60 Fun Facts About Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl drought came in three waves; the last of them spanned which years?

The first two waves were 1934 and 1936, though parts of the High Plains stayed dry for eight years.

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

The semi-arid area gets under 20 inches of rain a year and was once called the Great American Desert.

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

An unusually wet spell after the Civil War seemed to confirm it.

How large were the "quarter section" plots offered under the Homestead Act of 1862?

The Kinkaid Act of 1904 later granted 640 acres in western Nebraska because 160 was too little for arid land.

Which two events raised wheat prices and encouraged farmers to plow up far more of the plains?

On the Llano Estacado, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled between 1925 and 1930.

What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?

They were also called black rollers and could cut visibility to three feet or less.

When was the first recorded dust storm of the era?

Unlike a sandstorm, its cloud was black or grey and rolled along the ground.

How much dust did the two-day storm of May 1934 dump on Chicago?

Two days later it reached Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York and Washington, and red snow fell on New England that winter.

On what date did the storm known as Black Sunday strike?

The day began clear, warm and still, and the only warning was static electricity and fleeing birds and rabbits.

How fast did the Black Sunday cold front drive the dust south across the plains?

It hit Beaver, Oklahoma around 4 pm, Boise City at 5:15 and Amarillo at 7:20.

About how much topsoil is estimated to have been displaced on Black Sunday alone?

Woody Guthrie's song "The Great Dust Storm" describes that day.

Who coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday story?

Geiger was the reporter on the scene in Boise City; Stanley did the rewrite in Kansas City.

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

The term originally meant the affected area but now usually refers to the event.

The Dust Bowl centred on the panhandles of which two states?

It affected 100 million acres in all, touching Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico too.

By 1936, Dust Bowl losses were running at how much per day?

That is about $580 million a day in 2025 dollars.

Roughly how many Americans were left homeless by the Dust Bowl?

More than 350 houses had to be torn down after one storm alone.

About how many people moved out of the Plains states between 1930 and 1940?

Most moved within their own states, from badly hit counties to less affected ones.

A 1939 survey found what share of Southwestern migrants to California had been doing farm work before leaving?

Nearly a third were professional or white-collar workers.

As of 2007, what fraction of California's population was estimated to be of Okie heritage?

A 1990s study put the number of descendants at about 3.75 million.

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

Migrants from Arkansas, Texas, Kansas and elsewhere all got called Okies anyway.

Which highway did most Dust Bowl migrants take west to California?

Steinbeck's Joads call it the "mother road".

In February 1936 Los Angeles police chief James Davis sent 150 officers to the state line to do what?

Around 400,000 jobless people migrated to California in the 1930s.

The Farm Security Administration built Weedpatch Camp in 1936 south of which California city?

Also called the Arvin Federal Government Camp, several of its buildings are on the National Register.

Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration to California?

Merle Haggard was among the prominent Okies.

Who headed the Soil Erosion Service set up in August 1933 and later the Soil Conservation Service?

He was born in North Carolina and stayed at the head of the agency until 1951.

Hugh Bennett's agency, the SCS, moved in 1935 into which federal department?

It stayed there and was renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service in 1994.

How many trees had the Great Plains Shelterbelt project planted by 1942?

They filled 30,233 shelterbelts covering 18,600 square miles.

Which two native trees were typical of the Shelterbelt plantings along fence rows?

Farmers were paid to plant and cultivate them in a 100-mile-wide zone from North Dakota to Texas.

Which New Deal agency did Roosevelt order to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?

The belt of more than 200 million trees ran from Canada to Abilene, Texas.

How much per acre did the government pay reluctant farmers in 1937 to adopt soil-conserving methods?

By the following year the effort had cut blowing soil by nearly two-thirds.

By 1938 the conservation campaign had reduced the amount of blowing soil by how much?

The land still would not yield a decent living until the rains returned in autumn 1939.

The Drought Relief Service of 1935 bought cattle from emergency counties at what price per head?

At first more than half were judged unfit for human consumption and killed.

