The Dust Bowl
Geoff Cunfer, Southwest Minnesota State University
What Was "The Dust Bowl"?
The phrase "Dust
Bowl" holds a powerful place in the American imagination. It
connotes a confusing mixture of concepts. Is the Dust Bowl a place?
Was it an event? An era? American popular culture employs the term
in all three ways. Ask most people about the Dust Bowl and they can
place it in the Middle West, though in the imagination it wanders
widely, from the Rocky Mountains, through the Great Plains, to
Illinois and Indiana. Many people can situate the event in the
1930s. Ask what happened then, and a variety of stories emerge. A
combination of severe drought and economic depression created
destitution among farmers. Millions of desperate people took to the
roads, seeking relief in California where they became exploited
itinerant farm laborers. Farmers plowed up a pristine wilderness for
profit, and suffered ecological collapse because of their
recklessness. Dust Bowl stories, like its definitions, are legion,
and now approach the mythological.
The words also evoke
powerful graphic images taken from art and literature. Consider
these lines from the opening chapter of John Steinbeck's The
Grapes of Wrath (1939):
"Now the wind grew
strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields.
Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and carried
away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust
lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like
sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing
sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but
disappeared into the darkening sky. ... The people came out of their
houses and smelled the hot stinging air and covered their noses from
it. And the children came out of the houses, but they did not run or
shout as they would have done after a rain. Men stood by their
fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little
green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they
did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand
beside their men – to feel whether this time the men would break."
When Americans hear the
words "Dust Bowl," grainy black and white photographs of
devastated landscapes and destitute people leap to mind. Dorothea
Lange and Arthur Rothstein classics bring the Dust Bowl vividly to
life in our imaginations (Figures
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]).
For the musically inclined,
Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl ballads define the event with evocative
lyrics such as those in "The Great Dust Storm" (Figure 5). Some
of America's most memorable art – literature, photography, music
– emerged from the Dust Bowl and that art helped to define the
event and build the myth in American popular culture.
The Dust Bowl was an
event defined by artists and by government bureaucrats. It has
become part of American mythology, an episode in the nation's
progression from the Pilgrims to Lexington and Concord, through Civil
War and frontier settlement, to industrial modernization, Depression,
and Dust Bowl. Many of the great themes of American history are tied
up in the Dust Bowl story: agricultural settlement and frontier
struggle; industrial mechanization with the arrival of tractors; the
migration from farm to city, the transformation from rural to urban.
Add the Great Depression and the rise of a powerful federal
government, and we have covered many of the themes of a standard U.S.
history survey course.
Despite the multiple
uses of the phrase "Dust Bowl" it was an event which occurred in
a specific place and time. The Dust Bowl was a coincidence of
drought, severe wind erosion, and economic depression that occurred
on the Southern and Central Great Plains during the 1930s. The
drought – the longest and deepest in over a century of systematic
meteorological observation – began in 1933 and continued through
1940. In 1941 rain poured down on the region, dust storms ceased,
crops thrived, economic prosperity returned, and the Dust Bowl was
over. But for those eight years crops failed, sandy soils blew and
drifted over failed croplands, and rural people, unable to meet cash
obligations, suffered through tax delinquency, farm foreclosure,
business failure, and out-migration. The Dust Bowl was defined by a
combination of:
- extended severe
drought and unusually high temperatures
- episodic regional
dust storms and routine localized wind erosion
- agricultural
failure, including both cropland and livestock operations
- the collapse of
the rural economy, affecting farmers, rural businesses, and local
governments
- an aggressive
reform movement by the federal government
- migration from
rural to urban areas and out of the region
The Dust Bowl on the
Great Plains coincided with the Great Depression. Though few
plainsmen suffered directly from the 1929 stock market crash, they
were too intimately connected to national and world markets to be
immune from economic repercussions. The farm recession had begun in
the 1920s; after the 1919 Armistice transformed Europe from an
importer to an exporter of agricultural products, American farmers
again faced their constant nemesis: production so high that prices
were pushed downward. Farmers grew more cotton, wheat, and corn,
than the market could consume, and prices fell, fell more, and then
hit rock bottom by the early 1930s. Cotton, one of the staple crops
of the southern plains, for example, sold for 36 cents per pound in
1919, dropped to 18 cents in 1928, then collapsed to a dismal 6 cents
per pound in 1931. One irony of the Dust Bowl is that the world
could not really buy all of the crops Great Plains farmers produced.
