The Republican River Basin and the Dust Bowl Core

Southwest Nebraska is quiet now, just rolling fields and a horizon that seems farther away than it has any right to be. But in the nineteen thirties, this was as close to the end of the world as American agriculture had ever come.

The Republican River basin sits on the northern edge of what historians call the Dust Bowl, the area where chronic drought, ruinous plowing methods, and sustained wind combined in the worst years to remove the topsoil from the land entirely. The grassland that had covered this region for millennia had been broken by the plow beginning in the eighteen eighties. When rain failed in the early nineteen thirties, there was nothing to hold the ground in place. The soil lifted in walls that residents called black blizzards, rolling across the plains at thirty miles an hour, turning noon into night. Static electricity built up in the dust to the point that cars stalled and metal fences sparked.

The federal response included the Civilian Conservation Corps and a program, managed through what became the USDA Forest Service, to plant shelterbelts along the plains. By the early nineteen forties, more than two hundred million trees had been planted in rows across Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, designed to slow the wind at the field level and hold moisture in the soil. The Nebraska sections of the shelterbelt program, which ran through a zone roughly one hundred miles wide, were among the most extensive in the effort.

Many of those trees are still standing. Drive the county roads in southwest Nebraska in late afternoon and you will see them: long dark lines of cedar and cottonwood running north-south against the sky, planted by young men in the nineteen thirties who were told to dig and did not ask why.