned in significant amounts, the ordeal of the Dust Bowl finally ended.

Review Questions

1. The Dust Bowl was created by all the following except

• extreme drought
• removal of prairie grass
• poor farming techniques that led to soil erosion
• the building of “soddies”

2. The Dust Bowl inflicted the most significant damage on which area of the United States?

• The Eastern Seaboard
• The Great Plains
• The Great Lakes region
• The Rocky Mountains

3. The plight of the victims of the Dust Bowl was portrayed by John Steinbeck in his novel

• The Worst Hard Time
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Migrant Mother
• Migrant Madonna

4. For economic opportunity, people known as “Okies” migrated toward which region of the United States?

• The Southeast, primarily Florida
• The Northeast, primarily New York City
• The West Coast, primarily California
• New England, primarily around Boston

5. Families who settled the Great Plains and built their homes from the available resources there were often called

Free Response Questions

• Analyze the events that led to the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.
• Analyze the impact of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on farmers in the United States.

AP Practice Questions

“We go around all dressed in rags While the rest of the world goes neat, And we have to be satisfied With half enough to eat. We have to live in lean-tos, Or else we live in a tent, For when we buy our bread and beans There’s nothing left for rent. I’d rather not be on the rolls of relief, Or work on the W. P. A., We’d rather work for the farmer If the farmer could raise the pay; Then the farmer could plant more cotton And he’d get more money for spuds [potatoes], Instead of wearing patches, We’d dress up in new duds. From the east and west and north and south Like a swarm of bees we come; The migratory workers Are worse off than a bum. We go to Mr. Farmer And ask him what he’ll pay; He says, “You gypsy workers Can live on a buck a day.”

Lester Hunter, “I’d Rather Not Be on Relief,” 1938

1. When the excerpted song was written, the government

• believed in providing welfare for all citizens
• created programs to provide jobs and relief for those suffering in the Great Depression
• required people to move where agricultural work could be offered
• provided no assistance to the people

2. One doctrine or policy that may have contributed to the conditions described in the excerpt was

• Manifest Destiny
• the Trail of Tears
• the Kansas-Nebraska Act
• the Homestead Act

3. The sentiments expressed in the excerpt most likely would have been espoused by which group?

• Progressives
• The Know-Nothings
• Abolitionists

Primary Sources

New York Times headline on May 12, 1934, was “Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours.” https://www.nytimes.com/1934/05/12/archives/huge-dust-cloud-blown-1500-miles-dims-city-5-hours-white-particles.html

Photographs created by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/

“Transcript of Homestead Act (1862).” https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=31&page=transcript

Suggested Resources

Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s . 25th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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What Caused the Dust Bowl?

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When pione­ers headed west in the late 19th century, many couldn't resist the lure of the tall, gras­sy land in the semiarid midwestern and southern plains of the United States. They settled there to farm.

They were prosperous in the following decades, but when the 1930s rolled in, so did strong winds, drought and dust clouds that plagued nearly 75 percent of the United States between 1931 and 1939 [source: Library of Congress ]. The era became known as the legendary Dust Bowl .

The Dust Bowl brought ecological, economic and human misery to the U.S. when it was already suffering under the Great Depression . While the economic decline caused by the Great Depression played a role, it was har­dly the only guilty party.

Effects of the Dust Bowl

Another dust bowl.

Economic depression coupled with extended drought, unusually high temperatures, poor agricultural practices and the resulting wind erosion all contributed to making the Dust Bowl.

­­The conditions that led to the Dust Bowl began during the early 1920s. A post-World War I recession led farmers to try new mechanized farming techniques to increase profits. Many bought plows and other farming equipment, and between 1925 and 1930, more than 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of previously unfarmed land was plowed [source: Kershner ]. With the help of mechanized farming, farmers produced record crops during the 1931 season.

However, the overproduction of wheat, coupled with the Great Depression, led to severely reduced market prices. The wheat market was flooded, and people were too poor to buy. Farmers could not earn back their production costs and expanded their fields to make a profit. They replaced the prairie’s native grassland with wheat and left any unused fields bare.

But plow-based farming in this region cultivated an unexpected yield: The loss of fertile topsoil that literally blew away in the winds, leaving the land vulnerable to drought and inhospitable for growing crops.

Then, in a brutal twist of fate, the rains stopped. By 1932, 14 dust storms , known as black blizzards, were reported; in just one year, the number increased to nearly 40.

­Millions of people fled the region. The federal government enacted aid programs to help, but it wasn't until 1939, when the rain returned, that relief came.

When the drought hit the Gre­at Plains, roughly one-third of the farmers left their homes and headed to the mild climate of California in search of migrant work. Known as the Okies — the moniker referred to any poor migrant from the Dust Bowl region since only about 20 percent were from Oklahoma — they left behind the parched lands and economic despair.

Many were used to financial stability and home amenities such as indoor plumbing, but had become fin­ancially indebted after purchasing mechanized farming equipment and suffering crop failures. They faced foreclosure on home and farm.

California didn't welcome the influx of Okies. Since the number of migrant workers outnumbered the available jobs, tensions grew between Californians and laborers, and public health concerns rose as California's infrastructure became overtaxed.

The New Deal

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the first of several mortgage and farming relief acts under the New Deal aimed to reduce foreclosures and keep farms afloat during the drought. But by the end of 1934, roughly 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of farmland were ruined, and the topsoil covering 100 million acres (40 million hectares) had blown away [source: Dyer].

Under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, the government reserved 140 million acres (57 million hectares) as protected federal lands. Grazing and planting would be monitored to encourage land rehabilitation and conservation.

Additionally, in the early 1930s, the government launched the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) , one of the most successful New Deal programs. Three million young men volunteered for forestry and conservation work for the CCC. Called Roosevelt's "Forest Army," they planted trees, dug ditches and built reservoirs — work that would contribute to flood control, water conservation and prevent further soil erosion.

Between 1933 and 1935, the government introduced many more programs and agencies to help people affected by the Dust Bowl, including efforts like the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the Land Utilization Program and the Drought Relief Service.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program started under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, is one of the best-known New Deal programs. The WPA was a work relief program that employed more than 8.5 million people to build roads, bridges, airports, public parks and buildings.

The Soil Conservation Act of 1935

­­It took millions of tons of dirt and debris blowing from the Plains all the way into Washington D.C., known as "Black Sunday," to move Congress to pass the Soil Conservation Act and establish the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) under the Department of Agriculture.

The SCS (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) promoted healthy soil management and farming practices and paid farmers to put such methods to work on their farms. The legacy of the Service's practices, such as irrigation, crop diversity and no-till farming, continue in the Plains today.

­­The 1930s Dust Bowl didn't inoculate the United States from another such ecological disaster. Over 30 percent of North America is arid or semi-arid land, with about 40 percent of the continental United States (17 Western states) vulnerable to desertification [source: Alexander ].

Sustainable agriculture and soil conservation measures could help avoid another dust bowl, but experts aren't sure that such measures will be enough if extended and severe drought revisits the Great Plains.

No-till Farming

Tilling is a method of turning over the top layer of soil to remove weeds and add fertilizers and pesticides. But tilling also allows carbon dioxide, an important soil nutrient, to escape from the topsoil.

No-till is a sustainable farming method that helps nutrients stay put. Organic matter, such as crop residue, remains at the surface — healthy topsoil is fertile and decreases water runoff and erosion.

Dust Bowl FAQ

How did the dust bowl start, why was the dust bowl important, what were the causes of the dust bowl, how did the dust bowl affect the environment, did living in the dust bowl kill you, lots more information, ­related articles.

