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59 free Dust Bowl trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Dust Bowl turned the southern Great Plains into a desert of blowing topsoil for most of the 1930s, and this trivia quiz covers the whole disaster. It starts with the causes: the Homestead Act, "rain follows the plow", the wheat boom and the tractors that ripped up the native grass. Then come the storms themselves, from the first black blizzard in September 1930 to Black Sunday in April 1935 and the storm that dumped 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago. The quiz also follows the people: the Okies who took Route 66 to California, the Weedpatch camp, Florence Owens Thompson in Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, John Steinbeck's Joads, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Hugh Hammond Bennett's crusade for soil conservation. It closes with the New Deal response, the 220 million trees of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, and the way the story has been told since, from Pare Lorentz's 1936 film to Ken Burns and Interstellar. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on the Dust Bowl, Black Sunday, The Grapes of Wrath and related topics, and each question links to its source. Try our Great Depression and Route 66 quizzes next.
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Q 01The Dust Bowl drought came in three waves; the last of them spanned which years?
1939-40
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.
Q 02The Dust Bowl region lies mostly west of which meridian, on the High Plains?
The 100th
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.
Q 03What real-estate promoters' slogan convinced settlers the plains climate had changed for good?
"Rain follows the plow"
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.
Q 04How large were the "quarter section" plots offered under the Homestead Act of 1862?
160 acres
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.
Q 05Which two events raised wheat prices and encouraged farmers to plow up far more of the plains?
World War I and the Russian Revolution
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.
Q 06What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?
Black blizzards
Black blizzards, also called black rollers, were the immense dust storms of the era; they could cut visibility to three feet or less.
Q 07Which photographer took "Fleeing a Dust Storm" in Cimarron County in April 1936?
Arthur Rothstein
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.
Q 08How much dust did the two-day storm of May 1934 dump on Chicago?
12 million pounds
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.
Q 09On what date did the storm known as Black Sunday strike?
April 14, 1935
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.
Q 10How fast did the Black Sunday cold front drive the dust south across the plains?
60 mph
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.
Q 11Caroline Henderson's 1936 "Letters from the Dust Bowl" appeared in which magazine?
The Atlantic Monthly
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.
Q 12Who coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday story?
Edward Stanley, an AP news editor
Edward Stanley, an AP news editor in Kansas City, coined "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday dispatch from Boise City.
Q 13What nickname for the decade is sometimes used alongside "Dust Bowl"?
Q 21In February 1936 LAPD chief James Davis posted officers at California's borders to do what?
Enforce a "bum blockade" against migrants
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.
Q 22The Farm Security Administration built Weedpatch Camp in 1936 south of which California city?
Bakersfield
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.
Q 23Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration of the 1930s?
The Dirty Thirties
The Dirty Thirties is the companion nickname for the decade of drought and dust storms that began on the southern Plains in 1930.
Q 14The Dust Bowl centred on the panhandles of which two states?
Texas and Oklahoma
The Dust Bowl was centred on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, touching adjacent parts of Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
Q 15Roughly how many Americans were left homeless by the Dust Bowl?
More than 500,000
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.
Q 16About how many people moved out of the Plains states between 1930 and 1940?
3.5 million
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.
Q 17A 1939 survey found what share of Southwestern migrants to California had been doing farm work before leaving?
Only 43%
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.
Q 18As of 2007, what fraction of California's population was estimated to be of Okie heritage?
About one-eighth
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.
Q 19Journalist Ben Reddick is credited with popularising "Okie" after noticing what on migrants' cars?
"OK" on their licence plates
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.
Q 20Which highway did most Dust Bowl migrants take west to California?
U.S. Route 66
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.
The Bakersfield Sound
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.
Q 24Who headed the Soil Erosion Service set up in August 1933 and later the Soil Conservation Service?
Hugh Hammond Bennett
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.
Q 25The Soil Conservation Service moved in 1935 into which federal department?
Agriculture
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.
Q 26How many trees had the Great Plains Shelterbelt project planted by 1942?
220 million
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.
Q 27Which two native trees were typical of the Shelterbelt plantings along fence rows?
Red cedar and green ash
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.
Q 28Which New Deal agency did Roosevelt order to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?
The Civilian Conservation Corps
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.
Q 29How much per acre did the government pay reluctant farmers in 1937 to adopt soil-conserving methods?
One dollar
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.
Q 30By 1938 the conservation campaign had reduced the amount of blowing soil by how much?
65%
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.