The Dirty Thirties, The Dust Bowl Years

On November eleventh, nineteen thirty-three, a wall of black dust hit South Dakota and kept moving. Within two days, soil from the Great Plains had reached Albany, New York, more than fifteen hundred miles away. It was the first major dust storm of the decade that would be called the Dirty Thirties, and South Dakota would suffer through it as severely as any state in the country.

The roots of the catastrophe ran deeper than the drought. For a generation, homesteaders had been plowing the native grassland of the Great Plains, breaking the deep-rooted grasses that had held the topsoil in place through ten thousand years of dry seasons. When the rains stopped in the early nineteen thirties, there was nothing left to hold the earth. The drought came in waves: nineteen thirty-four, nineteen thirty-six, nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen forty. In some regions, conditions persisted for eight years. South Dakota lost more than fifty thousand residents, a greater percentage of its population than any other Great Plains state. Nearly forty percent of those who stayed required government assistance to survive. Grain production fell to near zero across entire counties. Livestock died.

The federal government responded with the Civilian Conservation Corps, emergency relief programs, and a new doctrine called dryland farming: contour plowing, windbreaks of trees, techniques borrowed from the knowledge that the grassland itself had embedded in the soil over millennia. The trees planted along South Dakota shelterbelts in the nineteen thirties are still standing. Driving across the eastern prairie today, you can read the landscape, a long row of cottonwoods and elms on a farmstead's north edge, placed there ninety years ago against a wind that came very close to ending everything.