Even the severe drought and crop failures of the 1930s had little
impact on the flood of farm commodities inundating the world market.
Routine Dust Storms on the Southern and Central Plains
The location of the
drought and the dust storms shifted from place to place between 1934
and 1940 (Figure 6 [large]).
The core of the Dust Bowl was in the Texas and
Oklahoma panhandles, southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado.
The drought began on the Great Plains, from the Dakotas through Texas
and New Mexico, in 1931. The following year was wetter, but 1933 and
1934 set low rainfall records across the plains. In some places is
did not rain at all. Others quickly accumulated a deep deficit.
Figure 7
[large]
shows percent difference from average rainfall over
five-year periods, with the location of the shifting Dust Bowl over
top. Only a handful of counties (mapped in blue) had more rain than
average between 1932 and 1940. And few counties fall into the 0 to
-10 percent range. Most counties were 10 percent drier than average,
or more, and more than eighty counties were at least 20 percent
drier. Scientists now believe that the 1930s drought coincided with
a severe La Nina event in the Pacific Ocean. Cool sea surface
temperatures reduced the amount of moisture entering the jet stream
and directed it south of the continental U.S. The drought was deep,
extensive, and persisted for more than a decade.
Whenever there is
drought on the southern and central plains dust blows. The flat
topography and continental climate mean that winds are routinely
high. When soil moisture declines, plant cover, whether native
plants or crops, diminishes in tandem. Normally dry conditions mean
that native plants typically cover less than 60 percent of the ground
surface, leaving the other 40+ percent in bare, exposed soils.
During the driest conditions native prairie vegetation sometimes
covers less than 20 percent of the ground surface, exposing 80
percent or more of the soil to strong prairie winds. Failed crop
fields are completely bare of vegetation. In these circumstances
soil blows. Local wind erosion can drift soil from one field into
ridges and ripples in a neighboring field
(Figure 8). Stronger
regional dust storms can move dirt many miles before it drifts down
along fence lines and around buildings
(Figure 9).
In rare instances
very large dust storms carry soils high into the air where they can
travel for many hundreds of miles. These "black blizzards" are
the most spectacular and memorable of dust storms, but happen only
infrequently (Figure 10).
When wind erosion and
dust storms began in the 1930s experienced plains residents hardly
welcomed the development, but neither did it surprise them. Dust
storms were an occasional spring occurrence from Texas and New Mexico
through Kansas and Colorado. They did not happen every year, but
often enough to be treated casually. This series of excerpts from
the Salina, Kansas Journal and Herald in 1879 indicates
that dust storms were a routine part of plains life in dry years:
"For the past few
days the gentle winds have enveloped the city with dust decorations.
And some of this time it has been intensely hot. Imagine the
pleasantness of the situation."
"During the past few
days we have had several exhibitions of what dust can do when
propelled by a gale. We had the disagreeable March winds, and saw
with ample disgust the evolutions and gyrations of the dust. We have
had enough of it, but will undoubtedly get much more of the same kind
during this very disagreeable month."
"Real estate moved
considerably this week."
"Another ‘hardest'
blow ever seen in Kansas ... Salina was tantalized with a small
sprinkle of rain Thursday afternoon. The wind and dust soon resumed
full sway."
"People have just got
through digging from the pores of the skin the dirt driven there by
the furious dust storms which for several days since our last issue
have been lifting this county ‘clean off its toes.' Even sinners
have stood some chance of being translated with such favoring gales."
"The wind which held
high carnival in this section last Thursday, filled the air with such
clouds of dust that darkness of the ‘consistency of twilight'
prevailed. Buildings across the street could not be distinguished.
The title of all land about for a while was not worth a cotton hat –
it was so ‘unsettled.' It was of the nature of personal
property, because it was not a ‘fixture' and very moveable. The
air was so filled with dust as to be stifling even within houses."
