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.