The federal government paid farmers to plow under fields and butcher livestock.Īs part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government purchased starving livestock for at least $1 a head. Dust pneumonia called the “brown plague,” killed hundreds and was particularly lethal for infants, children and the elderly. Much like miners, Dust Bowl residents exhibited signs of silicosis from breathing in the extremely fine silt particulates, which had high silica content. Those who inhaled the airborne prairie dust suffered coughing spasms, shortness of breath, asthma, bronchitis and influenza. Since static electricity could short out engines and car radios, motorists driving through dust storms dragged chains from behind their automobiles to ground their cars. So much static electricity built up between the ground and airborne dust that blue flames leaped from barbed wire fences and well-wishers shaking hands could generate a spark so powerful it could knock them to the ground. Dust storms crackled with powerful static electricity. A newspaper reporter gave the Dust Bowl its name.Īssociated Press reporter Robert Geiger opened his April 15, 1935, dispatch with this line: “Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent-if it rains.” “Dust bowl” was probably a throwaway line for Geiger, since two days later he referred to the disaster zone as the “dust belt.” Nevertheless, within weeks the term had entered the national lexicon. ![]() Sisalkraft proposed covering the farms with waterproof paper, while a New Jersey asphalt company suggested paving the Plains. Corporations also touted their products to the federal government as possible solutions. Farmers in one Texas town paid a self-professed rainmaker $500 to fire off rockets carrying an explosive mixture of dynamite and nitroglycerine to induce showers. Some followed the old folklore of killing snakes and hanging them belly-up on fences. There were few things desperate Dust Bowl residents didn’t try to make it rain. Proposed solutions were truly out-of-the-box. The National Guard was called out to crush grasshoppers with tractors and burn infested fields, while the Civilian Conservation Corps spread an insecticide of arsenic, molasses and bran. “What the sun left, the grasshoppers took,” President Franklin D. Thick clouds of grasshoppers-as large as 23,000 insects per acre, according to one estimate-also swept over farms and consumed everything in their wakes. To combat the hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits that overran the Dust Bowl states in 1935, some towns staged “rabbit drives” in which townsmen corralled the jackrabbits in pens and smashed them to death with clubs and baseball bats. If the dust storms that turned daylight to darkness weren’t apocalyptic enough, seemingly biblical plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and destroyed whatever meager crops could grow. The ecosystem disruption unleashed plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers. ![]() Once the oceans of wheat, which replaced the sea of prairie grass that anchored the topsoil into place, dried up, the land was defenseless against the winds that buffeted the Plains. ![]() When the drought and Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, the wheat market collapsed. ![]() Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that “rain follows the plow,” farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains. The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster.īeginning with World War I, American wheat harvests flowed like gold as demand boomed.
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