Dust+Bowl

__ media type="youtube" key="x2CiDaUYr90" height="344" width="425" The Dust Bowl __ By Curran The Dust Bowl was a very hard time for Americans in the West, so how does this time this time affect America today you ask? American learned a lesson after the Dust Bowl. We learned that if you destroy something from nature, it will affect events that happen later. People that came out West took out natural plants which helped during drought, and people died because of their poor decision.

During World War I, people went out West to grow wheat because it had very high prices. People said if you can’t fight in the war, go farm, so people cleared out all of the plants and those plants were very important. They helped during periods of drought. Without these plants, they couldn’t grow wheat so their $2.95/bushel of wheat dropped to pennies and … then nothing. They had no money, no water, and no food. Kids wore old worn sacks for clothes; they lived in little shacks and had only one mattress if they were lucky. They needed food so badly that they ate dogs, rats, and anything else they could find. It was 100° every single day. The people couldn’t leave because other states didn’t want them either.

Then darkness hit all over Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, and Missouri for five out of seven days a week. The people in the west called these dust storms “black blizzards”. Some of the storms lasted for three or four days long. People that were unprotected during those storms usually got badly injured, especially people with asthma. They sealed windows with tape or oil-soaked cloths, slept with wet rags over their faces, and some people even wore WWI gas masks. Then the Soil Conservation Service came along and taught the farmers how to save water and to plant trees and grass to hold soil down, and that stopped the dust storm and that was the end of it.

That is why the 1930’s were called the “dirty thirties” and why the Dust Bowl has such a big affect on the world today. Now people plant more trees and try to keep the environment the way it is like the people out West should have done.

Works Cited Cooper, Michael L. __Dust to eat drought and depression in the 1930's__. New York: Clarion Books, 2004. Hakim, Joy. __A History of US: Book 9 War, Peace, and All That Jazz 1918-1945 (History of Us, 9)__. New York: Oxford UP, USA, 2002. Teacher Created Materials, Inc. __The 20th Century__. Westminster CA: Teacher Created Materials, 1997.