This column two weeks ago began by referencing major events that occurred 20 years ago. Coincidentally, the book I recently finished reading was written in 2006.
A National Book Award winner by Timothy Eagan, entitled “The Worst Hard Time,” is about the Great American Dust Bowl.
For anyone who picks up this book, a major clue that it was written 20 years ago is a blurb on the front cover from Walter Cronkite — “This is can’t-put-it-down history.”
I am a sucker for a good history book.
Like many of you, I knew of the Dust Bowl and was vaguely aware that it was anthropogenic. But I didn’t really understand the Dust Bowl. I do now.
In layman’s terms, it was, without a doubt, the worst environmental disaster in recorded history. Worse than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Worse than Chernobyl. Worse than the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which released over 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Dust Bowl occurred long before my time, even before my parents were born. Of course, I have heard stories of locals waking up to dust on their cars. Unless you have read about the Dust Bowl, it was a hundred times worse than you can imagine.
Before April 14, 1935, now called Black Sunday, it didn’t have a name. Storms were called “black blizzards” or “black rollers.” Black Sunday was the worst dust storm in American history, moving an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil in the Great Plains on one day. In perspective, that’s twice as much dirt as was excavated in seven years to create the Panama Canal.
After the storm, a reporter with the Associated Press referred to “life in the dust bowl of the continent.” The term stuck, becoming part of the national lexicon.
How bad was it? Farmers ran ropes between their barn and house, so they could find their way home when caught in a dust storm.
The storms generated such strong static electricity that if two people touched each other, they could be thrown to the ground by the discharge. Cars had to have chains dragging on the road for grounding, otherwise the static charge would short out the vehicle. Individuals put petroleum jelly on their noses and wore masks to filter the dust.
Children as well as adults died from dust pneumonia. Cattle went blind and died with stomachs full of dust.
Lasting from 1934 to 1940, the Dust Bowl was a period of severe drought over the Great Plains covering the panhandle of Oklahoma, northern Texas, western Kansas, Southeastern Colorado and Northeastern New Mexico.
The Great Plains receives no more than 10 inches of precipitation in a normal year. Before being settled, it was covered in buffalo grass, with deep roots that held the soil in place and enabled it to survive during periods of drought.
As with many disasters, it had more than one culprit. The government was part of the problem.
The Homestead Act of 1862, offered settlers 160-acre plots of land on the plains. After the Civil War in 1865, and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, new immigrants from Europe traveled to the Plains to stake their claim.
After an unusually wet period on the plains, people started to believe that “rain follows the plow.”
The Great War increased demand and prices for wheat grown on the Great Plains.
At about this same time, tractors appeared, making it easier for farmers to plow up more acres of grass for wheat.
Then the price for wheat went from $1.00 per bushel to 50 cents by the early 1930s.To make the same amount of money — and pay their loans — farmers put more acreage under the plow.
Egan reports in his book, “The tractors rolled on, the grass yanked up, a million acres a year turned and pulverized; in just five years, 1925 to 1930, another 5.2 million acres of native sod went under the plow in the southern plains.” For reference, Missouri currently has approximately 2.5 million acres of corn planted.
Today, the Great Plains are recovering. According to Kathelijne Bonne on gondwanatalks.com, “the Great Plains have overcome the Dust Bowl disaster thanks to regenerative agriculture and tree planting, but are also experiencing apparent prosperity through contaminating (artificial fertilizers), poisonous (pesticides), and extractive (groundwater) methods.”
Extracting water from the Ogallala Aquifer could lead to its own disaster.
If you would like to learn more, please click on the links below.
https://www.history.com/articles/remembering-black-sunday
https://www.gondwanatalks.com/l/dust-bowl-american-great-plains-recovery/#google_vignette
https://www.britannica.com/story/9-of-the-biggest-oil-spills-in-history
