i need the best facts on the Dust Bowl. Where can i get them?

Answer 1

Here is a good starting point and it offers eyewitness accounts to the event. I hope this helps.




The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.

The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.

"The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."

The day after Black Sunday, an Associated Press reporter used the term "Dust Bowl" for the first time. "Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains." The term stuck and was used by radio reporters and writers, in private letters and public speeches.

In the central and northern plains, dust was everywhere.

The impact of the Dust Bowl was felt all over the U.S. During the same April as Black Sunday, 1935, one of FDR's advisors, Hugh Hammond Bennett, was in Washington D.C. on his way to testify before Congress about the need for soil conservation legislation. A dust storm arrived in Washington all the way from the Great Plains. As a dusty gloom spread over the nation's capital and blotted out the sun, Bennett explained, "This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act that same year.

Interview excerpts with Herman Goertzen:


"Well, enough to make the chickens go to roost. I remember one particular one. It was in the Sutton area. It was like a black wall that went over that area, south of us, there. It went through, and it was just like shutting a barn door. It was that dark, that black, and then it eventually came to our area."


Excerpt from LeRoy Hankel:



"Everything was dirty you know, with dust blowing all over. And then in '34 when the dust storms started from the west at North Platte was what I was told. And I'll tell you that looked like the worst storm you ever saw. It was just a cloud coming right over, that's what it looked. And it was all black. I've heard up to 100 mile per hour wind. I don't know if it was that strong. Myself, I don't think it was. But a car stopped at Frazier's. He was driving ahead of it. He said, 'You know, that storm started behind me about North Platte.'
"And he said, 'I outrun it until here.' And he said, 'I just had to stop.'
"But the whole sky in the west, as far as you – just a black cloud. That's the way it looked. But it was all dirt and that's all we got out of it. We got all dirt. Dave Frazier had his truck sitting out in front of the store there and it even blew that about 30-40 feet – just right down the street."