59 Fun Facts About Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl drought came in three waves; the last of them spanned which years?

The final drought wave, 1939-40, followed those of 1934 and 1936, though parts of the High Plains stayed dry for as long as eight years.

The Dust Bowl region lies mostly west of which meridian, on the High Plains?

The 100th meridian marks the Dust Bowl's rough eastern edge; the semi-arid High Plains west of it get under 20 inches of rain a year.

What real-estate promoters' slogan convinced settlers the plains climate had changed for good?

The promoters' slogan "Rain follows the plow" claimed cultivation itself brought rain, and an unusually wet spell after the Civil War seemed to confirm it.

How large were the "quarter section" plots offered under the Homestead Act of 1862?

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered settlers 160 acres, a quarter of a square-mile section, in return for five years of residence and improvement.

Which two events raised wheat prices and encouraged farmers to plow up far more of the plains?

Wheat prices climbed as World War I and the Russian Revolution disrupted supply; on the Llano Estacado, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled between 1925 and 1930.

What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?

Black blizzards, also called black rollers, were the immense dust storms of the era; they could cut visibility to three feet or less.

Which photographer took "Fleeing a Dust Storm" in Cimarron County in April 1936?

Arthur Rothstein, working for the Resettlement Administration, photographed farmer Arthur Coble and his two sons walking into a duster in Cimarron County in April 1936; it became one of the Dust Bowl's best-known images.

How much dust did the two-day storm of May 1934 dump on Chicago?

The May 1934 storm dropped an estimated 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago; two days later it reached Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York and Washington, and red snow fell on New England that winter.

On what date did the storm known as Black Sunday strike?

Black Sunday struck on April 14, 1935, a day that began clear, warm and still; the only warnings were static electricity and fleeing birds and rabbits.

How fast did the Black Sunday cold front drive the dust south across the plains?

The Black Sunday front pushed the dust wall south at about 60 mph, hitting Beaver around 4 pm, Boise City at 5:15 and Amarillo at 7:20.

Caroline Henderson's 1936 "Letters from the Dust Bowl" appeared in which magazine?

The Atlantic Monthly ran Caroline Henderson's "Letters from the Dust Bowl" in 1936, first-hand reports written from her family's wheat farm in the heart of the storm belt.

Who coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday story?

Edward Stanley, an AP news editor in Kansas City, coined "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday dispatch from Boise City.

What nickname for the decade is sometimes used alongside "Dust Bowl"?

The Dirty Thirties is the companion nickname for the decade of drought and dust storms that began on the southern Plains in 1930.

The Dust Bowl centred on the panhandles of which two states?

The Dust Bowl was centred on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, touching adjacent parts of Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.

Roughly how many Americans were left homeless by the Dust Bowl?

More than 500,000 Americans were left homeless by the drought and dust; after one storm alone, more than 350 houses had to be torn down.

About how many people moved out of the Plains states between 1930 and 1940?

About 3.5 million people left the Plains states between 1930 and 1940; in just over a year more than 86,000 of the migrants entered California.

A 1939 survey found what share of Southwestern migrants to California had been doing farm work before leaving?

Only 43% of the Southwestern migrants surveyed in 1939 had been doing farm work just before leaving; nearly a third were professional or white-collar workers.

As of 2007, what fraction of California's population was estimated to be of Okie heritage?

About one-eighth of Californians were estimated in 2007 to be of Okie heritage; a 1990s study had put the number of descendants at roughly 3.75 million.

Journalist Ben Reddick is credited with popularising "Okie" after noticing what on migrants' cars?

Ben Reddick noticed "OK" on their licence plates and wrote the migrants up as "Oakies"; families from Arkansas, Kansas and elsewhere soon got the label too.

Which highway did most Dust Bowl migrants take west to California?

U.S. Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles; Steinbeck named it the "Mother Road" in The Grapes of Wrath, and migrant families followed it across the Southwest to California.

In February 1936 LAPD chief James Davis posted officers at California's borders to do what?

Davis's orders were blunt: Enforce a "bum blockade" against migrants. For about two months in 1936 the LAPD turned indigent arrivals back at the state line, until lawsuits and ridicule ended it.

The Farm Security Administration built Weedpatch Camp in 1936 south of which California city?

Weedpatch Camp, officially the Arvin Federal Government Camp, sits near Arvin in Kern County, about 15 miles southeast of Bakersfield; Steinbeck modeled the government camp in The Grapes of Wrath on it.

Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration of the 1930s?

The Bakersfield Sound, the twangy Telecaster-driven style of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, grew up in the 1950s honky-tonks of Kern County, where Okie migrant families had settled.

Who headed the Soil Erosion Service set up in August 1933 and later the Soil Conservation Service?

Hugh Hammond Bennett, the North Carolina-born "father of soil conservation," ran the Soil Erosion Service from 1933 and led its successor, the Soil Conservation Service, until he retired in 1951.

The Soil Conservation Service moved in 1935 into which federal department?

The Soil Conservation Act of April 1935 created the Soil Conservation Service inside the Department of Agriculture, where it remained; it was renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service in 1994.

How many trees had the Great Plains Shelterbelt project planted by 1942?

The Prairie States Forestry Project planted about 220 million trees between 1935 and 1942, in 30,233 shelterbelts stretching some 18,600 miles through a 100-mile-wide zone from Canada to Texas.

Which two native trees were typical of the Shelterbelt plantings along fence rows?

Red cedar and green ash, both native to the Plains, were the workhorse species set along fence rows; farmers were paid to plant and tend them in a 100-mile-wide zone from North Dakota to Texas.

Which New Deal agency did Roosevelt order to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?

The Civilian Conservation Corps supplied the labor Roosevelt ordered for the Prairie States Forestry Project, planting shelterbelts from the Canadian border to Abilene, Texas, to break the wind and hold the soil.

How much per acre did the government pay reluctant farmers in 1937 to adopt soil-conserving methods?

One dollar an acre was the 1937 federal incentive for reluctant farmers to adopt contour plowing, strip cropping and other soil-conserving methods promoted across the Dust Bowl.

By 1938 the conservation campaign had reduced the amount of blowing soil by how much?

The 1937-38 campaign of contour plowing and strip cropping cut blowing soil by 65%, though the land did not yield a decent living until the rains returned in the autumn of 1939.

The Drought Relief Service of 1935 bought cattle from emergency counties at what price per head?

The Drought Relief Service paid $14 to $20 a head for cattle in emergency counties in 1935; animals judged unfit for human consumption, over half at the start, were killed and the rest went to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation.

How many pigs did the government order slaughtered under the Agricultural Adjustment Act?

More than six million pigs were killed in the AAA's 1933 emergency hog program to lift prices; the usable meat was packed and handed to the poor through the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation.

Modern analysis links Dust Bowl droughts most directly to sea-surface temperature anomalies in which ocean?

Cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific pushed the jet stream and its rain away from the Plains, making The Pacific the most direct driver; a warmer tropical Atlantic had only an indirect effect on circulation.

Which New Deal-era law ended free-for-all use of the public range by leasing it in districts?

The Taylor Grazing Act of June 1934 put some 80 million acres of unreserved public domain under leased grazing districts run by a new Grazing Service, ending the open-access grazing that had stripped the range.

Who took the 1936 photograph Migrant Mother?

Dorothea Lange shot Migrant Mother for the Resettlement Administration in March 1936, after turning her car around at a roadside sign reading "Pea-Pickers Camp".

In which California town was Migrant Mother taken?

The photographer found the family at a pea pickers' camp at Nipomo in San Luis Obispo County in March 1936; the crop had frozen and the pickers had no work.

What was the name of the woman in Migrant Mother, identified decades later?

Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee-born mother of seven at the time, was identified in 1978 by a Modesto Bee reporter; she resented the photo's endless circulation and never earned a cent from it.

Which Farm Security Administration worker's field notes fed heavily into The Grapes of Wrath?

Sanora Babb gathered notes on migrant families for the Farm Security Administration in 1938; her camp supervisor passed them to Steinbeck, and her own novel on the same families waited until 2004 for publication.

Which Joad has just been paroled from McAlester prison as The Grapes of Wrath begins?

Tom, the second Joad son, has served four years of a seven-year sentence at McAlester for homicide and insists he killed in self-defence after being stabbed in a fight.

Who suggested the title The Grapes of Wrath to Steinbeck?

His wife Carol proposed the title, lifted from Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; Steinbeck loved it and dedicated the novel "To Carol who willed this book."

Who directed the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

John Ford directed the 1940 adaptation for 20th Century Fox with Henry Fonda in the lead, winning his second Academy Award for Best Director.

Why did Darryl F. Zanuck send private investigators to Oklahoma before filming The Grapes of Wrath?

