The California Dust Bowl

Improved Essays
The Dust Bowl affected everyone living in the Great Plains. Some people moved to California to find new job opportunities, while most stayed behind and waited it out. This essay will be explaining the cause of the Dust Bowl, where it affected, and who it affected. This paragraph will be explaining where the Dust Bowl affected and the cause of it. The driest regions were southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Most say that the Dust Bowl was more man-made than natural. Some man-made causes were over-plowing. Another major one was cattle over-grazing. Farmers were warned of their bad habits by Native Americans an old ranchers that had known the land for many years. The Dust Bowl wasn’t a fun time for Americans. Some lost family members and pets. Some family members weren’t lost by death, but some moved to California for job opportunities, to get money for the family. That will be described in the next paragraph. …show more content…
Most farmers migrated to the cities to look for better job opportunities. Some even moved to California for the same reason. Dust storms weren’t the only thing that destroyed farmers crops, pests were a big problem during the Dust Bowl too. Without crops, farmers can’t make money that’s why they moved into the cities or to California. Sometimes, moving into the cities wasn’t the best option thought because the Dust Bowl didn’t just affect the countryside. Not everyone moved away, most actually stayed right where they were and waited it out. They most likely didn’t have the money to move. Farmers seemed to be the main cause of the Dust Bowl due to the way they went about farming. They learned the hard to pay attention to how they farm and think smart about what equipment to

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Dust Bowl Outline

    • 262 Words
    • 2 Pages

    I. Introduction a) Imagine being in the Midwest and then seeing a giant dust cloud. b) General info about Dust Bow. c) Because the Midwest became a failing region, many dreams were crushed. d) In the 1930's better known as "the dirty thirties", the dust bowl effected thousands of farmers and their families in the Southwest/Midwest.…

    • 262 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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.…

    • 828 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Dust Bowl Dbq

    • 105 Words
    • 1 Pages

    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.…

    • 105 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, we follow the Joads as they migrate from Oklahoma to California with family and friends in three stages. I believe that Steinbeck used unsophisticated protagonists and language for the sake of the general public. John Steinbeck wanted this book to be relatable to the public and for people to understand and relate to and feel compassion for the people who felt the hardships of the dust bowl the most. Steinbeck uses a lot of repetition making it easy to relate to the simple characters that Steinbeck has created for us.…

    • 636 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Dbq Great Depression

    • 179 Words
    • 1 Pages

    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.…

    • 179 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    During The Dust Bowl Dbq

    • 523 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The farmers did not want to suffer through the harsh epidemics and dust storms that occurred during the Dust Bowl. 7.Migrant workers had to experience a terrible life after they came to California. The living conditions and employment were dreadful for the farmers because these Californians knew that they would have to tolerate the conditions. The workers had to travel throughout the state of California to look for farm work. They had to experience a constant move around California in order to find jobs.…

    • 523 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dust Bowl Dbq

    • 424 Words
    • 2 Pages

    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.…

    • 424 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dust Bowl DBQ

    • 1142 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The dirt to lost moisture and became loose due to the lack of rainfall. If no grass is in place to secure the soil, like in the 1930s, the dirt will be blown around, contributing to the development developing of a dust storm. Therefore, the drought that occurred during the 1930s certainly was a factor in causing the Dust Bowl. Although the…

    • 1142 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Both events resulted in troubled times for people and workers. People lost their homes, suffered from malnourishment and seemed to be struggling to make it through the day. This book focuses on the problems and results of the Dust Bowl, “the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history”. The Dust Bowl followed The Great Plow-up, which “turned 5.2 million acres of thick native grassland into wheat fields”. Eventually, the United States began to enter into the time of the depression and prices for crops began to sink.…

    • 1186 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Have you ever seen or heard of a drought so bad that it turned nice green hills into a desert of sand and dirt? Starting in the 1930s, in the eastern part of the country, a very bad drought did just that. It made its way west, and by 1934 it turned the Great Plains into a desert. In 1935 this drought was dubbed the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had a huge effect on the daily lives of people and their homes, it wreaked havoc on their economy, and destroyed their land.…

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dust Bowl Dbq

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages

    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.…

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dust Bowl Dbq

    • 1310 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Prior to 1930, the area of the United States between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains (Great Plains) was lush with natural prairieland vegetation and abundant rainfall. It was these characteristics which made it seem ideal for westward development across the United States. However, during the 1930’s, the Great Plains endured a nine year period of severe droughts which lead to intense dust storms which killed crops, livestock and people. This time period has been consequently been labeled as the Dust Bowl.…

    • 1310 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dust Bowl Research Paper

    • 718 Words
    • 3 Pages

    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.…

    • 718 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Humans were one of the causes for the Dust Bowl to begin with. During World War I, when wheat crops were highly demanded, land was left exhausted as it was misused (“The Drought”). It…

    • 164 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Dust Bowl Migration

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages

    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…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays