Family
Dust Bowl History
In the early 1930's, my grandparents and mother left NE Nebraska due to the Depression effects on the region and they made the decision to move West. First through Cheyenne, WY then on through Washington State near Selah then to Lebanon, OR. My grandmother's favorite sister, Mary, died from dust pneumonia during the Dust Bowl days. The following is an article description how bad the situation could be in the Midwest.
"The Dust Bowl wasn’t entirely confined to the actual Dust Bowl states. Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico were certainly the most affected by the extreme drought that ravaged the Great Plains in the 1930s, a natural disaster that followed overcultivation and proved disastrous for both the land and the people living on it. But some of the dust storms that resulted were so extreme that their clouds reached cities more than 1,500 miles away on the East Coast. Boston, Massachusetts, even saw red snow due to red clay soil becoming concentrated in the atmosphere.
One of the worst storms hit the Great Plains region on April 14, 1935, which became known as Black Sunday. What started as a sunny morning quickly turned into an oppressive haze that dropped temperatures more than 25 degrees in an hour and turned the sky black. This “black blizzard” displaced an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil, an agricultural disaster that led to further hardship and a number of casualties."
"The Dust Bowl wasn’t entirely confined to the actual Dust Bowl states. Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico were certainly the most affected by the extreme drought that ravaged the Great Plains in the 1930s, a natural disaster that followed overcultivation and proved disastrous for both the land and the people living on it. But some of the dust storms that resulted were so extreme that their clouds reached cities more than 1,500 miles away on the East Coast. Boston, Massachusetts, even saw red snow due to red clay soil becoming concentrated in the atmosphere.
One of the worst storms hit the Great Plains region on April 14, 1935, which became known as Black Sunday. What started as a sunny morning quickly turned into an oppressive haze that dropped temperatures more than 25 degrees in an hour and turned the sky black. This “black blizzard” displaced an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil, an agricultural disaster that led to further hardship and a number of casualties."
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