Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Caroline Fraser

But the Dust Bowl was no act of god or freak accident of nature. It was one of the worst man-made ecological disasters of all time. Farmers had done this, and they had done it to themselves. It was small farmers, in particular, who were responsible, since they were more likely to cultivate intensively and less likely to employ any form of crop rotation or erosion control.11 As scholars have noted, settlers had boasted of their prowess in dominating the landscape, bragging of “‘busting’ and ‘breaking’ the land.”12 Well, now it was broken. Erosion transformed the southern plains into a desert, peeling off and whisking away two to five inches of topsoil from more than twenty-three million acres.13 In 1935, some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away.14 Much of it was blowing straight into Missouri; Lane wrote that “Kansas and Oklahoma dust is so thick in the Ozarks … that the sun looks like the moon.”15 Sixty-five percent of the Great Plains, once “so wide and sweet and clean,” in Wilder’s words, were damaged.