Document 6
. . . For years conservationists had warned that ecological catastrophe hovered over the Great
Plains. The so-called short-grass country west of the hundredth meridian was favored by fewer
than twenty inches of rain a year. Early explorers had labeled the frontier beyond the Missouri
“the great American desert,” and then it was relatively stable, hammered flat by millions of bison
and untilled by the Indians. Then the settlers arrived with their John Deere plows. Before the
Depression they were blessed by extraordinarily heavy rains, but as they pushed their luck by
overgrazing and overplowing, the ineludible [unavoidable] drew nearer. Even in the 192os a
hundred counties in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma had been called the
“dust bowl.” Now in 1934 the National Resources Board estimated that 35 million acres of arable
[productive] land had been completely destroyed, the soil of another 125 million acres had been
nearly or entirely removed, and another 100 million acres were doomed. Abruptly the bowl grew
to 756 counties in nineteen states. Like Ireland and the Ukraine in the nineteenth century, the
Plains were threatened with famine. . . .
Source: William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, Little Brown, 1974
According to William Manchester, what is one way climate affected farming on the Great Plains?