The Day the Sky Turned Black

On April 14, 1935, residents of Boise City, Oklahoma, looked up to see the horizon swallowed whole. A wall of dirt two thousand feet high rolled across the Great Plains, turning noon into midnight. They called it Black Sunday — the worst dust storm of the Dust Bowl era. But the devastation did not arrive without warning. For years, farmers had stripped millions of acres of native grassland, ignoring the deep-rooted prairie sod that held the soil in place.…