The dirty land7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() Many emigrants gave up farming, setting up shacks and tents near large cities, hoping to find a job. Paid starvation wages, they were often required to pay as much as 25% of their wages to rent a tar-paper shack with no floor, electricity, or plumbing and buy their groceries from a high-priced company store. Of those who made it in, they owned no land and were forced to work, if they could find a job, mostly on large corporate farms, whose crops of fruit, nuts, and vegetables were unfamiliar. In fact, in 1936, when they reached the border, they found border patrols posted there to keep them out. Unfortunately, many of those that traveled to California found economic conditions not much better and were not received warmly. Though these families left farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico, all were generally referred to as “Okies” since so many came from Oklahoma. Two hundred thousand of them moved to California. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states, headed primarily for the west coast. The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history within a short time. One-quarter of the population left the affected area, packing up everything they owned and heading westward, where they hoped to find greater opportunities. More than 500,000 people, primarily from Texas and Oklahoma, were left homeless. Others were forced out when their land was taken in bank foreclosures. ![]() Soon hundreds of thousands of people began to abandon their land when the dust storms showed no signs of letting up. Son of a farmer in the dust bowl, Cimarron County, Oklahoma The New York Times reported dust “lodged itself in the eyes and throats of weeping and coughing New Yorkers.” Dust flew as far as Boston, Atlanta, and even ships within a few hundred miles. On May 11, 1934, a severe dust storm blew over 340 million tons of dust all the way to the East Coast. ‘Visibility’ approaches zero, and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor.” It is almost a hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time, the dust clouds do not roll over. “In the dust-covered desolation of our No Man’s Land here, wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. These millions of acres of farmland became useless, and soon, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes.Ī resident of Oklahoma would say of the devastation, later published in Reader’s Digest: The region most affected – the Great Plains, including more than 100 million acres, centered in Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, Kansas, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Given names like “Black Blizzards” and “Black Rollers,” these rolling clouds often reduced visibility to a few feet. In high demand during World War I, wheat crops further exhausted the topsoil, and overgrazing stripped the western plains of virtually all other cover.Īs a result, during the drought of the 1930s, the soil dried and turned to dust, soon blowing in large dark clouds. The deep plowing of the topsoil had killed the natural vegetation that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during dry periods and high winds. For decades, unknowingly, farmers had not utilized the concepts of fallow fields and crop rotation, cover crops to manage soil fertility and quality, or other techniques to prevent erosion. ![]()
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