• Will the U.S. be a desert in 50 years?
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More Great Links

• Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy
• Library of Congress: Voices from the Dust Bowl
• What is No-Till Farming?
• "A major Dust Bowl storm strikes." The History Channel. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?id=4488&action=t­dihArticleCategory
• "Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Newspapers." The Library of Virginia. http://www.lva.lib.va.us/whatwehave/news/ccc.htm
• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080430152030.htm
• Alexander, Gemma. "Combatting Desertification." Earth 911. July 1, 2020 (April 20, 2022). https://earth911.com/living-well-being/combatting-desertification/
• "Civilian Conservation Corp. (CCC)." History.com. March 31, 2021 (April 20, 2022). https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps
• Colvin, Richard Lee. "Dust Bowl Legacy : 50 Years After ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ Five Okies Remember How Their Families Struggled During the Great Migration--and Endured" March 26, 1989 (April 20, 2022). Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-26-tm-677-story.html.
• "Did Dust Storms Make 1930s Dust Bowl Drought Worse?" ScienceDaily. 2008.
• "Dust Bowl." Aug. 5, 2020. (April 20, 2022). https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
• Fanslow, Robin. "The Migrant Experience." American Folklife Center. The Library of Congress. 1998. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tsme.html
• Goffman, Ethan. "Environmental Refuges: How Many, How Bad?" Discovery Guides. CSA. 2006. http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/refugee/review.php
• "Great Depression And World War II, 1929-1945. The Dust Bowl." American Memory. The Library of Congress. 2002. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/depwwii/dustbowl/dustbowl.html
• "Works Progress Administration (WPA)." June 10, 2019 (April 20, 2022). https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/works-progress-administration
• Kershner, Ellen. World Atlas. "What Was The Dust Bowl?" May 8, 2020 (April 20, 2022). https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-dust-bowl.html
• Lal, Rattan, Michael Griffin, Jay Apt, Lester Lave and M. Granger Morgan. "No-Till Farming Offers a Quick Fix to Help Ward Off Host of Global Problems." Ohio State University. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/notill.htm
• Library of Congress. "The Dust Bowl." (April 20, 2022). https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/great-depression-and-world-war-ii-1929-1945/dust-bowl/
• Mullins, William H. "Okie Migrations." Oklahoma Historical Society. http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/O/OK008.html
• "NASA Explains 'Dust Bowl' Drought." Goddard Space Flight Center. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 2004. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html
• Reganold, John P. and David R. Huggins. "No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows." Scientific American. 2008. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=no-till
• Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. "The Dust Bowl." Center for Agricultural History and Rural Studies. Iowa State University. http://www.history.iastate.edu/agprimer/Page21.html
• "The 1930s Dust Bowl." AccuWeather. http://www.accuweather.com/promotion.asp?dir=aw&page=dustbowl2
• "The Dust Bowl." Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. http://www.nasm.si.edu/ceps/drylands//dust.html
• USDA. "Natural Resources Conservation Service." (April 20, 2022) https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/about/history/
• USDA. "History of USDA's Farm Service Agency." (April 20, 2022) https://www.fsa.usda.gov/about-fsa/history-and-mission/agency-history/index
• U.S. Legal. com. "Taylor Grazing Act Law and Legal Definition." (April 20, 2022). https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/taylor-grazing-act/

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The Dust Bowl: An Iconic Catastrophe

July 21, 2011

Posted by: Stephen Wesson

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Scorched earth. Abandoned farms. Skies black with dust. Houses buried under great dunes of earth. Decades after the drought and depression of the 1930s ended, images of the Dust Bowl are still familiar to millions of people worldwide. These images, and the stories and songs that emerged at the same time, are powerful tools for exploring the history and legacy of this nation-changing disaster.

When a brutal drought hit the southern plains of the U.S. in the 1930s, it triggered both a humanitarian disaster and a tremendous social upheaval. Great billowing clouds of dust swept across the plains, stripping fields of their topsoil, choking livestock, and burying farms and towns under heaps of dust. Unable to make a living, more than 400,000 people fled the Great Plains, many heading to the west coast, and the populations of California, Washington, and Oregon, along with other states, swelled dramatically.

At the same time, however, the Dust Bowl was the subject of a major effort in social documentation. New government agencies launched projects to aid those affected by the catastrophe and to make a record of the devastation. Photographers and oral historians scattered across the Great Plains and beyond, recording the stories of displaced farmers and capturing images of the destruction.

In the decades since, the photos, interviews, and songs that resulted from these projects have become some of the most iconic representations of the Dust Bowl, and of the Great Depression overall. As a result, students today can hear first-hand accounts of Dust Bowl survivors , listen to songs written in migrant labor camps and look into the careworn faces of refugees on the road .

One of the greatest sources of Dust Bowl photographs in existence is the Library’s Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection , which includes more than 150,000 photographs taken from 1935 to 1944. In addition, hundreds of oral histories and musical recordings from Dust Bowl survivors are available in Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection .

Teaching Ideas

• Have each student select a photo of a Dust Bowl refugee and write a letter that this refugee might have written to friends or family to tell his or her own story.
• The government projects that produced these photographs and stories had a purpose. Students research the background of these projects, including in this presentation , and explore how that purpose is expressed in the materials found in the collections of Library of Congress.
• The songs in Voices from the Dust Bowl are often very personal, describing events that the singer experienced himself or herself. Students can examine the different emotional impact that a personal song like these might have, as opposed to a third-person account, like in a textbook.
• Some of the images and stories that are now in the Library’s collections have influenced the way people think of the Dust Bowl. Students can select photos, songs, and oral histories and compare them to novels or movies that deal with the Dust Bowl, such as Out of the Dust or The Grapes of Wrath , and identify similarities and differences between the primary sources and the fictional accounts.

The Library has a primary source set for teachers on the Dust Bowl that includes a selection of some of the most powerful primary sources on the topic, along with a teacher’s guide.

What images of the Dust Bowl are the most iconic for you? If you have used them in your teaching, how have your students responded?

Comments (4)

Here’s an idea: How about having students study the sources and research the time period and then write a journal entry for “Migrant Mother” or some other evocative image? Reading related literature can help students get a feel for the “voice” of their journal entry, too.

I would have my students try to find information on a family, or individual, who made the move to the west coast to learn about how their life changed as a result. It may be interesting to learn about the resiliency of the American spirit.

I found your website very interesting since I just published a novel that takes place in the Dust Bowl in 1933. It is for Young Adults and follows a young boy and his siter trying to survive as orphans. I tried to be as accurate as possible as to the harhships and how people tried to stick together to survive.

How could people survive during this period of time with so much dust. I find this page interesting because it taught me more about what the Dust Bowl days were like.

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What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation

Robert a. mcleman.

1 Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5 Canada

Juliette Dupre

2 Department of Geography, Burnside Hall, McGill University, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 0B9 Canada

Lea Berrang Ford

Konrad gajewski.

3 Department of Geography, University of Ottawa, Simard Hall Room 047, 60 University, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5 Canada

Gregory Marchildon

4 Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Economic History, Johnson-Shoyama School of Public Policy, University of Regina, 110-2 Research Drive, Regina, SK S4S 7H1 Canada

Associated Data

This article provides a review and synthesis of scholarly knowledge of Depression-era droughts on the North American Great Plains, a time and place known colloquially as the Dust Bowl era or the Dirty Thirties. Recent events, including the 2008 financial crisis, severe droughts in the US corn belt, and the release of a popular documentary film, have spawned a resurgence in public interest in the Dust Bowl. Events of the Dust Bowl era have also proven in recent years to be of considerable interest to scholars researching phenomena related to global environmental change, including atmospheric circulation, drought modeling, land management, institutional behavior, adaptation processes, and human migration. In this review, we draw out common themes in terms of not only what natural and social scientists have learned about the Dust Bowl era itself, but also how insights gained from the study of that period are helping to enhance our understanding of climate–human relations more generally.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11111-013-0190-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Introduction

During the worst years of the Great Depression, large areas of the North American Great Plains experienced severe, multi-year droughts that led to soil erosion, dust storms, farm abandonments, personal hardships, and distress migration on scales not previously seen. Known colloquially as the “Dirty Thirties” or “the Dust Bowl years,” they captured an important place in wider popular memory through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ) and the iconic images of US Farm Security Administration photographers. The subject of hundreds of popular books and films in subsequent decades, “the worst hard time” as author Timothy Egan ( 2006 ) has called it, has enjoyed a resurgence in public attention following the 2008 financial crisis, recent droughts in the US corn belt, and the November 2012 release of the Ken Burns documentary film The Dust Bowl . What is also notable, and is the focus of the present article, is that there has been considerable growth in scholarship on the subject in recent years, across a wide range of natural and social science disciplines. This includes one subset of works that seeks to explain or interpret the causes and consequences of events of the 1930s and another that uses events of the Dust Bowl era as learning vehicles and analogs to test datasets, methods, and theories with broader applicability to global change research. There are a number of potential explanations for the increase in scholarly attention. These include, but are not limited to, growing interest in the causes of droughts and their return frequency, the availability of new atmospheric datasets, greater analog-based research on the human dimensions of climate change, new directions in environmental migration research, and the growth in global environmental change scholarship more generally. Comparisons of the 2008 financial crisis to the Great Depression and the effects of recent droughts on global food prices are additional elements that influence current Dust Bowl research.

