Dust Bowl: Rain Follows the Plow, Black Sunday and 200 Million Trees

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The High Plains west of the 100th Meridian receive less than 20 inches of rain a year, and early explorers called the region the Great American Desert. Its shortgrass prairie of buffalo grass and blue grama held the soil with roots 10 to 15 feet deep. The Homestead Act of 1862, the Kincaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 pushed settlers onto the land during an unusually wet stretch that fed the slogan rain follows the plow. World War I grain demand and gasoline tractors then let farmers deep plow millions of acres. In the 1930s, warm Pacific and shifting Atlantic temperatures altered the jet stream, bringing droughts in 1934, 1936 and 1939 to 1940, and loose topsoil rose into black blizzards charged with static electricity.

On Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, a cold front drove a wall of dust south at 60 miles per hour, and AP reporter Robert E. Geiger's story led his editor Edward Stanley to coin the term Dust Bowl. About 3.5 million people left the Plains in the 1930s, though a 1939 survey found only 43% of Southwestern migrants in California had been doing farm work. The New Deal created the Soil Erosion Service under Hugh Hammond Bennett, bought starving cattle, planted a shelterbelt and paid farmers $1 an acre for contour plowing, cutting blowing soil 65% by 1938. Historians Donald Worster and Matthew Bonnifield still disagree on whether the region learned its lesson, with Worster pointing to the Ogallala aquifer.

• A May 1934 storm dropped an estimated 12 million pounds of dirt on Chicago before reaching Boston, New York and Washington.
• The Agricultural Adjustment Act ordered more than six million pigs slaughtered, with canned pork distributed to the hungry.
• The Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 200 million trees from Canada to Texas.
• Florence Owens Thompson, subject of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, resented the photo and earned nothing from it.
• Sanora Babb's novel Whose Names Are Unknown was shelved after The Grapes of Wrath appeared and was not published until 2004.