How many pigs did the government order slaughtered under the Agricultural Adjustment Act?

The meat was packed and given to the poor through the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation.

Modern analysis links Dust Bowl droughts most directly to sea-surface temperature anomalies in which ocean?

Atlantic temperatures had an indirect effect on atmospheric circulation.

By 1940, how far had farmland values in high-erosion counties fallen relative to low-erosion ones?

In the worst areas less than a quarter of the original agricultural losses were ever recovered.

Who took the 1936 photograph Migrant Mother?

She turned her car around after passing a sign reading "Pea-Pickers Camp".

In which California town was Migrant Mother taken?

The site is thought to be a crop field beside Highway 101 near the high school football stadium.

What was the name of the woman in Migrant Mother, identified decades later?

She resented the photo's endless circulation and the fact that she never earned a cent from it.

Which Farm Security Administration worker's field notes fed heavily into The Grapes of Wrath?

Her own novel Whose Names Are Unknown was shelved after Steinbeck's success and not published until 2004.

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

He was convicted of homicide but insisted he acted in self-defence.

Who suggested the title The Grapes of Wrath to Steinbeck?

The phrase comes from Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic".

Who directed the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

He later admitted he had never bothered to read the novel.

Why did Darryl F. Zanuck send private investigators to Oklahoma before filming The Grapes of Wrath?

He was nervous about the novel's left-wing politics and wanted ammunition against charges the film was pro-Communist.

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

It was his first commercial recording and the most successful album of his career.

Which label released Dust Bowl Ballads, the only major label Guthrie ever recorded for?

The label wanted an answer to Columbia's folk singer Burl Ives.

Which Dust Bowl Ballads song was so long it had to be spread over both sides of a 78 rpm disc?

"Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues" were left off the original release for length.

What nickname did Guthrie earn from his songs about the era?

He travelled with displaced Oklahoma farmers to California and learned their folk and blues songs.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) was the first film created by the US government for what?

Pare Lorentz directed and Virgil Thomson wrote the score.

Who directed the 2012 PBS documentary The Dust Bowl?

Its interviews were later borrowed for the dust-storm scenes of a 2014 science-fiction film.

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, about Dust Bowl survivors, won which prize in 2006?

Egan blames reckless agricultural misuse of the land for the disaster.

Dust pneumonia occurred when dust filled which structures deep in the lungs?

It stopped the cilia from moving so the lungs could never clear themselves.

Boise City, Oklahoma, at the heart of the Dust Bowl, suffered what bizarre accident in July 1943?

The crew mistook the four lights around the town square for their practice target across the state line.

The 2014 film Interstellar depicts a future America scoured by dust storms caused by what?

Director Christopher Nolan drew directly on the 1930s crisis and a 2012 PBS documentary.

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

With less than 20 inches of rain a year and little surface water or timber, the shortgrass prairie was thought unfit for European-style farming.

The 1904 Kinkaid Act offered homesteaders in western Nebraska plots of what size?

The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 offered 320 acres elsewhere on the Plains, quadrupling and doubling the original 160-acre quarter section.

Which AP reporter's Black Sunday dispatch from Boise City led to the coining of 'Dust Bowl'?

His Kansas City editor Edward Stanley coined the phrase while rewriting the dispatch about the 14 April 1935 storm.

Roughly how many acres did the Dust Bowl's drought and erosion affect?

The worst-hit core was 16 million acres across 20 counties in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, home to most of the Plains migrants.

Sanora Babb's shelved Dust Bowl novel was finally published in 2004 under what title?

Steinbeck had drawn closely on her Farm Security Administration field notes for The Grapes of Wrath.

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

Christopher Nolan later used interviews from Ken Burns's 2012 documentary to draw parallels in his dust-choked film Interstellar.

Historian Donald Worster concluded on a 1970s return visit that high-tech Plains farmers had done what?

The farmers he met credited deep wells, pesticides and giant harvesters with beating the old troubles; Mathew Bonnifield saw instead a triumph of the human spirit.