The Dust Bowl
By: Maddie Landis, Emma Burkart, Elvia Benitez
Question 11
What was the “Dust Bowl” and how did it hurt Americans in the Midwest? What did a lot of these people do to find relief?
Dust Bowl - the region in the Southern Mid-West central U.S. that suffered from dust storms in the 1930's.
Why it happened
Farmers had tiled there feild so many times it was just loose dry dirt. They didn’t plant any grass on anything while the field were not being used for crops; when the wind came it would create massive wind storms.
Dust Storms
In 1932, 14 dust storms were reported, the next year it was up to 38. The dust was so high people ad to climb out of widows to get out of their house. For the most part Families survived on cornbread, milk, and beans, and kept farming thinking the rains would come back. In 1934 one storm carried 300 million tons of soil. Depositing some of it on ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.
Moving:
Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states. Many people were unable to grow food and were forced to leave their farms. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the dust bowl states and toward the Pacific states, they quickly became migrant workers moving place to place to find work.
An estimated 2 million people became hobos during the Dust Bowl.