In this article, we review and synthesize the current state of scholarly knowledge of Dust Bowl era droughts, their ecological or socio-economic impacts, and the use of events from that period as a means to develop insights into related phenomena. We have sought to draw out common themes in terms of not only what natural and social scientists have learned about the Dust Bowl era itself, but also how insights gained from the study of that period are helping to enhance our understanding of climate–human relations more generally. We have also sought to identify potential avenues for future research, considering in particular future policymaking and human capacity to adapt to environmental change. We have found that our knowledge of the physical causes and human impacts of Dust Bowl era droughts remains incomplete and that the Dirty Thirties still have much to teach us about life in the present era of global warming.

What were “the Dust Bowl” and the “Dirty Thirties”?

The phrase “Dust Bowl” originated in a 1935 newspaper account of a tremendous dust storm that drifted across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and was quickly adopted more widely as a term to describe that part of the southern Plains where dust storms and soil erosion were especially common and severe (Hurt 1981 ). The exact boundaries of the Dust Bowl are subjective. A study by Porter and Finchum ( 2009 ) found twenty-eight different published cartographical representations of the Dust Bowl, with people who actually lived on the southern Great Plains during the 1930s tending to identify its location in much the same way as did Worster ( 1979 ) in his well-known environmental history of the region, which was in turn based on US Soil Conservation Service wind erosion maps (Fig.  1 ). In fact, similar environmental conditions prevailed across large parts of the Great Plains that were not popularly associated with the Dust Bowl, including the Dakotas and southern portions of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada (Fig.  2 a–c). With the passage of time, “Dust Bowl” has become more broadly and generically used to describe droughts in western North America; for example, the 2012 drought in the midwestern US spawned articles in a range of popular journals including Forbes , the Herald Tribune , National Geographic , the New York Times , and Time asking if a “new Dust Bowl” was upon us. Given its immediate familiarity, we use throughout the remainder of this article the phrase “Dust Bowl era” as a shorthand label for the period, although we might also have used “Dirty Thirties,” which was (and is) another widely used vernacular term describing the Great Plains during the Depression.

The Great Plains and the Dust Bowl proper. Great Plains boundaries based on those used by Lavin et al ( 2011 ). Outline of the Dust Bowl region is based on USDA National Resource Conservation Service wind erosion maps for 1935, 1936, and 1938, viewable at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MEDIA/stelprdb1049472.png

Soil blown by “Dust Bowl” winds piled up in large drifts near Liberal, Kansas. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, catalog no. LC-USF34-002504-E (b&w film nitrate neg.) ( http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html ). b Soil drifting over hog house. South Dakota, 1935. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, catalog no. LC-USF344-001610-ZB (b&w film nitrate neg.). ( http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html ). c Badly drifted field, Hanna area, Alberta, ca. 1930s. Glenbow Museum Archives, catalog no. NA-4179-15 ( http://ww2.glenbow.org/search/archivesPhotosResults.aspx?AC=GET_RECORD&XC=/search/archivesPhotosResults.aspx&BU=&TN=IMAGEBAN&SN=AUTO25702&SE=79&RN=7&MR=10&TR=0&TX=1000&ES=0&CS=0&XP=&RF=WebResults&EF=&DF=WebResultsDetails&RL=0&EL=0&DL=0&NP=255&ID=&MF=WPEngMsg.ini&MQ=&TI=0&DT=&ST=0&IR=69393&NR=0&NB=1&SV=0&BG=&FG=&QS=ArchivesPhotosSearch&OEX=ISO-8859-1&OEH=ISO-8859-1 )

Referred to in Canada as “the Prairies,” the Great Plains are an extensive semi-arid ecoregion stretching from southern Texas to central Alberta in the north, covering all or part of ten US states and three Canadian provinces (Fig.  1 ). With a highly variable continental climate characterized by cold winters and hot, dry summers, this ecoregion was dominated by short- and mixed-grass prairie vegetation prior to European settlement (Webb 1931 ; Weaver 1968 ). Between the US Civil War and the start of the 1930s, approximately 30 % of the US portion of the Great Plains was converted to cropland, with much of the remaining grassland used for livestock grazing (Cunfer 2005 ). Agricultural settlement developed a few decades later on the Canadian Prairies than in the US, but similar land use patterns had emerged there as well by 1930 (Friesen 1984 ; Rees 1988 ). In both countries, governments had policies that encouraged the establishment of family-operated farms on the Great Plains through a process known as homesteading (Stroup 1988 ; McManus 2008 ). Although a number of fast-growing urban centers had developed on the Plains by the 1930s, the population remained disproportionately rural, with local livelihoods and regional economic systems tied strongly to agriculture (Hurt 2011 ; Waiser 2005 ).

From the early years of European settlement to the present day, the Great Plains have experienced episodes of drought, dust storms, downturns in the agricultural economy, and movements of people in and out of the region (Malin 1946a ; Friesen 1984 ; Hurt 1981 ; 2011 ; McManus 2008 ). What made the 1930s notorious was the virtually simultaneous occurrence of harsh climatic conditions across a wide spatial area and difficult economic conditions that persisted through much of the decade. Multiple years of below average precipitation (see supplemental materials, Figures SM1 a–d), exacerbated by land management practices of the day, led to high rates of eolian soil erosion and dust storm activity across much of the region (Maio et al. 2007 ; Wheaton and Chakravarti 1990 ). The impacts of the Great Depression were experienced by Great Plains residents most directly in the forms of collapsed commodity prices, that wiped out farm incomes, and high unemployment in other economic sectors such as railroads and energy development that made non-agricultural employment opportunities scarce. The cumulative effects of the combined environmental and economic crises created widespread hardship, bankrupted many local governments, propelled high rates of farm abandonment and out-migration, and stimulated dramatic changes in government agricultural, land management and socio-economic policies in the US and Canada. Many of these are discussed in the review that now follows.

This project began with a simple question—what have we as scholars learned in looking back on the Dust Bowl era? It was stimulated by news of the impending Ken Burns documentary film, an event that past experience has shown inevitably spurs increased popular interest in its subject (Harlan 2003 ), and which indeed occurred once again (Sefton 2012 ). We employed an established methodology for systematic literature reviews in global environmental change research (e.g., Berrang-Ford et al. 2011 ; Ford 2012 ; McLeman 2011 ). First, we created a questionnaire listing more specific questions for the scholarly literature, ranging from the sorts of spatial and temporal scales within which Dust Bowl research is situated, to whether any specific land-management recommendations have been made on the basis of the Dust Bowl era experience (see Supplemental Materials Q1). Some of these questions were designed to allow for simple quantitative analyses, while others could derive more qualitative details. Our next step was to create an inventory of post-1930s peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles that make explicit reference to either the “Dust Bowl” or the “Dirty Thirties” and draw directly upon events of that period as part of the reported research. Both terms (particularly “Dust Bowl”) enjoy broad usage in scholarly literature about Depression-era droughts on the Great Plains, and as keyword search terms proved to be very useful in generating the inventory.

The ISI Web of Knowledge was used for this initial stage of the research, this database having been shown elsewhere to be highly suitable for this purpose (Jasco 2005 ; Berrang-Ford et al. 2011 ). Book reviews, non-peer-reviewed studies, and articles that upon reading were found to make only passing reference to events of the Dust Bowl era were excluded. This does not imply that the contents and findings of these sources are invalid; rather, we wished to focus on those publications that would have the greatest reliability and influence within the academy and maintain consistency with other systematic review studies in the environmental change field (e.g., Ford and Pearce 2010 ; Ford et al. 2011 ). The reference list of each article in the inventory was then reviewed to identify additional scholarly articles that met the selection criteria and were not indexed in Web of Knowledge (i.e., citation tracking; for example, smaller regional history journals are not always indexed by ISI). The process was continued until no further articles were found, creating an initial inventory of 101 articles.

