Dust Bowl Map - 2021

Below is a map of the Dust Bowl. It shows the areas that were most affected by the giant dust storms. Tomorrow you will watch some clips of what it was like for people living through these giant dust storms of strong winds, that were blowing dirt and dust around.

You can see from this map that states in the Great Plains were affected the most by these dust storms. In many of these states they were experiencing a lot of drought. A drought is when there is a lack of rain for a long time. Since it had not rained when the wind started blowing hard it caused the dry soil, which is the dirt on the ground, to blow everywhere and cover everything around it.

The really bad dust storms were happening in the Southern Plains. That is the area that is circled on the map with the purple line. The Southern Plains includes states like Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. That area in the purple circle is what we know today as the Dust Bowl and that's where the video you will watch tomorrow will take place. The people who live there were often forced to move because the land was no longer good for farming. The red lines on the map show where people moved out of the Dust Bowl and into the new places to live. These people were often called Okies because a lot of them were moving from Oklahoma. If you follow the lines you can see a lot of them went to California, but you can see some of them went further east. Some of them went into Minnesota or further into Texas. They moved to try and get work on different farms.