Here’s the seventh installment of Chris Woodka’s series “Taming the Land,” running in the Pueblo Chieftain. From the article:
Huge clouds of dust routinely covered the plains, largely a product of grasslands that had been tilled for crop production. April 14, 1935, was termed Black Sunday, when the worst of the storms tore across the plains. On Dec. 12, 1935, a conference on the Dust Bowl began at the Congress Hotel in Pueblo and plans were laid to fight back against dust storms that had eaten 5 million acres of land in five states, according to accounts at the time in The Chieftain. The conference set a course of action that led to the newly formed Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) working with area soil conservation districts to reduce the worst effects of drought the land.