Oklahoma Dust Bowl
... result of drought and land that had been overused. Drought first hit the country in 1930. By 1934, it had turned the Great Plains into a desert that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. In Oklahoma, the Panhandle area was hit hardest by the drought. The land of the southern plains, including Oklahoma, was originally covered with grasses that held the fine soil in place. Settlers brought their traditional farming techniques with them when they homesteaded the area and they plowed the land deeply. The topsoil was already damaged by the cattle and sheep. The situation was so serious that, by 1935, the government developed conservation programs to improve the Dust Bowl by changing the basic farming methods of the region. Even with these measures, the Dust Bowl lasted about a decade and contributed to the length of the Great Depression of the 1930s Americans tend to confuse the "Dust Bowl," a region plagued by dust storms in the 1930s, with the mass migration of "Okies and Arkies" to California that occurred in the same decades. Many people were forced to leave the Dust Bowl for California. But the majority of 1930s migrants, even migrants from Oklahoma, came from regions of the country largely unaffected by the dust storms. Beginning in 1935, federal conservation programs were created to rehabilitate the Dust Bowl, changing the basic farming methods of the region by seeding areas with grass, rotating crops, and usin...