The Dust Bowl Strips the Great Plains
Drought and overfarming turn nineteen states into a region of black blizzards
Quick facts
- Trigger
- Drought beginning in 1930
- Underlying cause
- Plowing under prairie grasses and overgrazing
- Extent
- Nineteen states became a dust bowl
- Human result
- Farm families fled west as migrant laborers
What happened
During the 1930s the southwestern Great Plains suffered a severe drought. For decades farmers had plowed up the native prairie grasses to plant wheat, and ranchers had overgrazed the range, stripping away the deep roots that held the soil. With the onset of drought in 1930 the overfarmed, overgrazed land began to blow away. Strong winds raised billowing clouds of dust that darkened the sky for days and buried farm buildings, and nineteen states in the American heartland became a vast dust bowl. Unable to make a living, farm families abandoned their homes and headed west to become migrant laborers, a migration later captured in John Steinbeck's writing.
Why it matters
The Dust Bowl layered an environmental disaster on top of the economic one across the farm belt, driving hundreds of thousands of people off the land at the same time that cities offered no work. It exposed the human cost of unsustainable farming and pushed the New Deal to create soil conservation programs and to plant windbreaks across the Plains, an early large federal response to environmental collapse.
How we know
The causes and course of the Dust Bowl are documented by the Library of Congress in its primary source materials on the Great Depression, drawing on Farm Security Administration photographs and contemporary records.
Sources
- Library of Congress. The Dust Bowl · Primary sourceloc.gov · The domain "loc.gov" is on our Primary source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Library of Congress. The Dust Bowl (extent) · Primary sourceloc.gov · The domain "loc.gov" is on our Primary source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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