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Dust Bowl Blues Poem

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On paragraph 11, in “Letter from the Dust Bowl,” Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson writes to a friend that the dust storms have destroyed their barley, buried mulberry hedges that protected their shelters from north west winds, wiped out pastures, and turned their locust grove into fence posts. Despite these conditions, why did Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson and her husband decide to stay, while the rest of their fellow settlers left? The song “I’d Rather Not Be in Relief” opens with these lines:
“We go around all dressed in rags
While the rest of the world goes neat,”
Who/What is the ‘We’ and ‘rest of the world’ referring to in the two lines above? The song “Dust Bowl Blues,” by Woody Gutherie, is about how the dust was so bad that it either buried
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Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 30’s written by Donald Worster and published in 1979, is an informative text on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Donald Worster is a credible author because he not only earned a Ph.D. from Yale in environmental history, but he also had previously written a book on the environment and the economy. This book was written well and Worster did a good job of revealing how people and how they live have effected the areas environment. He spoke of places including, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and many more.

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The dust bowl was considered the “Worst hard time” in american history. The Dust Bowl was a big cloud of dust that took place during the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The dust bowl was located in the southern great plains as it affected states like Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The three main causes of the Dust Bowl were drought (Doc E), amount of land being harvest (Doc D), and the death shortgrass prairie (Doc C).

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The Dust Bowl was a terrible experience during a horrible time. In the 1930s post World War I America had a total collapse of the stock market causing the Great Depression affecting the economy on a global scale, but hitting hardest at home in the United States. However, the economy wasn’t the only thing that was hit hard during this time; seemingly unstoppable dust storms ravaged farming land from the west to east coast hitting hardest in the great plains in the middle section the the US became known as the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was not entirely a causation of bad luck on nature, it was caused by an increasing demand for crops, advancements in farming technology, while the final nail in the coffin was a lack of rain. During World War

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Sure, the section on the dust bowl might mention that farmers planted too much wheat and allowed the soil to erode and get picked up by the wind, but it doesn’t go into why the farmers started planting so much wheat in the first place. A historian might decide to write a more in-depth book to ameliorate that problem, but unless someone is intentionally looking for more information, that book will not be read and the root cause of the disaster will be forgotten. Egan bridges the gap between the uninterested reader and the in-depth explanation with his continuing anecdotes. Instead of starting the book in the middle of the worst dust storm, he spends the first seven chapters explaining what happened beforehand, from when the first settlers came to No Man’s Land in search of free land until the first “duster” occurred. In between, he walks you through each farmer’s decisions amid previous choices and their consequences.

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With little rainfall, soft soil, and crazy winds, The Dust Bowl was held accountable for the death of many. Many housewives during the Dust Bowl years

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“ The story highlights a very real and relatable experience about a family driven out of their home due to economic hardship and drought. Also known as “The Dirty Thirties,” the Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major agricultural damage to the American west—especially the Oklahoma panhandle area, Kansas, and northern Texas. Farming methods at the time contributed to the severity of the problem. The arrival of farmers to the Great Plains created conditions for significant soil erosion during naturally occurring periods of cool sea surface water temperatures that regulate precipitation. “ http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/ 3.

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Donald Worster is an environmental historian and his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s helped to define the environmental history movement as it was the first environmental history book published. He breaks the stereotype of how the Dust Bowl was viewed by writing it from an environmental standpoint instead of writing a social history by focusing solely on the people and their experiences. How it helped to define the environmental history movement is that it opened up this avenue for others to write about environmental issues. He is also an anti-capitalist and this book combines his interest in the environment with the effect that capitalism has on the environment.

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the society was scared that the dust would never stop. The dust bowl hit from Texas to Kansas,that’s far

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During the Dust Bowl some people made the decision to stay at their farms. Huge drifts of dirt piled up on homesteaders’ doors, came in the cracks of windows and came down from the ceilings. Barnyards and pastures were buried in dirt. After about 850 million tons of topsoil was blown away in 1935 alone. The government responded to this by saying “Unless something is done, the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert.”

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The interview of LeRoy Hankel, who was a farmer during the dustbowl, really stood out to me because his words painted an image in my head. In his interview, Hankel recalls his time on the farm during the dust storm by saying that “it was just a cloud coming right over, that’s what it looked like. And it was all black.”

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The story starts off by telling you to imagine what it’d be like to live in the 1930’s when the Dust Bowl had taken effect. When dust storms came everyone in the area had to prepare quickly to withstand them. The wind combined with the dust and gravelly dirt was very strong and loud, easily getting into houses and cutting off fresh oxygen. Dust storms of the 1930’s were supposedly one of the worst natural disasters. They had affected everyone and everything in the area, so many Migrated West.

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In a very bad way. The dust bowl was very hard for the people living in it. They could do nothing because it was very hard to go outside and have something to do. It was even harder to get away from the dust because it could get through the cracks in your

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The Historical Significance of the Dust Bowl In one of the most fertile places in the United States, one of the nation's worst disasters occurred, the Dust Bowl. It began when an area in the Midwest was severely affected by an intense drought throughout the 1930s or what proceeded to be called the Dirty Thirties. The drought killed crops that had kept the rich soil in place, and when the strong root system was not there the soil was not kept grounded. Due to the soil left with no crops, the high and strong winds blew the topsoil away.

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“With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles ”( Richardson 59). The Dust Bowl was a huge dust storm in the 1930s that stretched from western Kansas to New Mexico. People that lived in that area could not step outside or they would get dust in their lungs.

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The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.”

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