Description:
The Dust Bowl was a term that came to represent the land damaged by a series of destructive wind and dust storms, primarily in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Most of the catastrophic storms hit during 1938 to 1938, when a series of droughts eroded away the topsoil that had been overgrazed by livestock and overcultivated by poor farming techniques. The soil became dry and loose, and was easily blown away by the strong winds that whipped through the Great Plains region. Although Oklahoma County was not in the region known as the Dust Bowl, dry conditions upriver produced low water levels and parched earth like this at Lake Overholser.
Dust storms were not uncommon on the Great Plains, but had never been as large or as destructive as those in the 1930s. The first major storm struck in May of 1934, carrying nearly 350 million tons of dirt across the country to the East Coast. At times, visibility during a storm would be reduced to less than a mile. People and animals caught without shelter often had their lungs badly damaged or were even suffocated. Sometimes buildings collapsed from the weight of the dirt trapped in attics. The fine dust ruined car and farm machinery engines. Bankrupted by the cycle of drought and winds, thousands of farm families left for California with hopes of finding a better life.
The publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and John Ford’s Academy Award-winning film, helped forever link the Dust Bowl era to the people of Oklahoma, capturing the heartbreak of “Okie” farmers hit hard by one of America’s worst environmental disasters. In reality, however, only the three counties in the Oklahoma panhandle sustained significant damage.
Resources
Andryszewski, Tricia. The Dust Bowl: Disaster on the Plains. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1993.
Cooper, Scott. “State of the Past.” Oklahoma Gazette, 3 Jan., 2007: 21-22.
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Houghton-Mifflin, 2006.
“The Dust Bowl of Oklahoma.” America’s Story from America’s Library. 2007.
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/es/ok/es_ok_dustbowl_1.html