Dust Bowl Trivia
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58 free Dust Bowl trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 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 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which aquifer beneath the Great Plains did farmers start pumping after the Dust Bowl?
The Ogallala
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.
Q 02The Dust Bowl region lies mostly west of which meridian, on the High Plains?
The 100th
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.
Q 03What real-estate promoters' slogan convinced settlers the plains climate had changed for good?
"Rain follows the plow"
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.
Q 04Which 1862 law gave settlers 160 acres for five years' residence?
The Homestead Act
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.
Q 05Demand from which war sent wheat prices soaring and pushed Plains farmers to plow up millions of acres of grassland?
World War I
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.
Q 06What were the huge Dust Bowl storms nicknamed?
Black blizzards
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.
Q 07In 1935, Plains towns held Sunday 'drives' to round up and club which crop-eating animals by the thousand?
Jackrabbits
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.
Q 08One great dust storm dropped an estimated 12 million pounds of Plains soil on which city?
Chicago
Chicago was only a stop on the way: the same storm rolled on east and darkened the skies over New York and Washington.
Q 09What did people fear from a handshake during a Dust Bowl storm?
A static shock
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.
Q 10What was the weather like on the morning of Black Sunday?
Clear and warm
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.
Q 11Caroline Henderson's 1936 "Letters from the Dust Bowl" appeared in which magazine?
The Atlantic Monthly
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.
Q 12What did Dalhart, Texas, pay rainmaker Tex Thornton to do during the Dust Bowl drought?
Fire explosives into the sky
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.
Q 13What nickname for the decade is sometimes used alongside "Dust Bowl"?
Q 21In 1936 LAPD chief James Davis posted officers at California's borders to do what?
Enforce a "bum blockade" against migrants
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.
Q 22In California's San Joaquin Valley, what work did Dust Bowl migrants mostly end up doing?
Picking cotton and fruit
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.
Q 23Which style of country music grew out of the Okie migration of the 1930s?
The Dirty Thirties
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.
Q 14Which insects descended on the drought-stricken Plains in clouds during the 1930s, stripping fields bare?
Grasshoppers
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."
Q 15Which organization supplied gauze dust masks to Dust Bowl families?
The Red Cross
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.
Q 16Though The Grapes of Wrath made the exodus famous, what did about three in four Dust Bowl farmers do?
Stayed on their land
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.
Q 17What were the out-of-town speculators called who planted Plains wheat in the 1920s boom and went home until harvest?
Suitcase farmers
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.
Q 18Which country singer, the California-born son of Oklahoma migrants, had a 1969 country number one with "Okie from Muskogee"?
Merle Haggard
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.
Q 19Journalist Ben Reddick is credited with popularising "Okie" after noticing what on migrants' cars?
"OK" on their licence plates
"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.
Q 20Which highway did Dust Bowl migrants famously follow west to California?
U.S. Route 66
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.
The Bakersfield Sound
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.
Q 24Which official ran the New Deal's Soil Erosion Service and then its Soil Conservation Service?
Hugh Hammond Bennett
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.
Q 25Congress created the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 inside which federal department?
Agriculture
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.
Q 26What was the Great Plains Shelterbelt planted to do?
Slow the wind
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.
Q 27Which two hardy trees were staples of the Great Plains Shelterbelt?
Red cedar and green ash
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.
Q 28Which New Deal agency helped plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt?
The Civilian Conservation Corps
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.
Q 29Why did Plains farmers plow more grassland as wheat prices collapsed?
To break even
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.
Q 30What became of the healthy cattle Washington bought from Dust Bowl ranchers?
Butchered to feed the hungry
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.