Dust Bowl Dbq

In early 1931, farmers in the southern plains were at their highest peak of money making. While the rest of the nation was being affected by the Great Depression, farmers were producing wheat in masses. The land was described as green and lush and the soil rich. Nobody had realized what they were witnessing would only last a short time before tragedy struck. Railroad companies and states released advertisements to lure settlers to move to the south. Not conscious of the drought to come, farmers began to plow mile after mile of land in hopes of turning every inch of the south into profit. By the summer of 1931, rain stopped and whirlwinds became larger and thicker than usual. The land was naked and fields were blown out. As dust rose into the atmosphere …show more content…
Face masks were issued especially to school children because breathing became difficult. One-hundred million acres were turned into wastelands. The “Dust Bowl” as one journalist called it, clouded the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered help from the government to the people affected. A more wrenching government program was cattle slaughter because they were starving. One year later, the lands were being destroyed by a different plague. Starving jackrabbits came down from the hills and devoured everything in their path. With no other choice, farmers began to kill them in alarming amounts called “rabbit drives”. Black Sunday on April 14, 1935, was the day no Dust Bowler would ever forget. The dirt in the air caused total darkness and thousands of animals dead on the plains. Children were especially vulnerable to dust pneumonia and residents tried their own home remedies. By 1935, one third of deaths in Kansas resulted from this pneumonia. Only a few months later, Dust bowlers gave up and headed west in search for jobs in California. Banks,