The Salina newspapers
reported dust storms many springs through the late nineteenth
century. An item in the Journal in 1885 epitomizes the local
attitude: "When the March winds commenced raising dust Monday, the
average citizen calmly smiled and whispered ‘so natural!'"
What Made the 1930s Different?
Dust storms were not
new to the region in the 1930s, but a number of demographic and
cultural factors were new. First there were a lot more people living
in the region in the 1930s than there had been in the 1880s. The
population of the Great Plains – 450 counties stretching from Texas
and New Mexico to the Dakotas and Montana – stood at only 800,000
in 1880; it was seven times that, at 5.6 million in 1930. The dust
storms affected many more people than they had ever done before. And
many of those people were relative newcomers, having only arrived in
recent years. They had no personal or family memory of life in the
plains, and many interpreted the arrival of episodic dust storms as
an entirely new phenomenon. An example is the reminiscence by Minnie
Zeller Doehring, written in 1981. Having moved with her family to
western Kansas in 1906, at age 7, she reported "I remember the
first Dirt storm in Western Kansas. I think it was about 1911. And
a drouth that year followed by a severe winter." Neither she nor
her family had experienced any of the nineteenth century dust storms
reported in local newspapers, so when one arrived during a dry spring
five years after they arrived, it seemed like a brand new
development.
Second, this drought
and sequence of dust storms coincided with an international economic
depression, the worst in two centuries of American history. The
financial stresses and personal misery of the Depression blended
seamlessly into the environmental disasters of drought, crop failure,
farm loss, and dust. It was difficult to assign blame. Were farmers
failing because of the economic crisis? Bank failures? Landlords
squeezing tenants? Drought? Dust storms? In the midst of these
concurrent crises emerged an activist and newly powerful federal
government. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal roared into Washington
in 1933 with a landslide mandate from voters to fix all of the ills
plaguing the nation: depression, bank failures, unemployment,
agricultural overproduction, underconsumption, the list went on and
on. And several items quickly added to that list of ills to be fixed
were rural poverty, agricultural land use, soil erosion, and dust
storms.
The drought and dust
storms were certainly hard on farmers. Crop failure was widespread
and repeated. In 1935 46.6 million acres of crops failed on the
Great Plains, with over 130 counties losing more than half their
planted acreage. Many farmers lived on the edge of financial
failure. In debt for land, tractor, automobile, and even for last
year's seed, one or two years with reduced income often meant
bankruptcy. Tax delinquency became a serious problem throughout the
plains. As land owners fell behind on their local property tax
payments, county governments grew desperate. Many counties had
delinquency rates over 40 percent for several consecutive years, and
were faced with laying off teachers, police, and other employees. A
few counties considered closing county government altogether and
merging with neighboring counties. Their only alternative was to
foreclose on now nearly worthless farms which they could neither rent
nor sell. Many families behind on mortgage payments and taxes simply
packed up and left without notice. The crisis was not restricted to
farmers, bankers, and county employees. Throughout the plains sales
of tractors, automobiles, and fertilizer declined in the early 1930s,
affecting small town merchants across the board.
Consider the example of
William and Sallie DeLoach, typical southern plains farmers who moved
from farm to farm through the early twentieth century, repeatedly
trying to buy land and repeatedly losing it to the bank in the face
of drought or low crop prices. After an earlier failed attempt to
buy land, the family invested in a 177 acre cotton farm in Lamb
County, Texas in 1924, paying 30 dollars per acre. A month later
they passed up a chance to sell it for 35 dollars an acre. Within
three months of the purchase late summer rains failed to arrive, the
cotton crop bloomed late, and the first freeze of winter killed it.
Unable to make the upcoming mortgage payment, the DeLoaches forfeited
their land and the 200 dollars they had already paid toward it. One
bad season meant default. Through the rest of the 1920s the
DeLoaches rented from Sallie's father and farmed cotton in Lamb
County. In September, 1929, just weeks before the stock market
crashed, William thought the time auspicious to invest in land again,
and bought 90 acres. He farmed it, then rented part of it to another
farmer. Rain was plentiful in 1931, and by the end of that year
DeLoach had repaid back rent to his father-in-law, paid off all
outstanding debts except his land mortgage, and started 1932 in good
shape. But the 1930s were hard on the southern plains, with the
extended drought, dust storms, and widespread poverty. The one
bright spot for farmers was the farm subsidies instituted by Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1933 DeLoach plowed up 55 acres of
already growing cotton in exchange for a check from the federal
government. Lamb County led the state in the cotton reduction
program, bringing nearly 1.4 million dollars into the county in 1933.
