Livestock healthy enough to be butchered could fetch as much as $16 a head, with the meat used to feed homeless people living in Hoovervilles.

The federal government paid farmers to plow under fields and butcher livestock.Īs part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government purchased starving livestock for at least $1 a head. As they flooded the West Coast in large numbers in search of jobs, they were given the disparaging nickname “Okies.”Ĩ. Many, but not all, of the Dust Bowl refugees hailed from Oklahoma. Once the oceans of wheat, which replaced the sea of prairie grass that anchored the topsoil into place, dried up, the land was defenseless against the winds that buffeted the Plains. When the drought and Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, the wheat market collapsed. Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that “rain follows the plow,” farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains. The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster.īeginning with World War I, American wheat harvests flowed like gold as demand boomed. For East Coasters, the storm was a mere inconvenience-“Housewives kept busy,” read a New York Times subhead-compared to the tribulations endured by Dust Bowl residents.Ģ. Capitol, inside which lawmakers were debating a soil conservation bill. For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. While “black blizzards” constantly menaced Plains states in the 1930s, a massive dust storm 2 miles high traveled 2,000 miles before hitting the East Coast on May 11, 1934. One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean.

7 days to die barbed club