The questionnaire was then applied to each article using a Microsoft Excel-based form into which standardized quantitative and qualitative data were entered. The quantitative data were aggregated and analyzed to identify general trends in Dust Bowl research (see Supplemental Materials Table SM1). Qualitative data were organized by discipline and interpreted by an author generally familiar with the theories and methods used in that discipline. Key findings from each article were recorded using semi-standardized language so as to facilitate aggregation and summary. The reference lists of articles in the inventory were then resampled to identify key scholarly books that appeared on multiple occasions in reference lists of different authors and which met the selection criteria. The questionnaire process was repeated with these documents, the requirement for citation by multiple authors being to focus on those books with broad influence on the scholarship as opposed to sources drawn upon for a single research project. Given the breadth of material covered in these, the qualitative data from the questionnaire were not recorded in Excel but in separate word processor files. Finally, the inventory was supplemented by inclusion and review of several key government reports (again selected from the reference lists of authors). A full bibliography of the inventory appears in the Supplementary Materials for this article.

Our inventory contains a disproportionate number of journal articles published in the last two decades, especially in the physical sciences (see Supplemental Materials Figure SM2). Some of this growth over time can likely be attributed to the general expansion in the number of scholars and scholarly journals being published in recent decades, particularly in fields such as environmental change, earth, and atmospheric sciences. However, we also suggest in later sections of this article that the increase has also been made possible by recent developments in datasets and methodological approaches used in atmospheric sciences and global environmental change research. The results of our review and discussion of them are organized according to scholarly field in following sections, followed by a conclusion suggesting future avenues where further scholarly reflection on the Dust Bowl may yet be beneficial.

Results and discussion

What atmospheric science has learned from the dust bowl.

Historian Donald Worster once wrote, “Scientists, climatologists and ecologists in particular, may one day be able to tell the historian why droughts happen” ( 1986 , p. 109). This quote foreshadowed the fact that the greatest expansion in scholarly interest in the Dust Bowl in recent years has come in the atmospheric sciences (28 articles). Through modeling, climatological data analysis, and paleoclimate studies, two key sets of questions are the main focus of scholars working in this and related fields: what are the causes and atmospheric dynamics of the Dust Bowl and other droughts of the recent past; and, what is the return interval, intensity, and extent of past droughts (Cook et al. 2007 ; Schubert et al. 2008 ). Stimulated in part by the need to understand possible causes and impacts of anthropogenic climate change, these studies have been made possible by increasingly sophisticated global climate models and greater availability of climate datasets, especially the “reanalysis data” (Kalnay et al. 1996 ). Reanalysis products combine quality-controlled meteorological data, including surface, upper-air, and satellite-derived measurements, within climate models to provide theoretically consistent quantitative descriptions (i.e., three-dimensional grids) of the atmosphere, including gridded measurements interpolated to areas with or without original data (e.g., temperature) as well as derived variables such as heat flux, which are useful for understanding climate dynamics.

Atmospheric scientists have observed that droughts of comparable severity to those of the Dust Bowl era have occurred in subsequent decades, including 2011–2012, but that the 1930s droughts stand out because of their spatial extent (Karl et al. 2012 ). Recent studies of paleo-records have found that twentieth century droughts were shorter in duration and perhaps less severe than past Great Plains megadroughts, such as those of the sixteenth century or the tenth to thirteenth centuries AD (Cook et al. 2007 ; Herweijer et al. 2007 ). Through data analysis and modeling, the causal mechanism for Dust Bowl era droughts on the Great Plains has been linked to ocean temperature anomalies (Schubert et al. 2004 ; Seager et al. 2008 ). Specifically, it appears that Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs), especially as expressed by cold tropical temperatures during the La Niña phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), have the most direct influence, with Atlantic Ocean SSTs perhaps having an indirect influence through dynamic effects on the atmospheric general circulation (Cook et al. 2011 ; Kushnir et al. 2010 ; McCrary and Randall 2010 ). Studies have identified the inherent, internal variability of the atmosphere as also having played a causal role, with local effects of dust and land surface changes having potentially intensified drought conditions during the Dust Bowl era, although the importance of these factors is still under discussion (McCrary and Randall 2010 ; Broennimann et al. 2009 ; Cook et al. 2009 ; Hoerling et al. 2009 ). The ability to predict Great Plains droughts with climate models on the basis of such information is not yet settled, with models differing in their ability to simulate droughts from a range of causes (McCrary and Randall 2010 ).

Instrumental and paleo-records have shown Dust Bowl era droughts to be part of a global series of precipitation anomalies (Herweijer et al. 2007 ). Dry conditions in western North America often coincide with dryness in mid-latitude North Atlantic regions and parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia; other regions, such as parts of the tropics, may in turn be relatively wet during such periods. Tree-ring data and lake sediment studies have also been used to study Dust Bowl era and other droughts and their effects on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and landscapes (Cook et al. 2007 ). A “drought atlas” of the past 1000 years for the US and southern Canada has been developed by assembling local-level drought reconstructions using tree-rings (Cook et al. 2007 ). These developments help place Dust Bowl era droughts in context, but remain as yet imperfect analogs of potential future drought conditions to be expected on the Great Plains under anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al. 2007 ; Herweijer et al. 2007 ; Seager et al. 2008 ). The density of paleo-records for the Great Plains region is still sparse, and there remains some debate over the likely intensity of paleo-droughts. The inherent nature of vegetation on the Plains, where trees are not abundant and are generally not long-lived, makes it challenging to generate paleo-climate chronologies using tree-ring analysis. The ability to use another key tool in paleo-climate reconstruction—lake sediment analysis—is also more challenging in the Plains than in other North American regions given the limited availability of suitable locations, the difficulty in getting reliable sub-decadal resolution, and the highly variable behavior of hydrology at local scales which in turn affects sedimentation processes (Woodhouse and Brown 2001 ). Despite these challenges, more paleo-research on the Great Plains is warranted and indeed necessary if atmospheric scientists are to generate better predictive tools for future regional and global drought frequency and impact.

Looking back on the human causes of soil erosion

Over the decades, a lively debate has taken place among scholars over the human causes and contribution to the high rates of soil erosion and severe dust storms that were experienced on the Great Plains. We found eight journal articles specifically dealing with the subject, but articles in several other categories (e.g., history, multidisciplinary studies) and several books also tackle this subject. There is also a large body of government reports published by the US Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conservation Service and similar agencies, as well as detailed studies from agricultural experimental stations in Canada and the US available to scholars interested in more detailed understanding of the causes of and responses to Dust Bowl era soil erosion.

The sources we reviewed suggest dust storms and eolian transport of soil are a natural geomorphological phenomenon on the Great Plains (Maio et al. 2007 ; Wheaton and Chakravarti 1990 ), with shallow sandy deposits being highly sensitive to variations in climate (Muhs and Holliday 1995 ). Soil and dust are transported by low magnitude, frequent wind events as well as less common but high magnitude storms typical of the 1930s (Lee and Tchakerian 2005 ; see Fig.  3 ). Based on written records of severe dust storms on the southern Great Plains dating back to the 1830s, before agricultural settlement took place, environmental historian James Malin (Malin 1946a , b , c ) has argued that the high frequency of dust storms in the 1930s was partly a reflection of better reporting, although he did acknowledge the human contribution to the creation of dust storms through “…the initial exploitive stage of power farming, the period of the late 1920s [which] was analogous in a sense to pioneering” ( 1946c , p. 412). Social and natural scientists generally agree that farming practices contributed to soil erosion and dust storm occurrence, but there is a lively and ongoing debate as to the relative importance of that contribution (see, e.g., contrasting opinions among Hurt 1981 ; Cunfer 2005 ; Goudie and Middleton 1992 ; Worster 1979 ). Several scholars have suggested that supporters of New Deal agricultural policies in the US played up the role of farming practices as a cause of erosion to advance political ends (e.g., Shindo 2000 , Lauck 2012 ) while others such as Worster ( 1979 ) place much more blame on the farming system.

Dust storm, Baca County. Colorado Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, catalog no. LC-USF34-001615-ZE (b&w film nitrate neg.) LC-USZ62-13580. ( http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1998018173/PP/ )

A common reference point in these debates is the 1936 report of The Great Plains Committee, established by the US government to identify the causes, impacts, and necessary remedies for the crisis in the region. Table  1 summarizes the key findings—which put much of the blame on land settlement patterns and land use practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—and the recommendations for action. In terms of the human contribution to the environmental disaster unfolding on the Plains, the Committee placed particular emphasis on the overgrazing of grasslands in the middle part of the nineteenth century; land speculation facilitated by government policies; the creation of land allotments under homesteading programs that were too small to be economically viable in the long term; and the failure on the part of settlers and governments alike to recognize the aridity of the climate and the diversity in soil conditions across the region. The Committee’s recommendations for action were many and placed a heavy emphasis on federal and state government intervention in land use management and soil erosion control. The Committee did not place great emphasis on irrigation or large-scale water retention projects in its recommendations, even those would turn out to be transformative adaptations in later decades, likely because the Committee did not anticipate the technological developments to come in these areas (see White 1986 for further analysis of the report).

