The Black Blizzards of Oklahoma

when the rains are good in western Oklahoma green fields like these blanket the plains for the settlers who arrived here in the late 18-hundreds this region appeared to be the Promised Land stretching to the horizon but Oklahomans have had to learn the hard way that survival here requires a delicate dance with the forces of nature flying low over western Oklahoma today it's easy to see why much of it is actually bone-dry thanks to a recent drought when it gets this dry plants and grasses are all that keep the topsoil from blowing away it was easy to forget that in the late 19th century because the rains kept coming and so farmers kept tilling the land and planting crop after crop enjoying year after year of bountiful harvests what those farmers didn't know was that they were experiencing a small moment in a long cycle of rain and drought and by clearing more and more grasses that had held the topsoil in place for hundreds of years they were puttin themselves at greater and greater risk by the 1930s the rain stopped falling the land was drying out and then the wind started to blow here in the Far West of the state the town of Guymon Oklahoma had already suffered years of drought residents prayed for rain at the town's Methodist Church but the clouds that arrived brought dust instead storms of dust that they called black blizzards at the time the dust storms were frequent across a vast swath of the Great Plains but in 1935 the worst of them all hit the Oklahoma Panhandle a towering wave of dust raced south towards the cities of Guymon and Boise City on Sunday April 14th just before the black cloud arrived a reporter named Robert Geiger set out from Guymon for Boise City on this road but he soon found himself in the middle of the sundae store he became absolutely blackest night he later reported we slammed on the brakes and turned on the car lights exploring by touch we found the car to be in a dust drift it was Geiger who coined the term dust bowl' the next day in his article for the Washington DC evening star the storm raced toward the southwest a storm the National Weather Service later described as a massive wall of blowing dust that resembled a land-based tsunami residents waited as the black wall approached downtown Boise City it would be the first of many such black blizzards to hit the region's farms and wrenches hard cars and trucks stopped working no one has captured the experience of this time better than Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie a dust storm hit and it hit like thunder he dusted us over and it covered us under blocked out the traffic and blocked out the Sun straight for home all the people did run with no crops left in the field and no money in the bank desperation set in Oklahomans for whom this land was all they'd ever known packed up what they could and fled soon a mass exodus had begun 2.5 million people from Oklahoma and other plane states fleeing the Dust Bowl part of the largest migration in US history overloaded cars trucks and even wagons streamed down Oklahoma's country roads as migrants made their way to the Mother Road route 66 to get out of the state and start their search for a new life

Channel: Smithsonian Channel

Views: 105,162

Rating: 4.8892856 out of 5

Keywords: cars, disasters, landmarks, terrorism, air, space, road, desert, Route 66, depression, america, Vacation, driving, aerial, Oklahoma, vacation

Id: MFSprH9tDM0

Length: 4min 10sec (250 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2012