The Dust Bowl Years in Western South Dakota

The great drought that settled over the American and Canadian plains in the nineteen thirties did not arrive all at once. It came in waves, each year a little harder than the one before, until by nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-four the ground around Wall was cracking, the crops were burning in the field before they could be harvested, and the topsoil that homesteaders had plowed from native prairie was lifting off in great brown clouds and drifting into dunes against the fence lines. The famous black blizzards of Kansas and Oklahoma reached here too, but what the plains around Wall suffered most was a slower ruin: a grinding shortage of rain that lasted through most of a decade and exposed the folly of farming ground that was suited to grass and nothing else.

In the summer of nineteen thirty-six, South Dakota recorded temperatures that have rarely been approached since, with some stations logging heat that would kill standing crops in days. Across the region to the south, many farms and whole townships emptied out. The federal government arrived with the Civilian Conservation Corps and planted shelterbelts of trees along field edges, rows of elm, ash, and cedar, trying to slow the wind and hold what soil remained.

Many of those rows of trees still stand today along section roads in western South Dakota, planted by young men in a desperate attempt to stop the sky from eating the earth.