Our thanks to the following individuals and institutions who assisted in the preparation of this script:

Dr. Jeff Lee,
Texas Tech University

Thomas E. Gill, Ph.D.
Department of Geosciences
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX

Ted M. Zobeck, Ph.D., CPSS
USDA, Agricultural Research Service
Wind Erosion and Water Conservation Research Unit
Lubbock, TX

The following books, articles and web sites were used in preparing this script:

The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History R. Douglas Hurt 1981 Nelson Hall Chicago

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s Donald Worster Oxford University Press 1979

“The Status of Biodiversity in the Great Plains”:http://www.greatplains.org/resource/biodiver/biostat/biostat.htm – The Nature Conservancy Great Plains Program

“The American Experience: Surviving the Dustbowl”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/ – PBS/WGBH 1999

“Welcome to your National Grasslands”:http://www.fs.fed.us/grasslands/ – US Forest Service

“History of the National Grasslands”:http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/dakotaprairie/history.htm – Dakota Prairie Grasslands

“National Grasslands”:hhttp://svinet2.fs.fed.us:80/r2/nebraska/gpng/ngland.html (USDA Forest Service)

“Prairie Ecosystems”:http://www.blackfootedferret.org/prairie.html – Black-footed Ferret Recovery Plan

Lavender, David. The Way to the Western Sea: Lewis and Clark Across the Continent. Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, NY 1988 pp 127-131

Author’s Notes:

Some farmers gave up and moved westward to California. Others stayed on, surviving on government assistance until the rains returned.

The plains’ native grasses are more densely packed than the wheat so can catch and hold soil better.

More infromation on the Dust Bowl
by Shireen Gonzaga

Background Information: The Dust Bowl

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, encouraging the settlement of the western United States. Each family was given 160 acres, to become their property if they could work the land for 5 years. About 1.5 million people used this opportunity to acquire over 200 million acres of land. They plowed the fertile prairie soil to plant their crops, mostly wheat, and began to raise cattle and sheep. Their success lead to further expansion, with the help of new technologies like tractors and combines, that made farming more efficient. Lower grain prices stimulated the conversion of even more prairie land to farmland. In 1917, the United States entered World War I. The war slogan “Wheat will win the war” took on a life of its own as even more prairie land came under the plow, and the expansion of farmland continued, even after the war had ended.

So far, normal precipitation had allowed wheat and other crops to thrive. The root systems of the crops held the soil in place, preventing the erosion of topsoil. But in 1931, things began to change. A drought descended over the southern Great Plains. The protective cover of wheat over the fields withered away. The bare land became exposed to merciless incessant winds that blew away the light topsoil, the organic matter, clay, and silt that was the most fertile part of the land.

The southern Great Plains of the 1930s became known as the Dust Bowl, a name coined by a journalist from the Associated Press. It was an area covering about 100 million acres, with dimensions roughly 500 miles by 300 miles. Although the boundaries of this drought-stricken area waxed and waned from year to year, it generally encompassed the western third of Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the Oklahoma panhandle, the northern two-thirds of the Texas panhandle, and northeastern New Mexico.

The drought in the southern Great Plains lasted from 1931 to 1939, at its worst from 1934 to 1937. It wreaked havoc on the region. The winds that eroded the soil kicked up large and violent dust storms that sometimes darkened the skies for days at a time. These storms became a regular event, beginning in 1932, peaking in 1935 and continuing during the spring months for the following four years. Drifts of fine soil that looked like sand dunes began to appear, sometimes burying fences and buildings, and closing roads. Windows had to be sealed with tape and putty to prevent fine soil from entering homes, and wet sheets were hung in front of windows to catch the fine dust. But even then, soil managed to sneak through the fine cracks in houses, coating furniture, floors, and even food. During the worst of the dust storms, it was so dark that electric lights had to be turned on during the daytime. Many of these storms came charged with static electricity, causing automobile ignitions to fail, thus stalling cars. Some people also believe that static electricity killed their crops.

The storms from 1935 to 1938 were particularly vicious, and became known as “Black Blizzards.” These storms were like winter blizzards, but instead of snow, dust came pelting down on the land. The most memorable storm, considered the worst by many people, was “Black Sunday.” On April 14, 1935, the day started clear and warm in many parts of the southern Great Plains. In stories recounted of the event, people took advantage of the beautiful morning to go to church, visit family and friends, perform chores, and run errands. But by mid-afternoon, conditions began to change. There was a drastic drop in temperature. People noticed birds acting nervously in their yards, with many more birds arriving as if they were fleeing some invisible danger. Then, they saw it. A massive dust storm in the northern horizon, bearing down on them. The sudden storm took many people by surprise, and many were caught in it as they tried to make their way home. The storm that had started in eastern Colorado proceeded through western Kansas, then headed for Texas and Oklahoma. In Dodge City, Kansas, the storm struck at 2:40 pm, bringing with it 60 mile per hour winds. There was total darkness for 40 minutes, followed by semi-darkness for 3 hours. By midnight, most of the storm had passed.

