James Gregory’s, American Exodus, is a book that focuses on Dust Bowl migration to California, and their economic and social struggles in California. The book first starts off setting up the historical context of the Dust Bowl and the migrants with statistics, maps, pictures, and migrant backgrounds in the introduction. The overall book reads like a history textbook on the Dust Bowl, which is divided into two parts instead of narrative based on one family like The Grapes of Wrath. The first part of the book is organized chronologically, focusing on the resettlement of the Dust Bowlers, and the second part is done thematically and focuses on Okie culture. Gregory’s approach successfully showed the clash of cultures and social struggles the migrants faced in California accurately without having to caricaturize the migrants.…
For many years now people have been trying to figure out what caused these terrible storms. According to the background essay and Donald Worster (Doc A.), the dust bowl was one of the hardest times. The storms ruined farmer’s crops, so then farmers could not get paid because they had nothing to sell. These dust storms also, caused people to get dust in their houses and ruin their belongings. Many people moved to try and get a new life, but many more people could not move because they did not have enough money to do so.…
The Great Plains of the 1930’s was given the name dust bowl because of the massive dust storms caused by the failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion. Most people don't know that grass is an anchor for our soil. When farmers plow the grass up for miles at a time to plant wheat. These tactics mixed with the factors of drought, light soil and high winds cause a catastrophic chain of events known as the “black blizzards” or dust storms. These storms drove off over half of the Great Plain population because of the deaths of cattle and their ravaged pastures.…
They woke up surprised that day and saw a dust storm. People and animals were terrified by the dust storm. The larger areas would get hit by the storm and sometimes be very disastrous. People had to move west because the storms were so bad. Many families bought or leased small parts of land and started to grow crops.…
If farmers tried new techniques the government would pay those farmers extra. 3.The Drought was considered a dry season that lasted for about a decade. It caused high temperatures, high winds, and no rainfall. 4.The Dust Bowl got its name from a journalist traveling through the region. 5.The states of Texas, Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico were included in the Dust Bowl.…
The 1930’s was a struggling time for people in the West because of the Dust Bowl, causing lots of problems with the way the people live and their land. This essay is going to explain how the Dust Bowl had developed and the different problems and effects on the people living in the West. To start off, the development of the Dust Bowl started off in 1930 but getting its name in April 15, 1935. The Dust Bowl as stated in passage 1 “The drought hit first in the eastern part of the country in 1930.…
The Dust Bowl started in the 1930s and lasted for about a decade. During the Dust Bowl there was dust everywhere. There was dust piled up in houses in people's lund everywhere you looked. All of this dust affected family dynamics. Most all families had to migrate to the western states where there was no dust.…
According to Document E, Western explorer John Wesley Powell stated the water requirement for good agriculture was twenty inches. Also found in Document E are two graphs which state the normal average rainfall for five Dust Bowl Towns and the average rainfall for Dallam County, Texas from 1923 to 1940. In Dallam County, Texas from 1931 to 1940, nine out of the ten years involved, rainfall measurements fell below twenty inches, indicating the occurrence of a drought. As proven in one of the graphs in Document E, the average rainfall for the five Dust Bowl Towns: Clovis, New Mexico; Boise City, Oklahoma; Dalhart, Texas; Burlington, Colorado; and Goodland, Kansas averaged at about seventeen inches providing that there was, in fact, a drought occurring in the Southeast Plains. Evidently, droughts happen during a period of time when a lack of rainfall occurs in a certain region hindering the growth of crops thus creating an arid, dry environment.…
By the end of the Dust Bowl over 250,000 were homeless. The Dust Bowl was a disastrous event caused by farmers over plowing the fields in the south, but there were terrible effects on farmers and their crops, animals, and daily lives. The Dust Bowl was caused by farmers but that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect them. Jackrabbits and grasshoppers (a.k.a. locus) weren’t necessarily bad unless you were a farmer.…
Prior to migrating, they were farmers that ended up losing their land and homes due to the Dust Bowl; a series of dust storms in the United States caused…
The Dust Bowl and Life in The 1930ś Introduction: The Dust Bowl was a tragic event in the Southern states that impacted families as many people died and had creased financial responsibilities, but different laws were put in place to help people in the Dust Bowl. The Great Plains suffered a drought between 1930-1940. This drought was caused by changes in weather, farming techniques, economic and cultural factors. Many people suffered during the Dust Bowl including crops and animals.…
Donald Woster, the Hall of Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas, once said “Suddenly there appeared on the northern horizon a black blizzard, moving toward them; there was no sound, no wind, nothing but an immense ‘boogery’ cloud.” This quote sums up the horror of the infamous Dust Bowl. However, this was not the first time that a natural disaster had a personal or economic effect on the country.…
The Dust Bowl In the 1930’s and the early 1940’s, the southwestern Great Plains region of the United States suffered a severe drought in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Kansas. Once a semi-arid grassland, the treeless plains became home to thousands of settlers when, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. Most of the settlers farmed their land or raised cattle. The farmers plowed the prairie grasses and planted dryland wheat.…
The Western Migration After the Civil War, people migrated west giving up all that they had for many different reasons, and to do many different things; one reason in particular was to gain a better life. The Civil War caused economic problems in the south, for this reason people migrated west to gain economically. Moving west meant better job opportunities, land ownership, and agriculture. Different groups of people picked up and moved west and in doing so, they encountered major barriers. These groups of people included African- Americans, Mexicans, and Native American to name a few with the hopes to become landowners.…
When the Dust Bowl conditions led to farmers abandoning their fields, mass migration patterns emerged with populations shifting from rural areas to urban centers. Farmers and landholders in the Great Plains had to migrate due to a period of…