Dust Bowl Dbq

The Dust Bowl was a huge catastrophic event that happened during the Great Depression throughout the United States. The dust bowl actually took place from 1930 to 1939, and is known as “The Dirty Thirties”. There are many different factors that contributed to the cause of the dust bowl. The dust bowl did not just happen one day. It had different causes that were taking place years in advance. There are two primary factors that led to this. They are bad farming and water shortage. Bad farming happened due to the inexperienced farmers that took over the Midwest. As the economy began rising so were prices and the food market. As these factors in the economy began to rise, the farmers wanted to plant and harvest more food to make more money. As they did this they did not let the soil properly reproduce its nutrients because there was not enough rain which caused the soil to be loose, topsoil. As the soil became worse the farmers did not realized it right away. When they did notice they knew they were in desperate need of a rain.

It turned the air of the Great Plains to solid dirt. As time went on more and more severe dust storms began. They caused many epidemics within the United States. A primary epidemic was pneumonia. The dust that filled the air caused many people’s lungs to fill up with dirt. The lungs that filled up with the dirt were the leading cause for pneumonia. The other primary epidemic was the migration of people. As the dust storms grew and became worse many people moved away. Most people in this area were farmers who then could not farm and make money, and they also did not want to die from the dust storms. The people who migrated became known as “okies”. There were about 2.5 million okies who migrated. Okies moved to the west and east coasts. They had a very tough life on the coasts. They had to face many hardships, fight through adversity of a new, different job, while also getting very low