The dust storms caused many health problems, particularly among the young and the elderly. Dust particles irritated the mucous membranes of the respiratory system, causing serious problems like chronic sinusitis, bronchitis, and other respiratory ailments. One unique illness associated with the Dust Bowl that brought a large number of fatalities was known as “dust pneumonia,” caused by fine dust in the lungs.

People were not the only victims. Many wild animals and livestock, often unprotected from the elements, died in the dust storms. By 1934, much of the livestock had to be destroyed due to lack of feed. One bizarre occurrence during the Dust Bowl was an explosion in the population of jackrabbits. The reason for this is unknown. Some speculate that the animals were driven out of the hills due to lack of food, and came swarming down to the farmlands, devouring any vegetation in sight. To protect what little crops they had, farmers began a program to exterminate the jackrabbits, by rounding them up and clubbing them to death.

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was not the only disaster gripping the country. The 1929 stock market crash had unleashed major economic turmoil. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was designed to bring the country out of the Depression. The people of the Dust Bowl now began relying on relief checks and food handouts from the government.

Some settlers could not take it anymore. They packed up all their belongings and left, many heading westward to California to become migrant workers. But many of the farmers and ranchers stayed on.

Starting in 1933, the government began paying farmers to cut back on their crop and livestock production. From 1936 to 1937, farmers were paid for planting crops that helped to curb soil erosion. Also in 1937, the Wind Erosion Program provided financial aid for farmers who adopted erosion control practices on their land, a move that significantly reduced the amount of soil that was being blown away by winds. For many people of the Dust Bowl, these government programs were their only source of income. But more needed to be done. The Department of Agriculture began buying up land that was no longer usable for planting crops and grazing livestock, and helped those farm families to begin new lives elsewhere. The land acquired by the government became part of the Land Utilization Project; these lands underwent a slow process of rehabilitation to restore some of the prairie grasses, and eventually began to be used in a controlled way as livestock pasture land.

The drought finally came to an end in 1939, and there was a good crop yield the following year. But can conditions that brought about the Dust Bowl ever return? In the 1950s, the region was put to the test once more. Another drought began in 1951, lasting for about five years. The dust storms were back. But this time, soil conservation lessons learned 20 years earlier, government aid, and increased irrigation softened the blow. But the southern Great Plains undergoes periodic droughts, and the challenge of preventing another Dust Bowl will always be there.

National Grasslands
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Most people associate the prairie with large herds of bison that once roamed through vast grasslands. But the prairie was much more than that. It hosted a rich diversity of plant fauna: tallgrass, mixed-grass, and shortgrass prairies, as well as shrublands, created unique ecosystems for a wide variety of plants and animals. Other grazing animals included elk and deer, rabbits and hares, large numbers of small rodents like the ground-dwelling prairie dogs. Higher in the food chain were wolves, foxes, coyotes, badgers, and black-footed ferrets. There were many insects, such as prairie ants, butterflies, moths, and grasshoppers. More than 200 species of birds regularly used the Great Plains as nesting grounds. The rivers and streams that meandered through the grasslands once hosted many fish and mussel species.

But much of this wildlife has drastically declined. Soil erosion from crop farming and livestock grazing, dam construction, and irrigation has severely degraded water quality for aquatic creatures. Some wild animals like bison were almost decimated. Loss of habitat has driven some species to the brink of extinction. The remaining habitat is mostly fragmented, threatening the survival of many species within it. Fire suppression in the eastern prairie has encouraged the growth of trees, this in a land where regular fires kept trees from growing and fertilized the land with the ashes of burned grasses, yet leaving the grass roots untouched so that new growth could emerge.

But some prairie habitat still remains. The National Grasslands are areas of prairie grassland administered by the U.S. Forest Service. They are not solid expanses of government-owned land, but parcels intermingled with state and private property. These areas have been designated as wildlife habitat, although in many areas, some controlled livestock grazing is allowed.

The National Grasslands were first established by the Secretary of Agriculture on June 23, 1960. Before that, some of these lands were known as Land Utilization Projects, rehabilitated land that had once been decimated by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Since then, the National Grasslands have expanded from the original 3,800,000 acres of rehabilitated Dust Bowl land, to include other grassland habitats around the country. There are 20 National Grasslands in all, found in California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.