The United States is a nation that has faced many catastrophic events throughout its history. After the stock market crash of 1929, the American economy began to collapse and many people lost their jobs. Because of this, the need for food was at an all-time high and people began planting extra crops to feed the starving nation. Overproduction of crops and drought created dust storms and, ultimately, The Dust Bowl. In 1934, the Dust Bowl began, damaging the entire Great Plains region and destroying most of the country's crops. The drought first destroyed the land of the Midwest and then the people, forcing them to pack their bags and leave their homes or stay and starve. The Great Depression and natural disasters completely devastated the Great Plains. The first major change in the lives of people on the Great Plains was the destruction of soil and land due to overplanting and drought. The number of farms had grown to over 800,000 by 1900 and 1.2 million by 1930 (Wunder, Kaye, and Carstensen 304). After the number of farms in the Midwest increased, many years of drought followed. In fact, every year after 1930 was drier than the year before, and 1934 was one of the driest on record (McGovern 18). The situation in the Great Plains region continued to worsen. A single storm would remove several inches of soil, first the topsoil and fine sand, then the coarse sand. Finally, the wind would remove all the soil leaving only the bottom layer and creating true desert conditions (Chase 113). An estimated 350 million tons of topsoil from North and South Dakota flew into the air. Chicago investigators at the time also estimated that 300 million tons of dust, which once came from Missouri topsoil and… middle of the paper…, had been made worse by the dust-laden air. In the most severely affected areas, dust ranged from a few inches to more than 6 feet deep, and considerable numbers of livestock died of starvation and suffocation. (Wunder, Kaye, and Carstensen 82) In addition to this, Collins and Hill cite the public health service in America's Own Refugees: Our 4,000,000 Homeless Migrants: "Dust... in our opinion was a clear contributing factor to the development of an untold number of acute infections and materially increased the number of deaths from pneumonia and other complications" (73). The Dust Bowl affected the Great Plains in many different ways. Drought and insect plague played a major role in this. Many people were left without crops or farms and had to relocate. By overcoming these events, the United States of America has once again demonstrated its strength and prosperity.