When the Plains Turned to Dust

In the 1920s, settlers across the Southern Plains of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas tore up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat. The deep-rooted buffalo grass that had anchored the soil for centuries was stripped away in a single generation. When drought arrived in 1931, there was nothing left to hold the earth in place. The wind came — not as a gentle breeze, but as massive black blizzards that buried farmhouses, choked cattle, and turned noon into midnight.…