PLOWED: How America Helped Build the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl wasn't just bad weather. America helped build it.

For thousands of years, deep-rooted native grasses held the southern Great Plains in place. Then a wheat boom arrived, and tractors tore most of it up.

With the grass gone, nothing anchored the topsoil. So when severe drought hit in the 1930s, the bare ground simply lifted into the wind. Witnesses called the storms black blizzards, walls of dirt that turned noon into night.

On April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, one storm carried plains soil all the way to the East Coast. Reports describe dust darkening Washington and sailors sweeping it off ships in the Atlantic. The disaster was too big for anyone to call it just weather.

That year, the government made the Soil Conservation Service permanent and planted millions of trees as windbreaks. They treated the Dust Bowl as a farming problem, because much of it was.

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