The Dust Bowl
Life During the Dust Bowl and After Effects
Beginning of the Storm
During the Dust Bowl
Residents of the Dust Bowl
Changes were made
After Effects of the Dust
After the dust had settled in the spring of 1934, the reaction among many Great Plains farm families was to flee the devastation: More than 350,000 people packed up their belongings and headed west, their lives forever changed by the disaster. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the first of several mortgage and farming relief acts under the New Deal aimed to reduce foreclosures and keep farms afloat during the drought. But by the end of 1934, roughly 35 million acres of farmland were ruined, and the topsoil covering 100 million acres had blown away. In order to fix it the situation the government stepped in to remedy the problem: Soil conservation became the focus of federal agencies, and the U.S. Forest Service undertook a project to plant a "shelter belt" of trees within a 100-mile-wide zone, from Canada to the Texas Panhandle. Recovery was aided by the return of the rains. Soon the buffalo grass had grown back, helping to ensure that the dust bowl would not recur.