May 14th 1934

Greetings from Kansas. Although the dust storms first began to blow in 1932, it wasn’t until May 1934 that the rest of the country began to pay attention. A duster captured by high-level wind currents gathered both momentum and dirt until some 350 million tons of silt were swirling en route to the eastern seaboard at a rate as fast as 100 miles per hour. It dumped 12 million tons of dust like so much snow over Chicago on the evening of May 10, shrouded New York in an eerie half-light the following day, and even sprinkled the decks of ships more than 300 miles offshore. Although East Coast papers labeled the dust “Kansas dirt,” this particular dust storm actually originated in Montana and Wyoming.