The investigators' brief was simple: To confirm the Okies' plight was really that bad. They reported conditions worse than Steinbeck described, reassuring a studio nervous about the novel's left-wing reputation.

Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) is often called one of the first examples of what?

A concept album in all but name, Dust Bowl Ballads strings its songs into one story of the Dust Bowl migrants; it was Guthrie's first commercial recording and the best-selling album of his career.

Which label released Dust Bowl Ballads, the only major label Guthrie ever recorded for?

Victor signed Guthrie on Alan Lomax's recommendation in 1940 and issued Dust Bowl Ballads as two three-disc 78 rpm albums; his later recordings went to small independents such as Asch and Stinson.

Which Dust Bowl Ballads song was so long it had to be spread over both sides of a 78 rpm disc?

"Tom Joad", Guthrie's ballad condensing The Grapes of Wrath into one song, ran so long it was split across both sides of a 78 rpm disc as Parts 1 and 2.

What nickname did Guthrie earn from his songs about the era?

The Dust Bowl Troubadour was the name Guthrie earned by singing the stories of the displaced Oklahoma farmers he had travelled west with, in their own folk and blues idiom.

The Resettlement Administration made The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) for what kind of distribution?

Commercial release was the aim: Pare Lorentz's 25-minute film, scored by Virgil Thomson, opened at New York's Rialto in May 1936 and was booked into theaters independently after Hollywood distributors refused it.

Who directed the 2012 PBS documentary The Dust Bowl?

Ken Burns directed the two-part 2012 PBS film, and its survivor interviews were later borrowed for the opening of Christopher Nolan's 2014 science-fiction film Interstellar.

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, about Dust Bowl survivors, won which prize in 2006?

The Worst Hard Time took The National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2006; Egan builds the book from survivors' stories and blames the reckless plowing of the grasslands for the disaster.

Dust pneumonia occurred when dust filled which structures deep in the lungs?

The alveoli, the tiny air sacs where gas exchange happens, filled with fine dust that also jammed the cilia sweeping the airways, so the lungs could never clear themselves.

Boise City, Oklahoma, at the heart of the Dust Bowl, suffered what bizarre accident in July 1943?

It was bombed by a US B-17 crew in training: on 5 July 1943 a crew from Dalhart, Texas, mistook the lights around the courthouse square for their practice target and dropped six sand-filled bombs.

The 2014 film Interstellar depicts a future America scoured by dust storms caused by what?

A crop-killing pathogen known only as "the blight" is destroying Earth's staple crops in Interstellar, leaving corn as the last viable crop while dust storms sweep the Midwest; Nolan modeled the look on 1930s footage.

What did early explorers call the semiarid High Plains region that later became the Dust Bowl?

The Great American Desert was the label put on the region after Stephen Long's 1820 expedition; with under 20 inches of rain a year and little timber, the shortgrass prairie was judged unfit for farming.

The 1904 Kinkaid Act offered homesteaders in western Nebraska plots of what size?

The Kinkaid Act of 1904 let settlers in the Nebraska Sandhills claim 640 acres, a full section, because a quarter-section homestead could not support a family on that dry range.

Which AP reporter's Black Sunday dispatch from Boise City led to the coining of 'Dust Bowl'?

Robert E. Geiger, an Associated Press reporter, filed the Black Sunday dispatch from Boise City, Oklahoma; his Kansas City editor coined the phrase 'dust bowl' while rewriting it.

Roughly how many acres did the Dust Bowl's drought and erosion affect?

Drought and wind erosion damaged roughly 100 million acres of the southern Plains, centered on the panhandles and adjoining parts of Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.

Sanora Babb's shelved Dust Bowl novel was finally published in 2004 under what title?

Whose Names Are Unknown, written in 1939 and dropped by Random House once The Grapes of Wrath dominated the market, finally appeared from the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004.

Which 2003–05 HBO series was set in the Dust Bowl era?

Carnivàle followed a traveling carnival and a troubled preacher through the Dust Bowl of 1934-35, from the southern Plains to California; HBO cancelled it in 2005 after two of a planned six seasons.

Historian Donald Worster concluded on a 1970s return visit that high-tech Plains farmers had done what?

"Learned nothing and still farmed unsustainably" was Worster's verdict: the 1970s farmers he met credited deep wells, pesticides and giant harvesters with beating the old troubles, while Mathew Bonnifield saw a triumph of the human spirit.