From 1909 to 1929, farmers on the Great Plains, many of them desperate to make a living as agricultural-commodity prices fell, plowed up for the first time some 32 million acres of sod. Immediately after that transformation of the land, in the 1930s the Plains set new records for heat, drought, and wind. The hardest hit region was made up of western Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, the center of what came to be called "the Dust Bowl." In many parts of the region, 1934 through 1936 witnessed the most intense drought ever recorded. These conditions created wind erosion of topsoil never seen before or since.[1] "The wind lifted the surface powder into the skies, creating towering eight-thousand-foot waves known as 'black blizzards."[2] By 1938, at least ten million acres had lost five inches of topsoil. An additional thirteen million acres had lost at least two inches.[3]
Notes
[1] Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 30; Donald A. Wilhite, "Dust Bowl," EOHC, 1:424-25.
[2] David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 194.
[3] Wilhite, "Dust Bowl," 425.
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