Drought lingered over the Texas panhandle through 1934 and 1935, and
by early 1936 DeLoach was beleaguered again. When the Supreme Court
declared the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) unconstitutional it
appeared that federal farm subsidies would disappear. A few weeks
after that decision DeLoach had a visit from his real estate agent:
Mr.
Gholson came by this A.M. and wanted to know what I was going to do
about my land notes. I told him I could do nothing, only let them
have the land back. ... I told him I had payed the school tax for
1934. Owed the state and county for 1935, also the state for 1934.
All tole [sic] about $37.50. He said he would pay that and we (wife
& I) could deed the land back to the Nugent people. I hate to
lose the land and what I have payed on it, but I can't do any thing
else. ‘Big fish eat the little ones.' The law is take from the
poor devil that wants a home, give to the rich. I have lost about
$1000.00 on the land.
A week later:
Mr.
Gholson came by. Told me about the deed he had drawn in Dallas. ...
He said if I would pay for the deed and stamps, which would be $5.00,
the deal would be closed. I asked him if that meant just as the land
stood now. He said yes. He said they would pay the balance of
taxes. Well, they ought to. I have payed $800.00 or better on the
land, but got behind and could not do any thing else. Any way my
mind is at ease. I do not think Gholson or any of the cold blooded
land grafters would lose any sleep on account of taking a home away
from any poor devil.
For the third time in
his career DeLoach defaulted and turned over his farm. Later that
month Congress rewrote the AAA legislation to meet Constitutional
requirements, and the farm programs have continued ever since. With
federal program income again assured, DeLoach purchased yet another
68 acre farm in September, 1936, moved the family onto it, and tried
again. Other families were not as persistent, and when crop failure
led to bankruptcy they packed up and left the region. The term
popularly assigned to such emigrants, "Dust Bowl refugees,"
assigned a single cause – dust storms – to what was in fact a
complex and multi-causal event (Figure 11).
Like dust storms and
agricultural setbacks, high out-migration was not new to the plains.
Throughout the settlement period, from about 1870 to 1920, there was
very high turnover in population. Many people moved into the region,
but many moved out also. James Malin found that 10 year population
turnover on the western Kansas frontier ranged from 41 to 67 percent
between 1895 and 1930. Many people were half farmers, half land
speculators, buying frontier land cheap (or homesteading it for
free), then selling a few years later on a rising market. People
moved from farm to farm, always looking for a better opportunity,
often following a succession of frontiers over a lifetime, from Ohio
to Illinois to Kansas to Colorado. Outmigration from the Great
Plains in the 1930s was not considerably higher than it had been over
the previous 50 years. What changed in the 1930s was that new
immigrants stopped moving in to replace those leaving. Many rural
areas of the grassland began a slow population decline that had not
yet bottomed out in 2000.
The New Deal Response to Drought and Dust Storms
Emigrants from the
Great Plains were not new in the 1930s. Neither was drought,
agricultural crisis, or dust storms. This drought and these dust
storms were certainly more severe than those that wracked the plains
in 1879-1880, in the mid 1890s, and again in 1911. And more people
were adversely affected because total population was higher. But
what was most different about the 1930s was the response of the
federal government. In past crises, when farmers went bankrupt, when
grassland counties lost 20 percent of their population, when dust
storms descended, the federal government stood aloof. It felt no
responsibility for the problems, no popular mandate to solve them.
Just the opposite was the case in the 1930s. The New Deal set out to
solve the nation's problems, and in the process contributed to the
creation of the Dust Bowl as an historic event of mythological
proportions.
The economic and
agricultural disaster of the 1930s provided an opening for
experimentation with federal land use management. The idea had begun
among economists in agricultural colleges in the 1920s who proposed
removing "submarginal" land from crop production.
"Submarginal" referred to land low in productivity, unsuited for
the production of farm crops, or incapable of profitable cultivation.
