58 Fun Facts About Dust Bowl

Which aquifer beneath the Great Plains did farmers start pumping after the Dust Bowl?

The Ogallala Aquifer holds water that seeped down after the last Ice Age; when drought came back in the 1950s, farmers stopped watching the sky and pumped it up to irrigate instead.

The Dust Bowl region lies mostly west of which meridian, on the High Plains?

The 100th meridian is the line explorer John Wesley Powell drew in 1878 between the humid East and the arid West; the worst-hit Dust Bowl counties lay just beyond it.

What real-estate promoters' slogan convinced settlers the plains climate had changed for good?

The promoters' slogan "Rain follows the plow" claimed cultivation itself brought rain, and an unusually wet spell after the Civil War seemed to confirm it.

Which 1862 law gave settlers 160 acres for five years' residence?

The Homestead Act asked only a small filing fee and five years of living on and farming the claim; later acts enlarged the plots for the dry Plains and drew in a rush of inexperienced farmers.

Demand from which war sent wheat prices soaring and pushed Plains farmers to plow up millions of acres of grassland?

World War I cut Europe's harvests, and Washington told Plains farmers that wheat would win the war; record prices put millions of acres of native grass under the plow.

What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?

Black blizzards rose like a wall of muddy water thousands of feet high and blotted out the sun; the biggest carried Plains topsoil all the way to the East Coast.

In 1935, Plains towns held Sunday 'drives' to round up and club which crop-eating animals by the thousand?

Jackrabbits came down from the hills by the hundred thousand and ate what the drought had spared; townspeople herded them into pens and used clubs because shotguns proved too dangerous in a crowd.

One great dust storm dropped an estimated 12 million pounds of Plains soil on which city?

Chicago was only a stop on the way: the same storm rolled on east and darkened the skies over New York and Washington.

What did people fear from a handshake during a Dust Bowl storm?

A static shock could knock a person to the ground: the blowing dust charged the air so heavily that it also shorted out the engines of cars on the road.

What was the weather like on the morning of Black Sunday?

Clear and warm: after weeks of dusters, families went out to church and picnics under blue skies, then the temperature plunged and a wall of dust rolled in by mid-afternoon.

Caroline Henderson's 1936 "Letters from the Dust Bowl" appeared in which magazine?

The Atlantic Monthly ran the letters of Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke graduate who had staked her own claim on the Plains in 1907 and was still farming it when the dust came.

What did Dalhart, Texas, pay rainmaker Tex Thornton to do during the Dust Bowl drought?

Fire explosives into the sky: Thornton claimed the blasts would jolt rain out of the air, so farmers and businessmen paid for his nitroglycerine and other explosives, and the drought went on regardless.

What nickname for the decade is sometimes used alongside "Dust Bowl"?

The Dirty Thirties left a lesson that held: when drought returned in the 1950s, the soil-saving methods farmers had adopted since kept the damage short of what the 1930s had seen.

Which insects descended on the drought-stricken Plains in clouds during the 1930s, stripping fields bare?

Grasshoppers finished off what the heat had not: after touring the drought states in 1936, Roosevelt told radio listeners he had seen corn stripped of its leaves, "for what the sun left the grasshoppers took."

Which organization supplied gauze dust masks to Dust Bowl families?

The Red Cross supplied light gauze masks, while families hung sheets over doors and sealed window frames with tape and rags. The fine dust got in anyway.

Though The Grapes of Wrath made the exodus famous, what did about three in four Dust Bowl farmers do?

Stayed on their land: about three in four farmers rode out the decade, and many of those who did go were pushed off by bank foreclosure rather than by dust alone.

What were the out-of-town speculators called who planted Plains wheat in the 1920s boom and went home until harvest?

Suitcase farmers were bankers, lawyers, preachers and real-estate men from the cities who hired the plowing done and gambled on rain, with no home on the land to lose.

Which country singer, the California-born son of Oklahoma migrants, had a 1969 country number one with "Okie from Muskogee"?

Merle Haggard was born in California in 1937 to parents who had left Oklahoma in the Depression; his hit took the word once thrown at migrants like them as an insult and wore it as a boast.

Journalist Ben Reddick is credited with popularising "Okie" after noticing what on migrants' cars?

"OK" on their licence plates is what Reddick reportedly spotted in the migrant camps in the mid-1930s; once in print, the label stuck to arrivals from Arkansas, Texas and Missouri as well.

