In the spring of 1934, storms swept across the Great Plains, but they were not rainstorms. They were the result of sun and drought and a terrible wind that blew millions of tons of topsoil from 300,000 square miles in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. This was the Dust Bowl. It buried fences, fields, and homes. It choked cattle and sickened the people who stayed. Three hundred and fifty thousand settlers fled, many becoming part of a slow, sad caravan along Route 66 to California.
But wind and drought were not the only factors that combined to create the Dust Bowl. Only fifty years earlier, a carpet of buffalo grass had covered the Great Plains, protecting the soil and retaining the moisture in the ground. By the turn of the century, farmers had settled, homesteading in regions that had been used as range land. The increased demand for wheat during World War I encouraged farmers to plow and plant even wider areas. Forty percent of the land that they plowed up had never been exposed to rain, wind, or sun before. When the drought and wind came, the land had been prepared for disaster.
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