A "land utilization" movement emerged in the 1920s to classify
farm land as good, poor, marginal, or submarginal, and to forcibly
retire the latter from production. Such rational planning aimed to
reduce farm poverty, contract chronic overproduction of farm crops,
and protect land vulnerable to damage. M.L. Wilson, of Montana State
Agricultural College, focused the academic movement while Lewis C.
Gray, at the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), led the effort
within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The land utilization
movement began well before the 1930s, but the drought and dust storms
of that decade provided a fortuitous justification for a land use
policy already on the table, and newly created agencies like the Soil
Conservation Service (SCS), the Resettlement Administration (RA), and
the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were the loudest to publicize
and deplore the Dust Bowl wracking America's heartland.
Whereas the land use
adjustment movement had begun as an attempt to solve chronic rural
poverty, the arrival of dust storms in 1934 provided a second
justification for aggressive federal action to change land use
practices. Federal bureaucrats created the central narrative of the
Dust Bowl, in part because it emphasized the need for these new
reform agencies. The FSA launched a sophisticated public relations
campaign to publicize the disaster unfolding in the Great Plains. It
hired world class photographers to document the suffering of plains
people, giving them specific instructions from Washington to
photograph the most eroded landscapes and the most destitute people.
Dorothea Lange's photographs of emigrants on the road to California
still stand as some of the most evocative images in American history
(Figures 12-13). The Resettlement Administration also hired
filmmaker Pare Lorentz the make a series of movies, including "The
Plow that Broke the Plains."
The narrative behind
this publicity campaign was this: in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries farmers had come to the dry western plains,
encouraged by a misguided Homestead Act, where they plowed up land
unsuited for farming. The grassland should have been left in native
grass for grazing, but small farmers, hoping to make profits growing
cash crops like wheat had plowed the land, exposing soils to
relentless winds. When serious drought struck in the 1930s the
wounded landscape succumbed to dust storms that devastated farms,
farmers, and local economies. The result was a mass exodus of
desperately poor people, a social failure caused by misuse of land.
The profit motive and private land ownership were behind this
failure, and only a scientifically grounded federal bureaucracy could
manage land use wisely in the interests of all Americans, rather than
for the profit of a few individuals. Federal agents would retire
land from cultivation, return it to grassland, and teach remaining
farmers how to use their land more carefully to prevent erosion.
This effort would, of course, require large budgets and thousands of
employees, but it was vital to resolving a rural disaster.
The New Deal
government, with Congressional support and appropriations, began to
put reform plan into place. A host of new agencies vied to manage
the program, including the FSA, the SCS, the RA, and the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration (AAA). Each implemented a variety of
reforms. The RA began purchasing "submarginal" land from
farmers, eventually acquiring some 10 million acres for former
farmland in the Great Plains. (These lands are now mostly managed by
the U.S. Forest Service as National Grasslands leased to nearby
private ranchers for grazing.) The RA and the FSA worked to relocate
destitute farmers on better lands, or move them out of farming
altogether. The SCS established demonstration projects in counties
across the nation, where local cooperator farmers implemented
recommended soils conservation techniques on their farms, such as
fallowing, strip cropping, contour plowing, terracing, growing cover
crops, and a variety of cultivation techniques. There were efforts
in each county to establish Land Use Planning Committees made of
local farmers and federal agents who would have authority over land
use practices on private farms. These committees functioned for
several years in the late 1930s, but ended in most places by the
early 1940s. The most important and expensive measure was the AAA's
development of a comprehensive system of farm subsidies, which paid
farmers cash for reducing their acreage of commodity crops. The
subsidies, created as an emergency Depression measure, have become
routine and persist 70 years later. They brought millions of dollars
into nearly every farming county in the U.S. and permanently
transformed the economics of agriculture. In a multitude of
innovative ways the federal government set out to remake American
farming. The Dust Bowl narrative served exceedingly well to justify
these massive and revolutionary changes in farming, America's most
common occupation for most of its history.
