LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Dust Bowl: Land
built 631 days ago
Hundreds of thousands of residents of the Dust Bowl salvaged what they could, piled their belongings into rattling jalopies, and headed for the promised land of California. They hoped to find good jobs and a better life. They soon found... that conditions in California were not quite what they imagined. Jobs were scarce. And many Californians greeted the newcomers with hostility.
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Alas it was, and Dust Bowl scars still persist on that landscape and in the psyches of longtime residents. But why that continues decades later will no longer be forgotten, thanks to the chilling elegy provided by Egan's "The Worst Hard Time."
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Natural dust storms happen all of the time, but the Dust Bowl's storms were larger and more destructive than any others recorded since. The movement west by settlers and farmers began to bring agricultural business to the plains. The small farms on the land did not affect dust storms too much. The small farms did not do enough tilling up of the soil to prevent the land from regenerating every season. With the coming of new large industrial farms the plowing of huge acres of land loosened unbelievable amounts of dirt. This time period was The Great Plow-up of the 1920s.
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----As many as 50 million acres of land were destroyed by the effects of the Dust Bowl; another 50 million acres endangered. Dust storms carried millions of tons of dirt from one location to the next. Those caught in the middle of dust storms were left with either damaged lungs or death due to inhalation of dust in the air they were breathing. Even cows developed health problems and often died from eating dust coated grass which turned to fatal "mud balls" in their stomachs. High speed winds pushed grains of dust into things such as farm equipment, barns, and homes. Cars were damaged beyond repair because of sand and dust clogging up vital parts of the engine.
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In 1937, the federal government began an aggressive campaign to encourage Dust Bowlers to adopt planting and plowing methods that conserve the soil. The government paid the reluctant farmers a dollar an acre to practice one of the new methods. By 1938, the massive conservation effort had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65 percent. Nevertheless, the land failed to yield a decent living.
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