Table 1

Summary of key findings of the Great Plains Committee ( 1936 )

The Committee also recommended as a precursor to federal action the creation of a centralized agency to coordinate the efforts of the 25 federal agencies and many more state and local groups involved in land management on the Great Plains

With the benefit of hindsight, scholars have examined in greater detail many of the various causal factors identified in the Great Plains Committee’s report. For example, under the mantra that “rain follows the plow” (Smith 1947 ), late nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers plowed under large areas of native grasslands, converting these to grain, corn, and, in the southern Plains, cotton fields. The view of the Great Plains Committee was that much of this land was marginal for agriculture and should have been left as grazing range. This view, shared by some later scholars (e.g., Johnson 1947 , Worster 1979 ), shaped many of the New Deal land management policies and programs initiated during the Depression era. However, using GIS tools not available to earlier generations of Great Plains scholars, Cunfer ( 2005 ) found that, even at the height of grassland conversion in 1935, only one-third of the US Great Plains was actually in plowed cropland, with the proportion of cropland lowest in the more arid westerns and southern portions of the Plains. The ratio of approximately 25 % cropland to 75 % grassland prevailed from the 1940s until the end of the twentieth century, a ratio that was first achieved in the 1920s (Cunfer 2005 ). Cunfer ( 2005 ) also found that the human contribution to eolian erosion and dust storm activity during the 1930s was most significant in the southern Texas panhandle region and that in other parts of the Great Plains conditions in the 1930s were consistent with those observed in other droughts, suggesting that Depression era land use may have been a less significant causal factor than the severity of the drought itself.

The evidence from Malin ( 1946c ) and Cunfer ( 2005 ) supports an interpretation that the pre-Dust Bowl era was a period when farmers were learning to adjust and adapt to local conditions, with Malin ( 1946c ) suggesting that longer-established farmers had more experience with local conditions and were better caretakers of the land than later arrivals who came during the expansion of mechanized farming across the Plains in the 1920s. Many of these latter included “suitcase farmers”—non-residents who operated monoculture grain farms as a source of speculative, often secondary income (Hewes 1973 ). When droughts struck, some of these ill-tended areas became sources of blowing soil that drifted across the lands of other, resident farmers (Hurt 1981 ). It has been observed that areas with high rates of farm tenancy often suffered from especially poor land management that contributed to soil erosion (Great Plains Committee 1936 ; Bonnifield 1979 ; Hurt 1981 ). While tenants and suitcase farmers clearly had less stake in the long-term health of the land, areas where most farms were operated by resident owners, such as southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, also suffered from erosion and dust storms (e.g., Gilbert and McLeman 2010 ; McLeman and Ploeger 2012 ). One reality is that some of the farming practices of the era used by owner-operators and non-owner-operators alike created ideal conditions for wind erosion once the droughts struck. An example of such a practice was plowing fields to a fine consistency prior to leaving them fallow, on the assumption that the exposed soil would have a higher rate of absorption and retention of moisture; instead, this practice produced conditions that made drought-desiccated soil more susceptible to wind transport (Smika 1970 ; Bonnifield 1979 ; Lyon et al. 1998 ). Further, the small size of Great Plains farms meant individual farmers had little influence over soil conservation in their local area and that abandoned farms became source points for erosion that adversely affected neighboring operators (Hansen and Libecap 2004 ).

An important question is why Great Plains farmers of the 1920s and 1930s pushed beyond the “unstable equilibrium” of cropland-to-grassland that Cunfer ( 2005 ) suggests was reached in 1920 and, with the help of irrigation in dryer areas, has been maintained from the 1940s onward. Here, the hypotheses of Donald Worster ( 1979 , 1986 ) have been influential. Worster suggests that the high commodity prices triggered by World War I stimulated an entrepreneurial rush of new entrants to farming on the Great Plains and the expansion of plowed acreages by established farmers (in what was colloquially known as the “great plow-up”) (for data on wheat prices during this period, see Supplemental Materials Figure SM3). This was facilitated by developments in farm mechanization, with the credit needed to finance purchases of new equipment further drawing the Great Plains and its residents more tightly into the broader international economy. The collapse of commodity prices following 1929 stock market crash chased out the suitcase farmers, but forced remaining operators to work the land even harder to make up lost income. Simultaneously, the early 1930s saw an influx of population to rural areas, especially to those where tenant farms were available (McLeman 2006 ), as people displaced from other sectors of the collapsing economy looked to farming as an alternative livelihood. Thus, the arrival of drought did not so much cause the soil erosion, farm abandonments, and distress migration as reveal the socio-ecological disequilibrium that had developed on the Plains. Worster’s interpretation of the Dust Bowl is in many ways a precursor to political ecology-based interpretations of general human vulnerability to environmental change developed in subsequent years, such as Blaikie et al. ( 1994 ) pressure-and-release model and more recent “vulnerability science” approaches, which seek to identify and document the multi-scale determinants of vulnerability (Turner et al. 2003 ).

Government involvement and policy intervention in land management

An important outcome of the 1930s socio-ecological crisis on the Great Plains was a greatly expanded participation of government in land management and soil conservation. In the US, a considerable range of federal agencies were involved in land management and soil conservation. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) undertook air photo surveys and generated detailed soil maps (digitized by Cunfer ( 2011 )) to identify areas needing attention. It sought to address the problem of wind erosion on unoccupied and abandoned lands by acquiring them outright, and running demonstration projects on terracing and contour plowing, among other activities (Johnson 1947 ; Hurt 1981 ; Bonnifield 1979 ; Baveye et al. 2011 ). Meanwhile, the US Forest Service’s Prairie States Forestry Project initiated tree-planting on private lands to create shelterbelts to reduce soil erosion, and by 1940 had planted 200 million trees on 30,000 farms from North Dakota to Texas (Johnson 1947 ; Gardner 2009 ; Hurt 1981 , 1985 ). The Federal Emergency Relief Administration offered farmers subsidies to list-plow their lands in ways that would reduce wind erosion (Hurt 1981 ), while the Works Progress Administration funded infrastructure projects that included the building of dams and improved roads in rural areas (Bonnifield 1979 ; McLeman et al. 2008 ). Millions of dollars of federal investment was channeled through the US Department of Agriculture to purchase farms on what it saw to be marginally productive land (Hurt 1986 ; Lewis 1989 ; Sylvester and Rupley 2012 ) and in 1935 a program was initiated to create long-range weather forecasting capacity (Hecht 1983 ). The Resettlement Administration (later to become the Farm Security Administration) encouraged owners of small farms in dryer parts of the Plains to resettle on other lands, although participation was low because of poor financial incentives and resettlement destination lands being not much better than those left behind (Bonnifield 1979 ). In addition to federal efforts at changing land management practices, state governments facilitated the formation of soil conservation districts to coordinate efforts among farmers, 38 of these having been established in the southern Great Plains by 1941 (Johnson 1947 ).

Although the political dynamics were different in Canada, similar types of government interventions occurred in that country. For example, the Alberta government’s Special Areas Board was mandated to acquire as much farmland as possible in the dry, southeast part of the province and convert it to grazing land, and the Board today still administers 2.1 million hectares (Jones 1991 ; Marchildon et al. 2008 ). In Alberta and Saskatchewan, provincial governments subsidized the relocation expenses of families willing to abandon their farms in the drought-stricken areas (Marchildon et al. 2008 ; Gilbert and McLeman 2010 ; McLeman and Ploeger 2012 ). The Canadian federal government created the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in 1935 to expand government research into soil erosion and land management, carry out soil surveys, encourage farmers to adopt soil conservation measures and new farming practices, and establish shelterbelts and community pastures (Marchildon et al. 2008 ).

