The Dust Bowl

Settlers had ploughed up the deep-rooted native grass of the southern plains to plant wheat during a wet decade and a wartime price boom. When the drought returned — as it always had — there was nothing holding the soil, and it lifted. Storms carried topsoil east in clouds that darkened Chicago and dusted ships in the Atlantic; one reached Washington while Congress debated a soil-conservation bill. Around 2.5 million people left the plains. The land had been farmed as though the good years were the normal ones.