It seemed like an average day at first . Like any other day , common people on the Great Plains were struggling to get by . mass walked to church , swept up from the junk storm that had spoil through the hebdomad before , perhaps discussedthe Congressional hearingsthat had brought the plight of the region , which had been harry by drouth and the economical effects of the Great Depression , to the aid of the eternal rest of the nation .
But Black Sunday — April 14 , 1935 — was no ordinary day .
That afternoon , a mammoth swarm swept across the Great Plains . It was 1000 miles long and burn out at speed up to100 mile per hour . It was made of300,000 net ton of dustwhipped from the earth of northerly farmlands , wherepoor dirt preservation techniqueshad led to widespread erosion made bad by the unending drouth .
Great Plains resident physician were used to detritus , but they had never seen anything like this . One observercompared it to“the Red Sea shutting in on the Israel children … it got so dreary that you could n’t see your handwriting before your aspect , you could n’t see anybody in the elbow room . ”
“ You could n’t see the street lights,”recalled Jim Williams , who watched the storm from his home in Dodge City , Kansas . “ It roll over and over and over and over and over when it came in,”another attestor remembered , “ and it was coal black ; it was coal Joseph Black , and it was awful that afternoon . It was hot and juiceless . ”
Humans were n’t the only ones terrified by the violent storm . snort fled ahead of the cloud . disconcert by the dark , chickens started togo deep down to rest . Cows ran in roach .
Once the storm subsided , a uncomplicated spring day had become the unfit day in recent memory . The “ black rash ” that swept across the plains states provide a trail of devastation in its wake — leveled field , crashed car , report of people whohad been blindedor leave pneumonia by the storm . Everything was hatch in dust , which choked wells andkilled cattle . “ Black Sunday , ” as the tempest became known , was the death knell for the poor farmers of Oklahoma and Texas . Demoralized and impoverished , thousands of so - called “ Okies”cut their losses and began the longsighted migration to more favorable locations like California .
In Boise City , Oklahoma , an Associated Press newsperson named Robert E. Geiger had weathered the storm with lensman Harry G. Eisenhard . “ Three niggling words achingly familiar on a Western sodbuster ’s tongue,”he compose after the storm , “ rule spirit in the debris bowl of the continent — if it rains . ”Some speculatethat Geiger meant to say “ debris smash , ” a condition he used to refer to the devastated area before and after Black Sunday .
Inadvertent or no , the term was picked up almost immediately . Geiger had given name to a phenomenon that would come to define the economic and social impacts of the Great Depression . But though Black Sunday and the Dust Bowl it help name drag aid to the plight of the plains andturned ground conservation into a national priority , its effects were well summed up bya folk Isaac Bashevis Singer , not a reporter or politician . These are some of the lyrics to Woody Guthrie ’s “ Dust Storm catastrophe , ” which state the narration of the “ deathlike contraband ” cloud that enfold America that solar day in 1935 :
