When states like Texas and Kansas started sending posters to the North-Eastern states with pictures of watermelon and cabbages as big as human beings, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They claimed to have the most fertile soil in the country and promised success to anybody willing to come farm.
After World War 1 (1918), wheat was in high demand. Farmers on the plains could grow wheat, throw it on a train and make enough money to live better lives than they could when they lived up North.
Northerners flooded the plains and started farming everywhere. Since the soil was so fertile and the North was paying big bucks for their wheat, farmers beat the crap out of the land and took everything they could from it. With the help of new machinery and modernized farming equipment, they over plowed, over planted and in a sense, gave up all of the standard farming “rules” they followed in the North. But who could blame them? Most of us would probably do the same thing right?
The problem with all of this was that nobody planned on a drought… When the rain stopped coming, the crops died and their was nothing to eat. The roots from the grass (that the farmers dug up to plant their crops) were gone and there was nothing to keep the dirt from kicking up. At first, there were just a few dust devils but eventually, they grew and grew. On Sunday April 14, 1835 the dust was so bad that people could hardly see 5 feet in front of them. They called it “Black Sunday“.
No matter how tight you sealed up your house, dust always got in. People were dying from starvation, disease and suffocation. Sometimes people couldn’t even leave their houses for days because the wind was so bad that the dust would wound their skin.
This song is written from a farmers point of view. I have been reading a lot of stories recently about farmers moving their families from the Northern states to the plains in hopes of a better life. Most of the stories end in devastation. In the song the man is asking God (most of the farmers where devout Christians of some sort or another) for help and expressing his heart ache after watching his families dreams crushed.
How does this relate to our generation? I mentioned earlier that I believe most of us would have kept planting if we were in the farmers shoes. We love to take all we can get from the land. Sure, the “Go Green” movement is growing but I feel like we still do this kind of thing everyday. We still drive big SUV’s, waste water, build big factories, bury our trash in the ground and do tons of other things because they are convenient for us (at the time). What have we learned from the “Dust Bowl“? Nothing?
