The Dust Bowl Of The Great West - 1172 Words

Lucia Martinez Professor Kim Wombles English 1302 September 21, 2015 The Dust Bowl Imagine a great wall closing in on you with nowhere to run. Imagine sweeping a floor of sand that will never go away. Imagine having a terrible cough that leaves your throat irritated and raw to the point where you are coughing up blood. Imagine the disappointment of realizing a possible rain cloud is really a wall of dust rushing your way. For people living in the Midwest during the 1930s this was not the conjuring of imagination but a reality. â€Å"Decade long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions†¦ when plagues of grasshoppers and swarms of rabbits descended on parched fields,† (Burns, â€Å"The Dust Bowl†). What seemed like the extinction†¦show more content†¦However the stock market crash in 1929 brought the entire nation to a downward spiral of depression. While the 1920s were uplifting what followed was not. The Dust Bowl was a tragedy in America in which millions of acres of semi-arid plains were reduced to nothing but a cloud of dust. Due largely to massive amounts of dry farming and overgrazing of cattle the grasslands slowly withered away. With the drought of 1930 the grasslands blew in the wind, covering houses and forced almost four hundred thousand people out of their homes.(â€Å":The Dust Bowl†LOC). Nineteen states at the heart of the United States were part of the massive dust bowl. â€Å"The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster† (Klein, 2012). â€Å"[The catastrophe] revealed the darker side of entrepreneurialism, its tendency to risk long-term social and ecological damage in the pursuit of short-term, private gain, (Worster, â€Å"Dust Bowl†). Like stated previously in the Library of Congress article the Dust Bowl was caused primarily by the overgrazing of cattle as well as dry farming by farmers. During the first world war wheat farmers need to fill in the demand of crops for the allied forces in Europe. While this worked for the period of time after the war ended the fields were plowed down to the bare minimum. With no wheat or grass to hold the soil together and nothing to protect the water and