Word: dusts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cycle. The dust storms of the south plains had their beginnings when the sod was first broken by homesteaders' plows in the late iSoos; the first U.S. dust bowl developed in Thomas County, Kans. in 1912. The development of the tractor, the rainy years between 1914 and 1931 and high prices for farmers' crops caused a tremendous increase in plowing. Millions of acres of sandy or submarginal land were planted to wheat, corn and cotton. Amid the droughts of the 19305, the coverless, powder-dry earth of the plains lay helpless under the scouring winds. During World...
Choked Throats. As the dusters sweep in, visibility sometimes falls to zero. During bad storms, traffic ceases, lights go on in such hard-hit towns as Garden City, Kans. or Lubbock, Texas. Farmers and townspeople seek shelter and wait while dust seeps remorselessly through every crack of window and door and drifts in the fields and streets outside...
...eastern Colorado thousands of miles of fences are down-pushed over by drifting sand. Mudballs form over the eyes of cattle, and wild geese fall dead with their bills and throats packed with dirt. At Field, N. Mex. (pop. 25), a dust storm halted the funeral of 73-year-old Mrs. Alice Towner, who had walked toward her mailbox in a previous storm, been swallowed by the blinding dust, wandered lost and helpless, and finally died in a nearby pasture. Oklahoma City's Engineer W. W. Baker estimated that one storm last week deposited 185,000 tons of dust...
...damage is already tremendous. Great acreages of winter wheat in the worst dust areas are already ruined-drifted under or simply pulled out of the loose ground by winds. Pasture lands have disappeared under drifting silt or have been spotted with hummocks of tumbleweed and mounded dirt. Ponds have filled, roads have disappeared...
...Week after week gales of 60, 70 and 80 miles an hour scourged the earth. In the Oklahoma panhandle alone there were 499,000 acres of land that either I) lost at least one inch of topsoil, or 2) been covered with from one to two inches of windblown dust and sand...