THE DUST BOWL YEARS

The dust bowl years followed the Panic of '29, and bank failures, bank holiday and the beginnings of federal projects that were inaugrated to furnish work in an effort to relieve unemployment and aid in getting the country back to normal.

Beginning in February 1935, came the dust bowl years.  Many will remember the night, when with very little wind their homes were filled with dust.  At first they wondered if it could be smoke, then going outside they found nothing visible because of dust.  From that time on parents were called to hurry their children home from school and sometimes, especially in the country, they didn't send them to school, at times the schools were all closed.  Street lights burned all day in the towns and all cars were driven in the daytime with their lights on.  On farms, outbuildings and windmills were not visible from the house.  Dust sifted in until it was often necessary to clean the kitchen before preparing breakfast and dust was everywhere in the house.

It was also deep on the roads and highways and heaped over the fence lines until they were scarcely visible.  Any implement left in a field was almost completely buried in dust.  The early plainsmen and explorers called this country a treacherous land because of its equatorial heat in summer, its fifty degree drops in winter and its sand storms.  In 1846 many buffalo hunters lost their lives in the "Black Blizzard" of snow and sand.  Two-thirds of Kansas was once considered desert.  The plainsmen, born in the fifties and sixties refused to believe the dust bowl was the fault of the plow.  They found "Loess" in deep deposits when diffing wells sixty feet deep.  Loess is a yellowish brown loam, always brought in by winds.  They said this was brought in during dust storms in times past and now buried by later storms.  Also they said blowing an drifting of top soil does not destroy the land.  Buffalo herds created so much dust that hunters were in the midst of these herds before they could see them.

Horace Greely on a trip by stage through western Kansas, or drought country, estimated the size of a buffalo herd.  He said that herd contained 502,000 buffalo and that any land that could feed such a herd was good land.

"God's greatest next year country" so called because of so many crop failures and its people always hoping for a crop next year.  The farmer still believed in his land during the dust bowl years even when he was not sure where provisions for his family were coming from.  He believes that such things as dry years and wet years come in cycles.  1880's was a wet cycle and 1890s a dry cycle.

With all the new methods and newly accumulated knowledge may we hope that sometimes "God's greatest 'next year' country will be a garden every year and for many years to come.