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Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone

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Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Resources Related Readings: Sanora Babb. Whose Names Are Unknown. University of In the 1930s, people on the Great Plains Oklahoma Press, 1979. DUST, Geoff Cunfer. On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. endured one of America’s most destructive Texas A&M University Press, 2005. DROUGHT, ecological disasters—the Dust Bowl. What Timothy Egan. The Worst Hard Time. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Caroline Henderson. Edited by Alvin O. Turner. Letters From the AND caused fertile farms to turn to dust? How did Dust Bowl. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. people survive? What lessons can we learn R. Douglas Hurt. The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social DREAMS History. Nelson-Hall, 1981. from the Dust Bowl? Bison herd at water, circa 1905 Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Pamela Riney-Kehrberg. Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas. University Press of GONE DRY We can find answers to these questions in Kansas, 1994. The Geography and People of the Plains the region’s history and geography. Centuries John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. Viking Press, 1939. Living on the Plains depended on rainfall, but many people Donald Worster. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. A Traveling of human interaction with the environment and animals thrived there. Bison shared the Plains with other Oxford University Press, 1979. Exhibit and intensified between 1850 and 1930 as animals and with different groups of indigenous people for Music: Public farmers believed that they could overcome thousands of years. Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and others Woody Guthrie. Dust Bowl Ballads. RCA Victor, 1940. Programs called the Southern Plains home. After 1800, Native Americans On the Web: for Libraries the area’s variable weather and climate. The The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns had to share the Plains with other people. An increase in about the http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/ 1930s disaster taught them that they were hunting led to the decline of the bison, and as the human Dust Bowl The National Drought Mitigation Center presence in the region grew, towns and ranches occupied more wrong. However, people survived the dust http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/DustBowl.aspx of the Plains. Humans came to rely more on agriculture, and Library of Congress Teacher’s Guide to the Dust Bowl Migration and the drought by forging new community farming made them dependent on the rain. The fields, the http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysource- ties and by embracing new government grass, the bison, and the dramatic swings in weather inspired sets/dust-bowl-migration/ Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm, 1936 Arthur Rothstein, photographer programs. People also discovered a new several distinct traditions of art based on the ecology and Documentaries: Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division cultures of the Great Plains, from Native American artists to Ken Burns, director. Dust Bowl. Florentine Films, 2012. respect for the power of nature. The Dust novelists like Willa Cather. Artists who captured the intense Chana Gazit, producer. American Experience: Surviving the Dust Bowl. Steward/Gazit Productions, 1998. Bowl experience demonstrates the complex connection of people to their environment in the Plains spoke Dan Tyrrell, producer. When Weather Changed History: for the many migrants, farmers, and shop keepers who had relationship between humans and the Dust Bowl. The Weather Channel, 2008. little time to draw or write fiction. dynamic Great Plains environment. Please visit ala.org/programming/dustbowl for a complete list of library host sites. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. ALA DUST BOWL BROCHURE.indd 1 6/11/14 11:30 AM BACK COVER FRONT COVER “It All Went Black” The Legacy of the Dust Bowl Farmers who stayed in the Plains during the Dust Bowl A period of prosperity between 1900 and 1920 seemed to thought about the economics of agriculture and wondered vindicate changes to the land. Although farmers did not know what the government might do to help. State and federal it at the time, this boom period relied on temporary programs to aid farmers in the Dust Bowl region increased in conditions. Parts of the Plains received record rainfall in the the late 1930s. The Drought Relief Service, the Soil Erosion 1910s and 1920s. The temporary environmental and economic Service, and the Agriculture Department all provided aid to conditions that encouraged the boom on the Plains ended in farmers. Government scientists tried to understand the causes the early 1930s when an epic drought started. No longer of the Dust Bowl, a tradition of investigation that continues protected by the grass and its deep roots, the soil dried and today. Scholars now have a better understanding of the turned to a fine dust that the winds spread everywhere. The economic forces driving agriculture in the Plains during the lack of rain destroyed the sense of control over nature that Plains period, and scholars understand the endurance, cooperation, and Prairie grasses being plowed under, Kansas, 1930s farmers had enjoyed during the boom years. The winds and the U.S. Soil Conservation Service Courtesy of Oklahoma State University Library, creative responses of local communities to the harsh conditions. Special Collections & University Archives dry fields produced monumental dust storms. Perhaps the Our best bulwark against another ecological crisis on the Railroads, Farming, and Machines Change the Land largest one occurred on April 14, 1935, a day known as Living Through the Dust Bowl Plains remains our collective knowledge. How do we build Black Sunday, when the sunlight grew dim and the sun was Plains inhabitants faced a complex and highly variable In the absence of a dramatic storm, dust still swept through strong communities? How do we reimagine economic and blocked by the great dust-filled maelstrom. environment featuring periods of wet weather and periods of farms. Dust blocked roads, buried fences, destroyed tractors, social systems that fit with the natural environment? The drought. People on the Plains also endured hostile weather and accumulated like great snow drifts against buildings. history of the Dust Bowl can inform these discussions. phenomena such as tornados, blizzards, floods, hail storms, In response to the hostile conditions, farm families created dust storms, and the constant wind. The short-lived tornado self-help groups to save their way of life. They made a virtue or the hail storm both posed less of a threat than the most out of staying on their farms through the dark years. Women serious weather hazard on the Plains: drought. The Plains has A man walks around his car during a dust storm, undated often added new duties to their already extensive work. Some H.H. Finnell Collection Agricultural fields and abandoned farmstead, eastern Montana, date unknown Courtesy of Oklahoma State University Library, Terry Sohl, photographer episodic, recurrent drought: periods of average or above Special Collections & University Archives people left their farms and moved to the nearest urban center, Courtesy of United States Geological Survey average rainfall alternate with periods of drought. Despite the while others packed their meager belongings and went west, challenges with rainfall, economic conditions in the Plains especially to California. Many more farmers stayed. Historians changed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth estimate that seventy to eighty percent of people in the region century with the expansion of railroads into the region from the of the Dust Bowl remained on their land. The intense physical east. The railroads, government scientists, and land speculators and psychological experiences of living through dust storms all repeated the same phrase: “The rain follows the plow.” inspired many artists to try to capture the essence of the They used this phrase to convince farmers that plowing the Dust Bowl. For example, Woody Guthrie sang ballads about land released moisture into the atmosphere which, in turn, the suffering of ordinary folk on the Plains. produced more rain. (Background) 5 A Texas farm endures in the dust, 1938 Dorothea Lange, photographer Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division ALA DUST BOWL BROCHURE.indd 2 6/11/14 11:30 AM INSIDE.
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