60 free Dust Bowl trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Dust Bowl turned the southern Great Plains into a desert of blowing topsoil for most of the 1930s, and this trivia quiz covers the whole disaster. It starts with the causes: the Homestead Act, "rain follows the plow", the wheat boom and the tractors that ripped up the native grass. Then come the storms themselves, from the first black blizzard in September 1930 to Black Sunday in April 1935 and the storm that dumped 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago. The quiz also follows the people: the Okies who took Route 66 to California, the Weedpatch camp, Florence Owens Thompson in Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, John Steinbeck's Joads, Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Hugh Hammond Bennett's crusade for soil conservation. It closes with the New Deal response, the 220 million trees of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, and the way the story has been told since, from Pare Lorentz's 1936 film to Ken Burns and Interstellar. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on the Dust Bowl, Black Sunday, The Grapes of Wrath and related topics, and each question links to its source. Try our Great Depression and Route 66 quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Dust Bowl drought came in three waves; the last of them spanned which years?
1939-40
The first two waves were 1934 and 1936, though parts of the High Plains stayed dry for eight years.
Q 02The Dust Bowl region lies mostly west of which meridian, on the High Plains?
The 100th
The semi-arid area gets under 20 inches of rain a year and was once called the Great American Desert.
Q 03What real-estate promoters' slogan convinced settlers the plains climate had changed for good?
"Rain follows the plow"
An unusually wet spell after the Civil War seemed to confirm it.
Q 04How large were the "quarter section" plots offered under the Homestead Act of 1862?
160 acres
The Kinkaid Act of 1904 later granted 640 acres in western Nebraska because 160 was too little for arid land.
Q 05Which two events raised wheat prices and encouraged farmers to plow up far more of the plains?
World War I and the Russian Revolution
On the Llano Estacado, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920, then tripled between 1925 and 1930.
Q 06What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?
Black blizzards
They were also called black rollers and could cut visibility to three feet or less.
Q 07When was the first recorded dust storm of the era?
September 1930
Unlike a sandstorm, its cloud was black or grey and rolled along the ground.
Q 08How much dust did the two-day storm of May 1934 dump on Chicago?
12 million pounds
Two days later it reached Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York and Washington, and red snow fell on New England that winter.
Q 09On what date did the storm known as Black Sunday strike?
April 14, 1935
The day began clear, warm and still, and the only warning was static electricity and fleeing birds and rabbits.
Q 10How fast did the Black Sunday cold front drive the dust south across the plains?
60 mph
It hit Beaver, Oklahoma around 4 pm, Boise City at 5:15 and Amarillo at 7:20.
Q 11About how much topsoil is estimated to have been displaced on Black Sunday alone?
300,000 tons
Woody Guthrie's song "The Great Dust Storm" describes that day.
Q 12Who coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting a reporter's Black Sunday story?
Edward Stanley, an AP news editor
Geiger was the reporter on the scene in Boise City; Stanley did the rewrite in Kansas City.
Q 13What nickname for the decade is sometimes used alongside "Dust Bowl"?
The Dirty Thirties
The term originally meant the affected area but now usually refers to the event.
Q 21Which highway did most Dust Bowl migrants take west to California?
U.S. Route 66
Steinbeck's Joads call it the "mother road".
Q 22In February 1936 Los Angeles police chief James Davis sent 150 officers to the state line to do what?
Enforce a "bum blockade" against migrants
Around 400,000 jobless people migrated to California in the 1930s.
Q 23The Farm Security Administration built Weedpatch Camp in 1936 south of which California city?
Bakersfield
Also called the Arvin Federal Government Camp, several of its buildings are on the National Register.
Q 14The Dust Bowl centred on the panhandles of which two states?
Texas and Oklahoma
It affected 100 million acres in all, touching Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico too.
Q 15By 1936, Dust Bowl losses were running at how much per day?
$25 million
That is about $580 million a day in 2025 dollars.
Q 16Roughly how many Americans were left homeless by the Dust Bowl?
More than 500,000
More than 350 houses had to be torn down after one storm alone.
Q 17About how many people moved out of the Plains states between 1930 and 1940?
3.5 million
Most moved within their own states, from badly hit counties to less affected ones.
Q 18A 1939 survey found what share of Southwestern migrants to California had been doing farm work before leaving?
Only 43%
Nearly a third were professional or white-collar workers.
Q 19As of 2007, what fraction of California's population was estimated to be of Okie heritage?
About one-eighth
A 1990s study put the number of descendants at about 3.75 million.
Q 20Journalist Ben Reddick is credited with popularising "Okie" after noticing what on migrants' cars?
"OK" on their licence plates
Migrants from Arkansas, Texas, Kansas and elsewhere all got called Okies anyway.
Q 24Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration to California?
The Bakersfield Sound
Merle Haggard was among the prominent Okies.
Q 25Who headed the Soil Erosion Service set up in August 1933 and later the Soil Conservation Service?
Hugh Hammond Bennett
He was born in North Carolina and stayed at the head of the agency until 1951.
Q 26Hugh Bennett's agency, the SCS, moved in 1935 into which federal department?
Agriculture
It stayed there and was renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service in 1994.
Q 27How many trees had the Great Plains Shelterbelt project planted by 1942?
220 million
They filled 30,233 shelterbelts covering 18,600 square miles.
Q 28Which two native trees were typical of the Shelterbelt plantings along fence rows?
Red cedar and green ash
Farmers were paid to plant and cultivate them in a 100-mile-wide zone from North Dakota to Texas.
Q 29Which New Deal agency did Roosevelt order to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?
The Civilian Conservation Corps
The belt of more than 200 million trees ran from Canada to Abilene, Texas.
Q 30How much per acre did the government pay reluctant farmers in 1937 to adopt soil-conserving methods?
One dollar
By the following year the effort had cut blowing soil by nearly two-thirds.