Volume 18 , Issue 25

1936 - Enemies of the Earth

What Dust Storms and floods meant to America in the 1930s. This is what we found on page 3, of the Kentucky Advocate, Danville, Kentucky, dated 8 July 1936, Wednesday: "Enemies of the Earth, What Dust Storms and Floods Mean to America." This was the third in a series of six articles describing dust terms and floods and what they mean to America. The article was written by Charles Norman, associated press staff writer. The photographer was flying at an altitude of 12,000 feet when he caught this view of a dust storm 30 miles south of Denver, Colorado. The dust - pay dirt to the farmers who lost it - blew 8,000 feet in the air.

Found on Newspapers.com

The dust bowl was a martyr of sentiments of its people sacrificed temporarily in the interests of America's future.

Having their farms and towns loped together as part of a dust bowl did not set well with the people of southeastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, Western Kansas, western Oklahoma and northwestern Texas. That was easy to understand.

Yet science could and did use this area as a laboratory in which the causes of dust storms could be ascertained, and in which remedial and preventive measures could be perfected. Its farmers, cooperating with he government in vast experiments, were modern pioneers. In return, it was being shown how to hold tis soil down.

The men the southwest wore big hats, farmed big farms - a thousand acres was an average in the Texas Panhandle. The love of eheirland was in their speech.

Traitorous was he who exaggerates their plight, or he who packs up and slips away, or the "suitcase farmer" who came for a quick crop, quick profit, and couldn't "take it."

But the story of the dust bowl was important to every section of America because it was the story of wind erosion. And the dust bowl had no monopoly on wind erosion. What happened to the high, green plains of the southwest that once could swallow an army and show not a mark on its thick carpet to indicate a host had passed through? Coronado, in 1540-1541, brought an expedition from new Spain (now Mexico) northward into what is now New Mexico, eastern Colorado, western Kansas. Reported Castenada, his chronicler:

"Who could believe that 2,000 horses and 500 of our cows and more than 5,000 rams and ewes and more than 2,500 friendly Indians and servants in traveling over these plains would leave no more trace where they had passed than if nothing had been there - nothing?"

Thus thickly did the lush green grasses cover the plains. There the buffalo, starting northward int he spring, grazed each section in turn, yet left root and seed to the miracle of reproduction.

After the Spaniards int he southwest came the settlers on the eastern seaboard, the Revolution, the steady westward march of the pioneers, the influx of homesteaders who staked out their plots on the public domain.

Cattlemen and sheepmen drove their herds and flocks into the grassy plains of the southwest. Where cattle grazed, something remained; where sheep cropped, cattle could not follow and live. Into western Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado they moved; to the Red desert country of Wyoming, up across Montana, the two Dakotas, clear to the Canadian border.

Had not General Luther P. Bradley reported, in 1868:

"I believe that all the flocks and herds in the world could find ample pasturage on these unoccupied plains and the mountain slopes beyond."

Soon no range remained unstacked Cattlemen and sheepmen warred against each other, but neither warred against the overgrazing which scientists, even then, realized would kill the soil.

Overgrazing leaves the soil without adequate cover to tie it down. (Even the Sahara and Gobi deserts were once green, say scientists; might even blossom again if the flocks that pasture at oases were checked or removed. Science holds it is the overgrazing o these nomad herds that halt the work nature - the march of trees in the wake of grass.)

It was the World War that brought a cry for more wheat. Thousands of acres were put to the plow, planted to wheat = acres which the conservationists say should have been left in pasture.

Better farmers are nowhere to be found says the soil conservation service, for if they did not farm their lands too wisely, they farmed them too well, making crops grow where perhaps nature never intended anything but native grasses marching in thick, green ranks across the plains.

Plowing the land to wheat turned up the clinging buffalo grass which protected the soil. Keeping the land in wheat, instead alternating wheat with other crops, depleted the mineral wealth of the soil and made the wheat less able to stand lack of moisture. With draught came crop failures, and crop failures left the land barren, ready to blow with the wind.

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