Which highway did Dust Bowl migrants famously follow west to California?

U.S. Route 66 carried so many Plains families west that Steinbeck, who sent the Joads down it in The Grapes of Wrath, called it the "mother road", and the nickname stuck.

In 1936 LAPD chief James Davis posted officers at California's borders to do what?

Enforce a "bum blockade" against migrants was the order: Los Angeles officers turned "undesirables" back at the state line, and the ACLU filed suit before they were recalled.

In California's San Joaquin Valley, what work did Dust Bowl migrants mostly end up doing?

Picking cotton and fruit was not the plan: the newcomers had hoped for small farms of their own, but big corporate growers held the valley's land, and so many arrivals pushed pickers' wages down.

Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration of the 1930s?

The Bakersfield Sound came out of honky-tonks like the Blackboard, where Buck Owens played through the 1950s in a town full of resettled Dust Bowl families; its twangy electric guitars answered the slick Nashville Sound.

Which official ran the New Deal's Soil Erosion Service and then its Soil Conservation Service?

Hugh Hammond Bennett was testifying to Congress when dust from the Plains blotted out the sun over Washington; he pointed at the window and told the lawmakers this was what he had been talking about.

Congress created the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 inside which federal department?

Agriculture took over in spring 1935: the agency had begun two years earlier in the Interior Department as the Soil Erosion Service, and Congress wrote it into law thirteen days after Black Sunday.

What was the Great Plains Shelterbelt planted to do?

Slow the wind: the Forest Service argued that belts of trees along the edges of farms would cut its speed and keep moisture in the soil, and planted them from Canada to Texas.

Which two hardy trees were staples of the Great Plains Shelterbelt?

Red cedar and green ash were staples of the belts, which ran across working farms, so it fell to the farmers themselves to keep cultivating the young trees.

Which New Deal agency helped plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?

The Civilian Conservation Corps was the New Deal's jobs program for young men; besides planting shelterbelts, its crews manned hundreds of erosion-control camps run by the soil service.

Why did Plains farmers plow more grassland as wheat prices collapsed?

To break even, farmers tore up still more sod to plant a bigger crop; when drought killed the wheat, the bare fields had nothing left to hold the soil.

What became of the healthy cattle Washington bought from Dust Bowl ranchers?

Butchered to feed the hungry: Washington bought animals their owners could no longer feed, destroyed the ones too starved to eat, and sent meat from the rest out as relief food.

In 1933, six million of which young farm animals were slaughtered on Washington's orders to push prices up?

Pigs, more than six million of them, died under the Agricultural Adjustment Act; so much meat went to waste while people went hungry that the outcry produced, within weeks, a federal body to send farm surpluses to relief groups.

Modern studies trace the Dust Bowl drought to a cooling of which ocean's tropical waters?

The Pacific ran cooler than normal, which weakened the low-level jet stream that usually pulls Gulf moisture north onto the Plains and bent it off course; a warmer-than-normal Atlantic added to the effect.

Which New Deal-era law ended the free-for-all on the public range by setting up regulated districts?

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 put unclaimed public range into districts that Washington monitored; the office created to run them later merged into today's Bureau of Land Management.

Who took the 1936 photograph Migrant Mother?

Dorothea Lange was driving home from a Resettlement Administration assignment when a sign for a pea pickers' camp flashed past; by her own account she drove on for twenty miles before making a U-turn.

In which California town was Migrant Mother taken?

Nipomo's pea crop had been ruined by bad weather, leaving the pickers without work; soon after the picture ran in a San Francisco paper, Washington sent the camp 20,000 pounds of food.

Why did the label "Dust Bowl refugee" not fit Florence Thompson, the face of Migrant Mother?

She went west in the 1920s, years before the dust storms, to work in mills and fields; in 1978 she told a reporter she felt exploited by the picture and had never made a penny from it.

Whose notes from California's migrant camps did her boss pass to Steinbeck?

Sanora Babb's supervisor shared her camp notes with Steinbeck; when she finished her own novel about the same families, editors told her the market could not bear another book on the subject.

Which Joad has just been paroled from McAlester prison as The Grapes of Wrath begins?

Tom has served four years for killing a man in a fight; going west with the family means breaking his parole, a risk he takes anyway.

Who suggested the title The Grapes of Wrath to Steinbeck?

His wife Carol found the phrase in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" after Steinbeck had struggled to name the book; he judged it better than anything he had come up with himself.