The effectiveness of these and other government programs and interventions in Great Plains land management, particularly those in the US, has been subject to debate by later scholars. Johnson’s ( 1947 ) account of government land management initiatives was generally very favorable and lamented the abandonment of many of these with the 1940s’ return of rainfall to the Great Plains and higher commodity prices stimulated by World War II. By contrast, Riney-Kehrberg ( 1994 ) and Bonnifield ( 1979 ) have observed that many US Plains farmers were suspicious of and resistant to federal land management initiatives, even in the heart of the drought. There is some evidence that soil conservation efforts initiated in the 1930s helped reduce the scale of soil erosion when drought conditions returned to the Great Plains in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s (Wienhold et al. 2000 ) and that many of the practices encouraged by government agencies are still generally appropriate for reducing dust storm activity (Ervin and Lee 1994 ). Bonnifield ( 1979 ) finds government programs had generally mixed results, benefitted disproportionately a relatively small number of large farm operators, and were susceptible to cronyism in many regions (the latter point also noted by McLeman et al. 2008 ). Hurt ( 1981 ) suggested that natural processes—the return of precipitation and the recolonization of eroded areas by plant species like Russian thistle—were likely as effective in restabilizing damaged lands as were planned interventions by the SCS. Using a reanalysis of aerial photographs, digitized soil maps and census data not available to previous scholars or to Depression-era governments, Sylvester and Rupley ( 2012 ) found that the encroachment of farms onto sub-marginal land and soils of the US Great Plains in the 1930s was relatively modest, suggesting that government efforts to acquire and reconvert farmland to grassland may have been excessive.

One outcome of Dust Bowl era government initiatives about which later scholars generally approve was the greater attention to institutional research and extension services. This has since led to the development of new erosion monitoring technologies that have been applied elsewhere (e.g., Norton and Savabi 2010 ) and new farming practices that emphasize protection of topsoil, such as conservation tillage, no-till farming, and the avoidance of fallowing through continuous rotational cropping (Anderson 2005 ; Hobbs 2007 ; Lal et al. 2007 ). Such practices minimize surface disturbance, reduce erosion, and may enable eventual remediation of lands that were damaged during the Dust Bowl era and remain so (Anderson 2005 ). They have been strongly recommended as a means of enhancing agricultural capacity to adapt to anthropogenic climate change in the future (Hobbs 2007 ), although field trials on the Great Plains show that considerable care must be taken in choosing location-appropriate crop rotations and sequences; even so, yields will continue to be variable (Lal et al 2007 ). Findings from Great Plains soil conservation and land management research have over the decades had influence in other parts of the world as well (Anderson 1984 ; Phillips 1999 ).

Institutional responses to socio-ecological crisis: farm income stabilization and relief

In addition to becoming actively involved in land management, governments also became closely involved in the agricultural economy and socio-economic welfare of Great Plains residents in the 1930s. As the crisis first emerged, much of the burden of providing support to affected families fell to local governments, which quickly found they lacked the necessary resources to do so (Riney-Kehrberg 1994 ; McLeman et al 2008 ; Marchildon et al 2008 ). An array of social assistance, food aid, and employment-creation programs, generically referred to as “relief” by governments and residents alike, were initiated by American and Canadian governments to assist impoverished families. While not all were targeted exclusively at Great Plains communities, their impacts were particularly strong there. The US Farm Security Administration provided short-term loans to farmers to purchase food, seed, and farming supplies, overcoming the difficulty in getting credit from financial institutions (Hurt 1981 ). It also operated camps in California for migrant workers arriving from the Great Plains and neighboring regions (Gregory 1989 ). The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation supplied subsidized feed to cattle farmers, while the Resettlement Administration was providing incentives to reduce herd size (Hurt 1981 ). Infrastructure programs funded by the Works Progress Administration became an important source of off-farm employment in rural and urban communities across the Great Plains, while the Farm Security Administration funded the shipment and distribution of emergency food supplies to the hardest hit areas (Hurt 1981 ; McLeman et al 2008 ). As in the US, many local governments across the Canadian Prairies struggled financially during the 1930s. The provincial governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan were essentially bankrupt as well, necessitating significant federal financing of relief activities, including food assistance, rural infrastructure building, and other spending reminiscent of that which was going on in the US (Marchildon et al 2008 ). Scholarship since the 1930s generally agrees that such activities lessened the degree of hardship experienced by rural households across the region, although several studies (e.g., Bonnifield 1979 ; Gilbert and McLeman 2010 ; McLeman et al. 2008 ) emphasize the equal, if not greater, importance of household-level resilience and non-institutional social networks in successful adaptation (see “ The Dust Bowl as a research analog for understanding climate adaptation and climate-related migration ” subsection below).

An especially important government response to the crisis was intervention in commodity markets and production systems. In the US, a key piece of legislation was the agricultural adjustment act (AAA), which in its various incarnations created a production management system designed to stabilize commodity prices for producers, with a specific goal of restoring farm purchasing power to parity with the non-farm population by using the much higher average commodity prices of 1909–1914 as a baseline (Bowers et al. 1984 ). As part of this program, government provided financial incentives to farmers to withdraw less-productive lands from farming and reduce overall production to levels that provided price stability for farmers (Skopcol and Finegold 1982 ; Bonnifield 1979 ). Federally guaranteed crop insurance programs were established, with the caveat that participants had to partake in soil conservation activities (Bowers et al. 1984 ). When the US Supreme Court ruled the direct payments to farmers to reduce acreages to be unconstitutional, the AAA was modified and began paying farmers to increase planting of cover crops for soil conservation purposes, thereby achieving similar ends (Hurt 1981 ). Administration of the AAA was carried out by a special agency created within the existing US Department of Agriculture, facilitating cooperation with the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, farm extension, and the land-grant colleges. Skopcol and Finegold ( 1982 ) suggest that this organizational arrangement—which today would be called “mainstreaming” adaptation (e.g., Smit and Wandel 2006 ) into existing institutions—allowed the AAA to be much more effective and have a more long-lasting influence than other New Deal initiatives that were set up as independent operating agencies. Whatever the reason, Dust Bowl era agricultural policies with their heavy governmental role in commodity prices and production levels remained influential into the 1970s (see Libecap ( 1998 ) for an extensive review). When drought returned to the US Great Plains in the 1950s, many 1930s-era farm relief programs were renewed, although unlike the Dirty Thirties, the “Filthy Fifties” were not accompanied by economic recession or depressed commodity prices (Opie 1993 ). The 1950s also marked the beginning of widespread adoption of groundwater irrigation in many parts of the Plains, improving to some degree farmers’ ability to cope with drought.

In Canada, an important federal government intervention was the 1935 creation of a centralized marketing board for Prairie wheat and barley producers to compete with private firms for sale and distribution of grain. Membership in the new Canadian Wheat Board was initially voluntary, but during World War II made mandatory so as to strengthen government control over output and prices (Skogstad 2005 ). It was not until 2012 that the de facto monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board over Prairie-produced wheat and barley was terminated.

The Dust Bowl as a research analog for understanding climate adaptation and climate-related migration

In addition to documenting and analyzing the extensive intervention of government in the agricultural economy and in providing basic relief, a range of scholars have drawn attention to the initiatives and expertise of local communities and households in adapting to the conditions of the 1930s. Environmental historians were among the first to do so, through a flurry of publications released in the 1970s and early 1980s. For example, Bonnifield ( 1979 ), writing before the terms “vulnerability” and “adaptation” came into common scholarly usage, devotes a full chapter, plus many examples elsewhere, to describing how households and communities “liv(ed) through it all.” Hurt ( 1981 ) and Worster ( 1979 ) similarly wrote of challenges faced during daily life during the Dust Bowl, and how people overcame these. It is probably not coincidental that when the 1970s saw a return of drought conditions to the Great Plains, Lockeretz ( 1978 ) asked explicitly in American Scientist if any lessons had been learned from the Dust Bowl.

With the “critical turn” of the 1980s, scholars in natural hazards and related fields began combining political economy and other social theory with physical science methods to develop explanations of human vulnerability and adaptation to changes in the natural environment (e.g., Hewitt 1983 ; Blaikie 1985 ; see Adger ( 2006 ) for a more detailed review of the origins of vulnerability research). The Dust Bowl soon proved to be an especially useful historical analog for understanding the physical impacts and societal responses to climate change. Glantz ( 1988 , 1991 ) was among the first to propose the use of the research-by-analog method for climate change impacts research and to study the Dust Bowl specifically in this fashion. Glantz ( 1988 , along with other authors in the same edited volume) was particularly interested in how Great Plains communities would adapt to a declining availability of groundwater for irrigation—a key adaptation for many farmers on the southern Plains—with his concerns subsequently pursued by others (e.g., Opie 1992 , 1993 ; Orlove 2005 ; Rosenberg et al. 1999 ). Rosenzweig and Hillel ( 1993 ) asked whether the Dust Bowl was an analog of the physical changes to be experienced on the Great Plains in the future and concluded that it was, except that future drought conditions would likely be worse, thereby anticipating findings generated in the subsequent bloom in Dust Bowl research by atmospheric scientists already discussed in the “ What atmospheric science has learned from the Dust Bowl ” section above.

