The Dust Bowl Years and the Drought That Never Really Left

The nineteen thirties broke North Dakota twice. First came the Depression, which collapsed wheat prices so completely that some farmers found it cheaper to burn their crop for heat than to haul it to an elevator that would pay less than the freight. Then came the drought, arriving in earnest in nineteen thirty-four and persisting through most of the decade.

North Dakota was at the northern edge of the Dust Bowl proper, but drought does not respect cartographic lines. Topsoil that had been broken by the plow since the eighteen eighties, stripped of the native grass that had held it for millennia, lifted into the sky and moved east. Temperatures in nineteen thirty-six reached one hundred twenty one degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the state, the hottest readings ever recorded in North Dakota.

Grasshoppers consumed what the drought had spared. County after county reported farm abandonment as families loaded what they could into their cars and drove, most of them not to California as the Steinbeck narrative goes, but east to Minnesota or the industrial cities of the upper Midwest. The federal government responded with emergency programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Resettlement Administration, the creation of shelterbelt plantings, lines of trees across the open plains meant to break the wind that lifted the soil.

The shelterbelt program eventually planted two hundred twenty million trees across the Great Plains. Many of them still stand, visible from the highway as dark lines across the fields, the living signature of a federal intervention that took the disaster seriously. The drought returned in the nineteen fifties, the nineteen eighties, the two thousands.

Dry years are not anomalies in North Dakota. They are the baseline condition the good years interrupt.