Who directed the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

John Ford's film does not end as the novel does: it closes on a hopeful note, with Ma Joad vowing that people like hers will keep going.

Which actor played the lead in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Henry Fonda wanted the part so badly that studio boss Darryl Zanuck, letting it be known he favored Tyrone Power, got him to sign a long-term contract for it; the role brought Fonda an Oscar nomination.

Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) is often called one of the first examples of what?

A concept album hangs its songs on a single theme, and every song here deals with the dust storms and the people they uprooted; Sinatra and the rock bands who made the format famous came later.

Which record label released Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940?

Victor recorded the ballads in 1940, the year folklorist Alan Lomax also taped Guthrie for the Library of Congress; after that he cut hundreds of discs for Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records.

Which folk anthem did Woody Guthrie write in 1940 as an irritated answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America"?

This Land Is Your Land was Guthrie's retort: Berlin's hit was sweeping the country, and to him it sounded complacent and out of touch with the hard times he had seen on the road.

What nickname did Woody Guthrie earn from his songs about Plains migrants in the 1930s?

The Dust Bowl Troubadour had earned it: he lived through Black Sunday in Pampa, Texas, then hitchhiked and rode freight trains to California alongside the migrants he sang about.

Why did the movie industry object to the 1936 Dust Bowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains?

The government had made it, through the Resettlement Administration, and studios did not want Washington as a competitor; shown in independent theaters and school halls, it still reached some 10 million people in 1937.

Who directed the 2012 PBS documentary The Dust Bowl?

Ken Burns made the two-part film with writer Dayton Duncan around interviews with survivors; Christopher Nolan later borrowed some of them for his 2014 film Interstellar, where they pass for memories of a future disaster.

Timothy Egan's Dust Bowl history The Worst Hard Time won which 2006 prize?

The National Book Award for Nonfiction went to a book built on interviews with survivors; Egan argues the disaster was man-made, the result of plowing up grassland never suited to farming.

The "dust pneumonia" that spread across the Plains in the 1930s was most dangerous for whom?

The very young and the old died most often: the fine dust that got into every house brought coughing fits, chest pain and shortness of breath, and nobody kept an official count of the dead.

Which Dust Bowl town did a US bomber crew hit with practice bombs by mistake in 1943?

Boise City, Oklahoma, was the town: a B-17 crew on a night training flight mistook the lights of its square for their target and dropped six 100-pound practice bombs, hurting no one.

In the 2014 film Interstellar, what is dooming a future Earth swept by Dust Bowl-style storms?

A crop-killing pathogen, called only the blight, is steadily cutting the number of crops that will still grow; Nolan modeled this worn-out Earth on the 1930s Plains.

What did early explorers call the semiarid High Plains region that later became the Dust Bowl?

The Great American Desert was the label that stuck after Stephen Long's 1820 expedition, whose chronicler Edwin James judged the Plains unfit for farming people; the region gets under 20 inches of rain in a typical year.

The Oklahoma Panhandle, at the heart of the Dust Bowl, carried which nickname in the 1880s?

No Man's Land belonged to no state or territory from 1850 to 1890, so its settlers could only squat, with no way to hold title; in the 1930s the same strip lay at the center of the dust.

Which news organization's dispatch, filed the day after Black Sunday, gave the Dust Bowl its name?

The Associated Press carried Robert Geiger's report the next day, which said three little words ruled life in "the dust bowl of the continent": if it rains. The label outlived the story.

The Dust Bowl's 100 million acres covered parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and which fifth state?

New Mexico's northeastern corner lay inside the bowl, which centered on the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles; by 1940 some 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states.

Which Dust Bowl novel, shelved when The Grapes of Wrath appeared, was finally published in 2004?

Whose Names Are Unknown grew out of the notes its author kept while working in California's migrant camps for the Farm Security Administration; it finally appeared in 2004, the year before she died.

Which 2003–05 HBO series was set in the Dust Bowl era?

Carnivàle followed a traveling carnival and a troubled preacher through the Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s; HBO ended it after two seasons and 24 episodes, saying those two had told the story very well.

In 1930s Dalhart, Texas, newspaper editor John McCarty dared his readers to sign a pledge to do what?

Never abandon the Plains was the vow of his Last Man Club: McCarty, who urged readers to "grab a root and growl", printed the pledge in his paper. He later took a job in Amarillo and left Dalhart himself.