What was the Oklahoma Dust Bowl?
Dust storms were the result of drought and land that had been overused. Drought first hit the country in 1930. By 1934, it had turned the Great Plains into a desert that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. In Oklahoma, the Panhandle area was hit hardest by the drought.
How many people died in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl?
7,000 people
In the Dust Bowl, about 7,000 people, men, women and especially small children lost their lives to “dust pneumonia.” At least 250,000 people fled the Plains.
Is Oklahoma still a Dust Bowl?
Oklahoma was and is identified as “the Dust Bowl State” even though it had less acreage in the area designated by the Soil Conservation Service as the Dust Bowl than did the contiguous states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas.
What states were affected by the Dust Bowl?
Although it technically refers to the western third of Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the northern two-thirds of the Texas Panhandle, and northeastern New Mexico, the Dust Bowl has come to symbolize the hardships of the entire nation during the 1930s.
How was the Dust Bowl caused?
The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.
What years were the Oklahoma Dust Bowl?
Results of a Dust Storm, Oklahoma, 1936. Between 1930 and 1940, the southwestern Great Plains region of the United States suffered a severe drought. Once a semi-arid grassland, the treeless plains became home to thousands of settlers when, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act.
What happened to Oklahoma after the Dust Bowl?
Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California.
Did the Dust Bowl affect Tulsa Oklahoma?
The heavy dust storm that hit Tulsa on March 16 stretched to Kansas City and portions of Wyoming, Nebraska and central Kansas. It also gave residents of the Eastern Seaboard, including New York and Washington, a taste of grit before disappearing over the Atlantic Ocean.
Where did the farmers go during the Dust Bowl?
In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.
What were the 3 main causes of the Dust Bowl?
The biggest causes for the dust bowl were poverty that led to poor agricultural techniques, extremely high temperatures, long periods of drought and wind erosion. Some people also blame federal land policies as a contributing factor.