blackfoot-valley

But during the still-booming year of 1918, signs of drought were becom- ing apparent, and it struck with a vengeance the following year. Wheat yields plummeted from the expected 25 bushels per year to less than a 2 1/2 bushel average in the harvest season of 1919, a more than tenfold drop. Plagues of locusts descended on the farmlands to decimate the crop. During 1920, high winds whipped up clouds of ground-up dry topsoil into fearsome dust storms. In the western forests, fires raged over great areas. Compounding these di- sasters, European demand for wheat fell off as that continent recovered from the war and resumed growing most of its own food. During the summer of 1920, the bottom dropped out from the artificially high wartime grain prices, when the price per bushel of wheat at the farm fell by half in just two months between August and October. “Dust storm, eastern Montana” 1924 courtesy Wikimedia commons Half of all farmers in Montana lost their land due to foreclosures dur- ing the 1919-1925 period, and farm property values were cut in half. Farm- ers left Montana by the tens of thousands. It has been estimated that during the 1920s, sixty thousand people left the state, one in nine of Montana’s total 1920 population, and this does not count the many thousands who left in the catastrophic previous year, 1919. Twenty percent of all farms in the state were abandoned entirely. 89