Conclusion
The Dust Bowl finally
ended in 1941 with the arrival of drenching rains on the southern and
central plains and with the advent of World War II. The rains
restored crops and settled the dust. The war diverted public and
government attention from the plains. In a telling move, the FSA
photography corps was reconstituted as the Office of War Information,
the propaganda wing of the government's war effort. The narrative
of World War II replaced the Dust Bowl narrative in the public's
attention. Congress diverted funding away from the Great Plains and
toward mobilization. The Land Utilization Program stopped buying
submarginal land and the county Land Use Planning Committees ceased.
Some of the New Deal reforms became permanent. The AAA subsidy
system continued through the present and the Soil Conservation
Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) created a
stable niche promoting wise agricultural land management and soil
mapping.
Ironically, overall
land use on the Great Plains had changed little during the decade.
About the same amount of land was devoted to crops in the second half
of the twentieth century as in the first half. Farmers grew the same
crops in the same mixtures. Many implemented the milder reforms
promoted by New Dealers – contour plowing, terracing – but little
cropland was converted back to pasture. The "submarginal"
regions have continued to grow wheat, sorghum, and other crops in
roughly the same quantities. Despite these facts the public has
generally adopted the Dust Bowl narrative. If asked, most will
identify the Dust Bowl as caused by misuse of land. The descendants
of the federal agencies created in the 1930s still claim to have
played a leading role in solving the crisis. Periodic droughts and
dust storms have returned to the region since 1941, notably in the
early 1950s and again in the 1970s. Towns in the core dust storm
region still have dust storms in dry years. Lubbock, Texas, for
example, experienced 35 dust storms in 1973-74. Rural depopulation
continues in the Great Plains (although cities in the region have
grown even faster than rural places have declined). None of these
droughts, dust storms, or periods of depopulation have received the
concentrated public attention that those of the 1930s did.
Nonetheless, environmentalists and critics of modern agricultural
systems continue to warn that unless we reform modern farming the
Dust Bowl may return.
References and Additional Reading
Bonnifield, Mathew P.
The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1979.
Cronon, William. "A
Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative." Journal of
American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-1376.
Cunfer, Geoff. "Causes
of the Dust Bowl." In Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History,
edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, 93-104. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press,
2002.
Cunfer, Geoff. "The
New Deal's Land Utilization Program in the Great Plains." Great
Plains Quarterly 21 (Summer 2001): 193-210.
Cunfer, Geoff. On
the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. Texas A&M
University Press, 2005.
The Future of the
Great Plains: Report of the Great Plains Committee. Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1936.
Ganzel, Bill. Dust
Bowl Descent. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Great Plains
Quarterly 6 (Spring 1986), special issue on the Dust Bowl.
Gregory, James N.
American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in
California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Guthrie, Woody. Dust
Bowl Ballads. New York: Folkway Records, 1964.
Gutmann, Myron P. and
Geoff Cunfer. "A New Look at the Causes of the Dust Bowl."
Charles L. Wood Agricultural History Lecture Series, no. 99-1.
Lubbock: International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies,
Texas Tech University, 1999.
Hansen, Zeynep K. and
Gary D. Libecap. "Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of
the 1930s." Journal of Political Economy 112 (2004):
665-694.
Hurt, R. Douglas. The
Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History. Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1981.
Lookingbill, Brad.
Dust Bowl USA: Depression America and the Ecological Imagination,
1929-1941. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001.
Lorentz, Pare. The
Plow that Broke the Plains. Washington: Resettlement
Administration, 1936.
Malin, James C. "Dust
Storms, 1850-1900." Kansas Historical Quarterly 14 (May,
August, and November 1946): 129-144, 265-296; 391-413.
Malin, James C. Essays
on Historiography. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1946.
Malin, James C. The
Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History.
Lawrence, Kansas, privately printed, 1961.
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela.
Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern
Kansas. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994.
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela,
editor. Waiting on the Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary of Mary
Knackstedt Dyck. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.
Svobida, Lawrence.
Farming the Dust Bowl: A Firsthand Account from Kansas.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986.
Wooten, H.H. The
Land Utilization Program, 1934 to 1964: Origin, Development, and
Present Status. U.S.D.A. Economic Research Service Agricultural
Economic Report no. 85. Washington: Government Printing Office,
1965.
Worster, Donald. Dust
Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979.
Wunder, John R.,
Frances W. Kaye, and Vernon Carstensen. Americans View Their Dust
Bowl Experience. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999.