The Dust Bowl era has continued to be used as a research analog in more recent years, including as a means of understanding how climate affects human migration behavior. The Dust Bowl era saw the end of decades of rural population increase on the Great Plains and initiated a trend of rural population decline that persists to this day (Parton et al. 2007 ). The American states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan all experienced net population losses in the 1930s (University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center 1998 ; Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1936 ). The movement of over 300,000 people to California from Oklahoma and surrounding drought-stricken states, made famous by Steinbeck’s writings and documented by Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration photographers, acquired the popular name “the Dust Bowl migration” (Gregory 1989 ; Lange and Taylor 1939 ; Stein 1973 ). It has since been well documented that most California-bound migrants actually originated in more densely populated (though often equally drought-stricken) areas on the eastern periphery of the Dust Bowl proper (Bonnifield 1979 ; Gregory 1989 ), although Dust Bowl counties had outmigration rates up to 15 % higher than other areas (Fishback et al. 2006 ; see Riney-Kehrberg ( 1994 ) for a detailed account of adaptation and migration in southwestern Kansas). And, while the California-bound migrants are the best known, tens of thousands of households migrated from rural and urban homes on the Great Plains for Washington State, Oregon, and British Columbia, and for the Aspen parklands of central Alberta and Saskatchewan (Hoffman 1938 ; McLeman et al 2010 ). A variety of internal migration patterns within the Great Plains also emerged during the 1930s, including rural-to-urban, urban-to-rural, and rural–rural migration involving tens of thousands of households, each reflecting different environmental, socio-economic and institutional dynamics operating at sub-regional and local scales (Gregory 1989 ; Fishback et al 2006 ; McLeman 2006 ).

Although some scholars in the 1980s suggested southern Great Plains migration developed from a unique set of dynamics (e.g., McDean 1986 ) or downplayed the role of environment (Manes 1982 ), more recently, scholars using new theories, datasets, and analytical tools have learned much in looking back upon Great Plains migration patterns of the 1930s. Gutmann et al. ( 2005 ; Gutmann and Field 2010 ; Deane and Gutmann 2003 ) have used Dust Bowl era population movements in developing explanations of the relationship between environment and American population trends more broadly, in giving context to the population displacements and migration that followed in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and as an inspiration for studying the relationship between dust storms and population change in later decades on the Great Plains. Fishback et al. ( 2006 ) combined newly available economic datasets with census data to assess the effects of New Deal policies on migration, finding that areas of the US where larger amounts of money were spent on public works projects, relief, and agricultural assistance, were less likely to lose out-migrants and more likely to attract migrants from elsewhere. These findings echo qualitative evidence found by McLeman et al. ( 2008 ) in eastern Oklahoma, which suggested that out-migration rates there would have been much higher if not for government assistance. McLeman and Smit ( 2006 ) used evidence from Depression-era Oklahoma to explain how migration is a means by which households adapt to climatic variability and change more generally, the likelihood of migration as opposed to other possible adaptations being subject to the influences of household access to economic, social and cultural capital. Similar findings were made in subsequent studies of Depression-era drought migrants in Alberta and Saskatchewan (Gilbert and McLeman 2010 ; Laforge and McLeman ( 2013 , in press). McLeman et al ( 2010 ) and McLeman and Ploeger ( 2012 ) used GIS models that combined historical climate models, land quality inventories, and census data to identify rural areas on the Canadian Prairies where drought conditions and soil quality had a strong influence on out-migration during the 1930s, techniques that, with modification, might be undertaken elsewhere. Reuveny ( 2008 ) used the less-than-welcoming reception Dust Bowl migrants received in California (see Gregory 1989 for greater details) as one of a number of case studies to understand factors that lead environmental migrants to come into conflict with populations in receiving areas.

Future research opportunities

Despite the large body of scholarly literature that exists, the Dust Bowl era still has much to teach us about preparing for and responding to the acute socio-environmental challenges that will continue to arise in our present era of anthropogenic climate change, food and water scarcity, and global economic uncertainty. The recent surge in interest in the Dust Bowl among climate scientists shows how more is yet to be learned about the formation, frequency, and severity of Dust Bowl-type droughts by taking advantage of newly available datasets, models, analytical tools, and computing power. Several studies described above have shown that GIS software can use digitized historical datasets to illuminate more precisely the outcomes of the complex interplay between human systems and environment on the Great Plains and suggest ways by which similar tools and data might be used for anticipating future outcomes elsewhere. Researchers have only begun to plumb the Dust Bowl experience to better understand human and institutional adaptation processes in the face of coincident environmental and economic crisis. We have also yet to explore systematically the vast wealth of community histories, autobiographical accounts, community newspaper archives, personal correspondence, and other records kept by residents of the Great Plains, which describe the innovative ways by which people adapted to “the worst hard time” (Egan 2006 ). It is important that scholars continue to analyze and assess such information not only because of the pace and scale of environmental change to which we must adapt in the future, but also because of the reality that cash-strapped governments have ever-less wherewithal to provide the institutional responses we have come to expect of them in the post-Dust Bowl era.

In conducting this study, we were able to answer the question “what have we learned (so far) from the Dust Bowl,” but we also noticed a decline in two particular aspects of scholarly reporting that we believe should be reversed: research studies that consider human and physical system processes together (as opposed to focussing on one or the other); and, the discussion of broader policy and planning recommendations in research findings. Although those who have first-hand knowledge of the Dust Bowl are ever more elderly and fewer in number, policy makers and the general public are familiar with it through popular culture and iconic imagery. This provides an excellent opportunity for scientists to connect their research to public dialogue about environmental change issues. Doing so, however, requires scholars already working on the Dust Bowl to make explicit the implications of their findings for policy, and requires new scholars already specialized in connecting physical and human systems research to turn their attention to the Dust Bowl. One avenue notably underrepresented in Dust Bowl scholarship to date is that of food and water security, one that is of growing global public policy concern. Here again, the Dust Bowl is recent enough to provide a powerful learning analog. While it is widely known that people can go hungry even in times and places when food is plentiful, we tend to associate that knowledge with the world’s least developed regions. It has been largely forgotten that some Americans starved during the Dust Bowl years (Fig.  4 ; see also McWilliams 1942 ; McLeman et al 2008 ), and it took Hurricane Katrina to remind us that food and water security issues are not restricted to the poorest parts of the planet. We could learn much about avoiding such crises in the future through further investigation of our past.

Starving woman and child in 1930s Oklahoma. The photographer’s note accompanying this image reads: “Tubercular wife and daughter of agricultural day laborer. She had lost six of her eight children and the remaining two were pitifully thin. The mother said that she had tuberculosis because she had always gone back to the fields to work within 2 or 3 days after her children were born. Shack home is on Poteau Creek near Spiro, Oklahoma.” Image source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-033601-D DLC (b&w film neg.) http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/fsa2000014830/PP/

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Acknowledgments

Peter Todd was our cartographer. This research was partially funded by a standard research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Canada Research Chairs program and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada are also acknowledged for their indirect contributions to this project through their ongoing financial support of several of the authors. Four anonymous peer reviewers and the editor of this journal are thanked for their suggestions, which greatly improved this article.

Contributor Information

Robert A. McLeman, Phone: 1-613-5625800, Email: ac.ulw@namelcmr .

Juliette Dupre, Phone: 1-514-3984111, Email: [email protected] .

Lea Berrang Ford, Phone: 1-514-3984111, Email: [email protected] .

James Ford, Phone: 1-514-3984111, Email: [email protected] .

Konrad Gajewski, Phone: 1-613-5625800, Email: ac.awattou@ikswejaG .

Gregory Marchildon, Phone: +306-585-5464, Email: [email protected] .

