Prelude to the Dust Bowl: Drought in the Nineteenth-Century Southern Plains

American histories of drought often begin with the 1930s. Scholars have long profiled farmers, ranchers, scientists, and rural communities that endured the ecological disasters of that decade. First-hand accounts, such as the one by F. A. Wagner—superintendent of the Branch Extension Station in Garden City, Kansas—capture the region’s plight: “The Drought of 1934 … coupled with unwise land use and tillage practices, gave rise in the Spring of 1935 to the most severe and widespread dust storms this country has ever witnessed. Occasionally a ‘Black Blizzard’ in the form of a rapidly moving billowy cloud of dust would move in from the north, at which times visibility was reduced to zero…. During such storms, midday was plunged into jet black darkness and it was impossible to see one’s own hand when extended in front at arm’s length.”¹ But, how did deadly fluctuations of rainfall shape the region before the...