Yesterday was the anniversary of some mammoth multi-state dust
storms. Robert Geiger (AP) wrote on 4/15/35: Three little words
achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the
dust bowl of the continent - if it rains. The name "Dust Bowl"
stuck, first coined on today's date 74 years ago. The rains
didn't return until four years later. When the dust settled in
April 1935, scenes like this were repeated throughout the high
plains region. Crops were ruined. Farms produced nothing.
Livestock died en masse. There was no one to sell to. People
abandoned them in droves, with little more than the clothes on
their back to show for many years of hard work building their
homesteads. The 1930s Dust Bowl is often referred to as a
natural disaster. But that's not quite right. Human activities,
en masse, had everything to do with it. Woody Guthrie wrote a
song about the storms that day, which came to be known as Black
Sunday: This is where those storms were that day: This one was
in Colorado: There had been