The Dust Bowl: Black Sunday Over Amarillo

From nineteen twenty-five to nineteen thirty, farmers broke up tens of millions of acres of southern plains sod that had held the soil since the last ice age. The gasoline tractor made it possible to plow more land faster than any horse-drawn equipment could. The deep-rooted native grasses that had anchored the soil through a thousand years of drought cycles were gone. Then the rains stopped.

In Amarillo the worst year was nineteen thirty-five. Dust storms hit the city that year for a total of nine hundred and eight hours. Seven times between January and March of that year, the visibility in Amarillo dropped to zero. Citizens wore masks in the streets. Children developed a respiratory condition that doctors called dust pneumonia. The city's hospitals filled.

On April fourteenth, nineteen thirty-five, Black Sunday, the largest dust storm of the decade moved through the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. It hit Amarillo at seven twenty in the evening. People who saw it approach described a wall of brown-black cloud several thousand feet high moving at highway speed. It swallowed the city in seconds. The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in minutes. The darkness was total.

The federal government recognized Amarillo as a regional crisis center. The Soil Conservation Service opened its Region Six office here in nineteen thirty-five to coordinate conservation work across the entire Dust Bowl. Work Projects Administration funds rebuilt Amarillo's streets, water system, and sewer infrastructure during the Depression years.

The people who left the Panhandle in those years, following Route Sixty Six west, became the Okies of California legend. Many of them came from Texas. The families who stayed rebuilt the land through federal conservation programs and changed how they farmed. The soil is still here. But the native grass that held it for millennia is mostly gone.