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The Dust Bowl: Causes, Impact, and Lessons for the Future

This essay is about the Dust Bowl, a severe environmental and agricultural disaster of the 1930s in the Great Plains region. It discusses how a combination of severe drought and poor farming practices led to massive dust storms that devastated the land and forced many families to migrate in search of better living conditions. The essay highlights the socioeconomic impacts, including poverty and displacement, and the federal government’s response, which included soil conservation programs and changes in agricultural practices. It also explores the long-term ecological effects and the lessons learned, emphasizing the importance of sustainable land management and proactive measures to prevent future environmental crises.

How it works

One of the worst ecological disasters in North American history was the Dust Bowl, a 1930s agricultural and environmental catastrophe. The Dust Bowl, which started in the Great Plains, was caused by a combination of a protracted, intense drought and years of intensive farming without sufficient crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops, or other methods of conserving soil. In addition to changing the physical environment, this time had a significant social impact that still reverberates today, affecting public policy, agricultural practices, and migratory patterns.

A sequence of dust storms that started in 1931, peaked in 1934 and 1936, and persisted intermittently until the end of the decade signaled the start of the Dust Bowl. The agricultural techniques of that era had made the topsoil susceptible, and these dust storms, dubbed “Black Blizzards,” swept it away. Millions of acres of prairie have been tilled by farmers; before, the soil and moisture were retained by the deeply rooted grasses. When the drought hit, the wind could readily carry the loose dirt, resulting in enormous dust clouds that obscured the sky as far east as New York and Washington, D.C.

The impacted areas suffered terrible effects right away. Livestock died, crops failed, and families were left penniless. The Dust Bowl’s economic collapse exacerbated the Great Depression’s problems, resulting in widespread destitution and uprooting. A large number of farmers and their families were compelled to leave their homes in quest of employment and more congenial living arrangements. Hundreds of thousands of “Okies” and “Arkies” moved westward to California and other states during this migration, which is well-known for being detailed in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Upon arrival, they frequently encountered hard conditions and discrimination.

Aside from the acute suffering of people, the Dust Bowl led to important adjustments in government regulations and agricultural techniques. In response, the federal government, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, implemented a number of policies meant to provide both short-term assistance and long-term protection against future calamities. An organized attempt to promote soil conservation methods was started in 1935 with the founding of the Soil Conservation Service, which is now the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Initiatives including contour plowing, crop rotation, and windbreak planting were implemented to lessen soil erosion and replenish the land’s fertility.

Equally important were the Dust Bowl’s ecological effects. Native plants and animals perished as a result of the disruption of local ecosystems caused by topsoil loss and the dust storms that followed. The weather patterns were also impacted by the changing topography, which made the drought conditions worse in some places. Reforestation initiatives and the founding of the Shelterbelt Project—which sought to build a tree barrier across the Great Plains to lessen wind erosion and stabilize the soil—were two of the efforts made to restore the land.

The Dust Bowl left behind more than just its immediate consequences. It was a sobering reminder of the precarious equilibrium that exists between environmental sustainability and human activity. The lessons learnt during this time have impacted agricultural practices globally, highlighting the significance of sustainable farming practices, soil conservation, and the necessity of government action during ecological crises.

The Dust Bowl has reappeared in conversations concerning contemporary farming methods and climate change in recent years. The susceptibility of our food systems to environmental disturbances is becoming more and more evident as global temperatures increase and extreme weather events become more frequent. The Dust Bowl is a lesson in sustainable land management, emphasizing the need for proactive steps to protect our natural resources and the possible repercussions of disregarding such management.

In summary, the Dust Bowl was a disastrous occurrence that altered the social and physical landscape of the US. Its causes highlight the complex interplay between human activity and the environment, stemming from a confluence of natural and human influences. Future generations will benefit greatly from the crisis reaction, which included adjustments to government regulations and agricultural practices. The Dust Bowl serves as a potent reminder of the necessity of alertness, ingenuity, and collaboration in the search of a sustainable future as we confront fresh environmental difficulties.

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How the Dust Bowl Made Americans Refugees in Their Own Country

By: Patrick J. Kiger

Updated: August 11, 2023 | Original: January 4, 2019

Eight decades ago, hordes of migrants poured into California in search of a place to live and work. But those refugees weren’t from other countries. They were Americans and former inhabitants of the Great Plains and the Midwest who had lost their homes and livelihoods in the Dust Bowl .

Years of severe drought had ravaged millions of acres of farmland. Many migrants were enticed by flyers advertising jobs picking crops, according to the Library of Congress . And even though they were American-born, the Dust Bowl migrants still were viewed as intruders by many in California, who saw them as competing with longtime residents for work, which was hard to come by during the Great Depression . Others considered them parasites who would depend on government relief.

As many of the migrants languished in poverty in camps on the outskirts of California communities, some locals warned that the newcomers would spread disease and crime. They advocated harsh measures to keep migrants out or send them back home.

Migrants Fled Widespread Drought in Midwest

The Dust Bowl that forced many families on the road wasn’t just caused by winds lifting the topsoil. Severe drought was widespread in the mid-1930s, says James N. Gregory , a history professor at the University of Washington and author of the book American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California.

“Farm communities in the larger region were also hurt by falling cotton prices. All of this contributed to what has become known as the Dust Bowl migration,” Gregory says.

The exact number of Dust Bowl refugees remains a matter of controversy, but by some estimates, as many as 400,000 migrants headed west to California during the 1930s, according to Christy Gavin and Garth Milam, writing in California State University, Bakersfield’s Dust Bowl Migration Archives.

Dust Bowl migrants squeezed into trucks and jalopies —beat-up old cars—laden with their meager possessions and headed west, many taking the old U.S. Highway 66.

“Dad bought a truck to bring what we could,” recalled one former migrant, Byrd Monford Morgan, in a 1981 oral history interview . “There were fifteen people to ride out in this truck, in addition to what we could haul”—including the family’s kitchen table, sewing machines, sacks to use in picking cotton, and five-gallon cans packed with cookies baked by Morgan’s stepmother. Along the way, the family camped out by the side of the highway.

When the family got to California, they stopped at farms and asked if they needed workers, and picked everything from tomatoes to grapes, Morgan said.

More people from the drought-ravaged plains actually settled in the Los Angeles area than in the San Joaquin Valley and other agricultural areas in California, according to Gregory. But migrants made up a bigger percentage of the population in the state's rural areas, and it was there that journalists recorded the dire poverty and desperation that John Steinbeck described in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath .

Police Officers Tried to Block Migrants at the Border

As the migrants’ numbers swelled, efforts were made to thwart the migration. Police officers sometimes met migrants at the state line and told them to go away, because there was no work, in what was called the “bum blockade.” Officers stopped one mother with six children at a checkpoint and demanded that she pay $3 for a California driver’s license, though they relented when she said that she only had $3.40 to her name and needed that money to buy food for her family, according to a L.A. Times account .

Those who got into California often found themselves continually on the move from farm field to farm field in search of work. They lived in spartan quarters provided by agricultural growers or squatted in “Hooverville” shanties on the outskirts of towns, before the federal government started setting up migrant camps to accommodate them, according to the U.S. National Archives.

“Yes, we ramble and we roam, and the highway that’s our home,” folk singer Woody Guthrie sang in “ Dust Bowl Refugee. ”

Californians derided the newcomers as “hillbillies,” “fruit tramps” and other names, but “Okie”—a term applied to migrants regardless of what state they came from—was the one that seemed to stick, according to historian Michael L. Cooper’s account in Dust to Eat: Drought and Depression in the 1930s . One California businessman described the newcomers as “ignorant, filthy people,” who should not “think they’re as good as the next man.”

Some warned that the newcomers would sponge off the government, although relatively few of them actually sought benefits, as State Relief Administration director Harold Pomeroy explained in a 1937 Desert Sun article.

Migrants Were Feared as a Health Threat

A local official in Madera, California complained in 1938 that the migrants crowded into the camps presented a health threat, noting that “these conditions are not to be blamed o the growers, but on the people themselves, [for] having lived in squalor for many generations” back in their home states. One riverbank shantytown that was home to 1,500 migrants was burned to the ground by disease-fearing Californians in 1936.

Ironically, it would be a war— World War II —that would finally boost migrants’ fortunes. Many families left farm fields to move to Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, where they found work in shipyards and aircraft factories that were gearing up to supply the war effort.

By 1950, only about 25 percent of the original Dust Bowl migrants were still working the fields. As the the former migrants became more prosperous, they blended into the California population.

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Dust Bowl Outline

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Introduction, causes of the dust bowl, consequences of the dust bowl, lessons learned from the dust bowl.

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