What Are The Causes Of The Dust Bowl

The dust bowl was considered the “Worst hard time” in american history. The Dust Bowl was a big cloud of dust that took place during the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The dust bowl was located in the southern great plains as it affected states like Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The three main causes of the Dust Bowl were drought (Doc E), amount of land being harvest (Doc D), and the death shortgrass prairie (Doc C).

People were left homeless and hungry. It came in as a yellow brown dust that formed in the South and turned black going toward the North. It was hard to breathe, eat, and walk in this extremely crazy weather. People had to wear dust mask to keep their lungs from collecting the dust. Women had to hang wet sheets over their windows to keep dirt from entering their homes, and farmers watched as their crops died.

Intro The Dust bowl conveyed an enormous agrarian and monetary hit to the Great Plains and destroyed what was left of the United States Economy during the Great Depression. It continued for a decade, 1930 to 1939, and wrecked ranches and lives all over Texas, Oklahoma panhandles, Colorado, parts of New Mexico, Canada, and Kansas. Monstrous dust storms wrecked pretty much everything from harvests, overwhelming ranches, in such a way it crushed the income and careers of thousands of farmers. Cause

The Dust Bowl The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936, however in some places it lasted until 1940. The Dust Bowl was caused by a severe drought also coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion. Deep plowing of the top soil of the Great Plains had killed the natural grass that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during the period of droughts and high winds.

Livestock could not breath or find food sources. Thousands of people lost their homes due to the storm. Changes in farming and agriculture in the early 1900s altered the landscape and soil creating the perfect environment for the Dust Bowl and impacted living conditions and economic policy. First, changes in farming and agriculture over the years led to the conditions that caused the Dust Bowl and impacted the Great Plains. “Wind and drought alone did not create the Dust Bowl.

Dust and depression swept through America at an alarming rate. The devastation and poverty caused during this era will haunt this countries history forever. However, factual history is hard to attain for each historian, writer, or even photographer tells his or her own story. The terrible storms shook the nation to its foundation and sent thousands of people to new lands in search of work and a better life. The Dust Bowl, the migrations, and the search for true factual evidence will shape the accounts of this dark era.

The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930’s, which was also referred to as the “Dirty Thirties” lasted nearly a decade. During this time there were severe dust storms that caused major agriculture devastation primarily in the southern plains. Tens of thousands of families were forced to abandon their homes and farms, and relocated westward.

The drought lasted 8 long years.(Burns) The drought lasted 8 years and it caused many families to go thirsty. The black blizzard was so strong with electricity people could even touch each other without a shock. “Men avoided shaking hands for fear of shocks that could knock a person to the ground.”

The Dust Bowl Introduction Theodore Roosevelt said, “When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” The Dust Bowl was a very bad time for the United States because it was also during The World’s War and the United States was also already in a bad state with the Great Depression going on. The Dust Bowl was a time of economic hardship because people did not know how to stop the problem, people were losing land, the government did not know how to stop the Dust Bowl. Dry Conditions The Dust Bowl was started by farmers growing wheat crops.

Imagine living in a period where there was pure dust. Well, in the 1930s there was an environmental disaster in the Midwest called the Dust Bowl. According to Jess C. Porter, “The dust bowl was a period of severe drought accompanied by high winds and high temperatures” (1). Even though the dust storm made the dust bowl worse, the dust bowl was a harsh period of time because the dust bowl caused poverty and it caused many Americans to migrate to California.

Oklahoma was so terribly destroyed, it was an awful tragedy. Other information in this book, for example: Billie Jo being poor is accurate because when the Dust Bowl hit, it took out most farms and farmers’ jobs. This means that Billie Jo’s father lost his job as a farmer. And with no job, then that means no income, which resulted in being poor.

Causes of the Depression My three major points are The Dust Bowl, World War 1, and the Stock Market Crash. These three major points put millions of people in a sad place, A place nobody wanted to be at. Everyone wanted to believe it was just a dream, that they could wake up and not having to worry about anything. Doing their best to raise their children.

Many immigrants, such as the Irish, came to America for a better life. The potato famine, which started in the mid to late 1800’s, infected many Irish people. About 2,000,000 Irish men, women, and children perished during this terrible incident (document 1.) The majority of the Irish people were farmers and planted many potatoes. That meant during the potato famine, many potatoes were infected and rotten, so many farmers became poor and helpless.

It was fine for a while, after the prairie grasses were cut up, then the great depression hit and many of the farmers ran out of money. To top it all of a drought came and the ground dried up and dust storms started to form (Tarshis 7). One in particular called Black Sunday was the biggest one. The menacing storm rose up 8,000 feet into the sky

The dry conditions increased the nutritive values of vegetation due to the sugars and nutrients and reduced plant defense. But the drought triggered a massive outbreak of locusts that swept over an area, destroying most of the agricultural production and also bringing famine to the settlers. One eyewitness claimed that “the swarms of countless flying insects looked like dark storm clouds, and they glittered like snowflakes as they descended out of the sky”. That lead to many families having to abandon their homesteads and having no food left for themselves or their