The dirty thirties, black blizzards, the black rollers, the Dust Bowl goes by many names but they all have one thing in common. They all describe a remarkably scary and serious time in America. The Dust Bowl didn't just appear out of nowhere though, there were a few ways it was caused. The Dust Bowl was caused by drought, the Economy crash, and over farming.
In the 1930s, drought covered most all of the Great Plains for nearly a decade. “At one time the Great Plains were some of the most fertile grasslands on Earth, with topsoil reaching as deep as six feet. Overtime though, farmers had dug up the topsoil for agricultural uses, and eventually the sun dried it all up.” Around this time, rainfall had become an issue seeing as there wasn't very
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Which back then was a major part of the economy. With the severe loss of topsoil the economy was struggling. In addition to economy decline something similar to a migration was happening farmers and occupants of the Great Plains were packing their belongings and moving westward. In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states ( Oklahoma, Arkansas) Began to move to California, by 1940 250,000 had arrived. In all there were approximately two and a half million people had abandoned the Plainstates. Furthermore, growing crops was extremely difficult. Between almost half of Arkansas crops failed. By 1937, more than one out of five farmers were on federal emergency relief. At this time, “For many Americans in the 1930s, working was more than often a dream than a reality. The unemployment rate was lower than previous years reaching only 3.2 percent in 1929. More than 12.8 million people didn’t have a job that year.”Inflation is a condition where prices rise over a period in time, this is why All-Items CPI rose 16.5 percent from April 1933 to September