Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—'if it rains.'" In this simple statement, Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger introduced the term "Dust Bowl" to the nation on April 15, 1935, upon reporting on the great dust storm of the previous day. Use of the term quickly spread across the nation.
Between 1932 and 1939, a series of disastrous dust storms struck the southern Great Plains of the United States. Particularly hard hit were western Kansas, eastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Though dust storms also occurred elsewhere on the Plains, the effects were far less severe. Soils of this region had always been prone to dust storms in the past, but during the drought of the 1930s they became far more vulnerable. Farmers had removed millions of acres of the natural grass sod to plant wheat during the previous twenty years. When the wheat failed to grow as the decade-long drought arrived in 1931, the soils were left exposed to the strong winds that annually sweep across the region. Millions of tons of blinding black dirt would sweep across the Plains, turning plowed fields into sand dunes. The social and economic impacts on farming communities were particularly severe given the drought's occurrence during the Great Depression.