Black Sunday and the Unmaking of the Plains

On April 14, 1935, the residents of Boise City, Oklahoma, watched the horizon disappear. A wall of black dust three thousand feet high rolled across the plains at sixty miles per hour, turning midday into midnight. Birds fled before the advancing darkness. Cattle suffocated in the fields. Families huddled under wet sheets, gasping for air in their own kitchens. The Dust Bowl did not arrive without warning.…