Dust Bowl Compare and Contrast

Dust Bowl

Compare and contrast the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the U.S.A. with the similar events that took place in Palliser's Triangle, located near Alberta, Canada during the 1930s.

The causes of the 'Dust Bowl' phenomenon of the 1930s in America had roots that stretched far beyond the immediate period of extreme drought that predated this period of American history. People had settled the Great Plains over the course of the 19th century during an unusually wet stretch of weather for the area. This meant that the vast majority of the farmers did not truly understand the nature of climate on which their livelihood depended. The 19th century farmers often experienced immediate and unusual success with their crops. They did not grow accustomed to using farming techniques truly suited to the land or the climate. "Farmers had also switched from the lister to the one way disc plow. The one way disc plow was more efficient, but it also left the soil more susceptible to wind erosion," the most obvious and visually dramatic symptom of the drought, hence the appellation "dust bowl" ("Causes," The Dust Bowl Outline, 2003).

Capitalist greed along with ignorance and a false sense of confidence of how to farm the land contributed to the Dust Bowl, according to Donald Worster. There was a wheat boom during World War I but this was followed by a sharp drop in prices in the 1920s. Farmers developed a near "compulsion" to "plough and plant every available parcel of the ground," first to make a profit, and then to sustain the profits they had made during the boom (Worster 1975). The increasing expense of farming the plains drove residents to abandon any pretence of crop rotation, and to farm every bit of land in sight. The balance between human and nature, personified for Worster by the Native American tribal attitude to the land, (he says they had a "much greater sense of husbandry than either the modern American business farmer or his frontier predecessor") had been destroyed (Worster 199).

In contrast to the initially hopeful conditions experienced by the 19th century American pioneers, the early settlers in Alberta Province's Palliser's Triangle struggled from the beginning. Although the 1930s as a whole for all farmers were marked by dramatic periods of "boom and bust," for the residents of the Triangle, the periods of "boom" were far shorter and crueler (McNeill 40). Indeed, when "Captain John Palliser first reached the prairies he was said he thought he had "discovered Hell" because the region was so arid and desert-like. Still, Palliser noted "a fertile belt surrounding the region" (Bonikowsky 2007). Like the Great Plains, Indians and buffalo were the main residents (McNeill 41). The British government ignored Palliser's dim prognosis about developing the area and encouraged settlement.

Farmers in the Triangle repeatedly watched entire seasons of crops blow away in the dust, despite their efforts to engage in vigorous, proactive farming techniques like "fallowing (plowing but not sowing a field)," crop rotation (which was not practiced in the American West) and "shallow cultivation to preserve soil moisture, unfortunately leaving the soil vulnerable to wind erosion" (Bonikowsky 2007).