What Caused the Dust Bowl? John Steinbeck once wrote, “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, and their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’ comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ‘cause we’re the people” (The Grapes of Wrath). Steinbeck wrote of the period in the last century between the two world wars. Dust storms swept through five different states in the Great Plains, devastating farmers and their families’ crops. The storms arose from nature, but also unintentionally from human design. It was technology that led to overfarming, which combined with a drought to cause the series of dust storms in the 1930’s that became known as The Great Dust Bowl. The causes of The Great Dust Bowl can be traced all the way back to the 1890’s. This was the decade the first gasoline-powered tractor was invented, resulting in accelerated plowing, planting, and harvesting for farmers. In the novel, The Worst Hard Time, …show more content…
This brings up farmers such as Folkers and Fishman again, just two of the thousands of farmers from this time. In The Worst Hard Time, Egan notes of Folkers, “By the late 1920’s, his harvest was up to ten thousand bushels of wheat - a small mountain of grain” (Doc. C1). Fishman had one million bushels of wheat being shipped out from his farm at one point. In a chart from the Great Plains Drought Area Committee Report from 1936, there is a representation of how much was being harvested from 1879 to 1929. In 1879, ten million acres of crop in the Great Plains were harvested, in 1899, fifty million acres were harvested, and in 1929, one hundred five million acres were harvested (Doc. D). In fifty years, harvest on the Great Plains had multiplied tenfold. Progressively, farmers moved out to the plains, planting foreign wheat in shortgrass prairie land, a practice that did not bode well for the