Dust Bowl

Map of the location of the Dust Bowl in the United States.

The Dust Bowl refers to an ecological disaster which occurred in the American Midwest in the 1930s. It was caused by a combination of factors, some being natural in so far as this was a period of extreme drought in Oklahoma and surrounding states, but much of it being human-created. Decades of over-farming in the region had removed the secure topsoil from the land and created conditions which were prone to wind erosion. This, when combined with the droughts of 1934, 1936 and 1939, led to severe dust storms from which the term Dust Bowl originated. These conditions led to the collapse of agriculture and economic activity across large swathes of the Midwest, in Oklahoma and Arkansas in particular, but also parts of nearby states such as Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and New Mexico. As a consequence of their declining economic an existential circumstances, millions of people left the Dust Bowl and headed to other parts of the United States such as California in the 1930s.

Chronology of events

A dust storm in the Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s.

The American Midwest was intensively settled from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. As it was, and as the region increasingly became a breadbasket for the hungry and growing urban populations of cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and St. Louis to the east, agricultural practices in the plains of the Midwest became more and more intense. The amount of plowing being carried out was particularly notable. This was problematic as the topsoil of the plains here did not have a history of being plowed intensively over the centuries. Moreover, the plowing removed deep-rooted grasses which held the light soil of the Midwestern plains together. The result was that the topsoils of the region became extremely fine, almost like sand or, as observers would later term it, ‘dust’. The process became particularly acute during the 1920s as mechanized plows became common across the Midwest. This was fine during years when there was sufficient rain and moisture to dampen the soil and make it less fine, but when a period of intense heat and drought came along, the soil became so fine that windy weather raised it well over the ground and stirred it up into the skies in vast quantities.

Droughts of this kind duly came along in the 1930s, a surprise after years of decent rainfall and mild winters in the 1920s. During the 1930s states like Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas suffered some of the driest calendar years recorded during the twentieth century. The cumulative result of this was that the topsoil across the region turned dusty and when windstorms came through they swept up huge dust storms which turned the sky black and grey in places and deposited layers of dust soil across vast swathes of the American Midwest. This not only rendered the land unproductive for economic reasons and destroyed crops, but it also caused immense damage to buildings and infrastructure. All of this occurred in the context of the wider Great Depression which was occurring across the Americas and Europe. Unsurprisingly, people started leaving the Dust Bowl in droves as millions of tons of topsoil were being blown around the region.

Extent of migration

Oakland Museum of California depiction of a family vehicle prepared to leave the Dust Bowl region.

The combined damage of the dust storms and the impact of the Great Depression, which had been underway across America since late 1929, ensured that many people left the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in search of a better life. The bulk of these were farmers and farm laborers whose source of income had been decimated by the destruction of agricultural land in the Dust Bowl. This migration involved a large swathe of states. The storms of the mid-1930s impacted a region as far north as the Dakotas and into southern Canada. The following states saw the greatest migration numbers:

• North Dakota
• South Dakota
• Nebraska
• Wyoming
• Iowa
• Colorado
• Kansas
• Missouri
• New Mexico
• Texas
• Oklahoma
• Arkansas

In all, 2.5 million people within these states migrated, many leaving for other parts of the country or heading to the cities and towns in search of work. However, the worst impacted region was in the south of the Midwest, with Oklahoma as the epicenter of the migration from which approximately a million of those involved hailed. Many others came from Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, north Texas and north-eastern New Mexico.

Demographic impact

Cover of the first edition of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

The demographic impact of the Dust Bowl migrations was felt to the greatest extent in California, a state which had long had a reputation as a land of opportunity for people further to the east. The Central Valley had been developed as an agricultural center in the state and many of the farm workers of Oklahoma perceived that this was somewhere that their skills would be of use and work could be found. There they became known as the ‘Okies’, such was the volume of people coming from Oklahoma. An idea of the scale of this migration was developed in a study carried out in the early 1990s which revealed that some 3.75 million Californians, or approximately 12.5% of the state’s population at that time, were descendants of the ‘Okies’.

The migration continued into the 1940s and by mid-century it was estimated that one-quarter of all people who had been born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri were now living outside of those four states. Furthermore, the Dust Bowl migrations shaped American culture in the twentieth century, with John Steinbeck winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 in large part for The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which tells the tale of the Joads, a family of tenant farmers who are driven from Oklahoma because of the dust storms of the 1930s and the impact of the Great Depression and head towards California.

See also

• Great Depression
• Great Migration

Explore more about the Dust Bowl

• Oklahoma Newspapers records collection at MyHeritage
• California Newspapers records collection at MyHeritage
• 1940 US Federal Census records collection at MyHeritage
• Researching Ancestors from the 1930s through the 1940 US Federal Census at Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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