During the 1930's, large dust storms ravaged the Great Plains.
This area was labled the "Dust Bowl" and the time period was
called the "dirty thirties". The region of the Dust Bowl consisted
of 100 million acres in the panhandles of:
Texas
- Oklahoma
- New Mexico
- Colorado
- Kansas
The Dust Bowl was given nicknames such as "Black Blizard"
and "Black Roller" because visibility was reduced to a few
feet. The Dust Bowl was a ecological and human disaster. It was
caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Millions
of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands
of people were forced to leave their homes.
Degradation of drylands claimed peoples' cultural heritage and
livelihoods. Hundreds of thousands of families from the Dust Bowl
(often kown as the "Okies," since so many came from Oklahoma)
traveled to California and other states, where they found
condititions a little better than those they had left. Owning
no land of there own, many workers as agricultural migrants,
traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at
starvation wages.
There was more than one cause of the Dust Bowl. The major
participant was the expansion of agriculture that set the
stage for this disastrous period of soil erosion.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO ON THE DUST BOWL
Page created by:
Christopher Corkery, Tanya Cox, Deanna Curl, Tara McKenny
Dekalb College, Georgia
March 6, 1997