Prelude to the Dust Bowl : drought in the Nineteenth-Century Southern Plains
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-271) and index.

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nations nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates the dramatic and little-known role drought played in settlement, migration, and war on the plains.Stephen H. Longs famed military expedition coincided with the drought of the 1820s, which prompted Long to label the southern plains a Ǵreat American Desertá destination many Anglo-Americans thought ideal for removing Southeastern Indian tribes to in the 1830s. The second dry trend, from 1854 to 1865, drove bison herds northeastward, fomenting tribal warfare, and deprived Civil War armies in Indian Territory of vital commissary. In the late 1880s and mid-1890s, two more periods of drought triggered massive outmigration from the southern plains as well as appeals from farmers and congressmen for federal famine relief, pleas quickly denied by President Grover Cleveland. Sweeneys interpretation of familiar events through the lens of drought lays the groundwork for understanding why the U.S. governments reaction to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was such a radical departure from previous federal responses