Traveling the Southwest: Kansas U.S. Route 56

My family and I jumped onto U.S. Route 56 shortly after leaving Salina, Kansas en route to Oklahoma’s Panhandle. Route 56 runs Northeast to Southwest for 640 miles between Kansas City, Missouri and Spring, New Mexico. Today, we would be traveling on Route 56 for nearly 320 miles. I was excited to take this drive because:

1. I find myself drawn to wide open spaces. There is beauty in seeing an expansive landscape, viewing a sunset without obstruction, and, for me, open landscapes evoke a feeling of being free.
2. The kids chose to do a presentation on the early 1930’s Dust Bowl last year (which has been declared the United States’ worst ecological disaster of all time). Route 56 just so happens to run through the hardest hit area of the Dust Bowl. Will we get a glimpse of the Dust Bowl disaster? How will it feel to be in the area that experienced the greatest devastation during the Dust Bowl?

Let’s get started!

Wide Open Spaces

Are you humming the song yet? I don’t know how many times we sang “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks as we drove along U.S. Route 56.

And, if it wasn’t “Wide Open Spaces”, we were singing “Cowboy Take Me Away”.

I guess the Dixie Chicks have the right songs for the mood that rural Kansas sets as one drives through endless acres of wheat, sorghum,

wind turbines (these large giants dot the landscape while producing renewable energy, and are awesome to see),

and short grass prairies.

A 360-degree view of the horizon followed us as we drove down Route 56. But, we did have to slow down every 10 miles or so as we drove through old farming towns.

Rural Towns In Southwest Kansas

Grain elevators pop-up on the unencumbered landscape hinting at approaching towns.

As we drove down Main Street (Route 56) in these towns,

I felt like we were in an Old West scene. The only difference is that many of the storefronts sit empty today. I wonder if the advancement of technology requires fewer and fewer farmers to be at hand on the job thus making it difficult for businesses to stay open. Some of the towns we drove through seemed devoid of people and movement. What would it have been like to drive down these streets during a time of agricultural boom?

Also, what were these towns like during the Dust Bowl? Did they even exist?

Dust Bowl Days

My kids chose to do a study and presentation of the Dust Bowl after reading a school book that touched on this subject in 2018. The stories our family read, the pictures we saw, and the documentaries we watched about the Dust Bowl touched us as we researched before the kids put together their presentation board.

The Dust Bowl ravaged the Plains States during the early 1930’s. Severe soil erosion brought on by drought and poor farming practices affected every aspect of life.

Homes were invaded by dust despite the number of cloths that were drenched in flour and water and stuffed into cracks. Sand was shoveled like snow to uncover equipment, vehicles, wagons, barns, and houses. Every individual had to wear masks, hats, and goggles when walking outside to prevent sand from packing into mouths, ears, and eye sockets. Farmers strung cables from houses to outbuildings to avoid getting lost since dust storms often resulted in zero visibility. Scarcity of food and water forced many to abandon their homes in search of relief camps, which offered very little in respite. People weren’t the only lives affected by the Dust Bowl, animals were devastated too.

Animals often detected an impending dust storm before people did, but were unable to dodge the deadly sand barrages. The body cavities of cattle, horses, pigs, and other animals were filled with sand by the time farmers found them.

Plagues erupted as predators died. Jack rabbit, deadly spider, centipede, and grasshopper numbers exploded, which presented new problems for people. The photo above shows a mass killing of jack rabbits in order to try to control the population. The end of the Dust Bowl did come by the late 1930’s, but not without help.

The End of the Dust Bowl

• The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act of 1933 allotted $200 million for refinancing mortgages to help farmers facing foreclosure
• The Drought Relief Service (1935) was created to coordinate relief efforts
• U.S. Dept. of Agriculture created the Soil Conservation Service (1935) to retain as much topsoil as possible, and prevent further damage
• The Shelterbelt Project (1937) planted masses of trees 100-miles wide in an area stretching across the Great Plains (Canada to Northern Texas) in order to protect the land from further wind erosion

These were just some of the measures taken to help people, animals, and land during and after the Dust Bowl.

Despite the destruction the Dust Bowl left in its wake in the early 1930’s, life in Kansas seems to have recovered nicely. We didn’t notice any signs of Dust Bowl devastation as we drove along Route 56. The national grasslands grow strong and healthy along the road, but I can’t help wondering if the grass that now waves freely in the wind is covering the remains of old farm equipment – the equipment that once helped bring about the Dust Bowl. Whether signs of devastation exist or not in areas we cannot see from the car, the Kansas landscape is beautiful today.

Onto Our Next Stop

Kansas had a few special “goodbyes” for us as we neared the end of our auto tour on Route 56. A friendly preying mantis (okay, I don’t know how friendly he or she was, but we were excited to see him or her) came out to see us when we stopped to stretch our legs at a wildlife preserve,

dust was picked up by the wind and into the air giving us a minute taste of a dust storm,

and a beautiful sunset stretched across the western horizon as we left Cimarron (I LOVE the sound of this name) National Grassland and entered the Panhandle of Oklahoma. A fitting end to our day in Southwest Kansas.

Thank you very much for joining my family and me on Route 56! I hope you’ll join us for our next adventure in a place that is known to have the darkest night sky in the United States, a place that marks the beginning of the Rocky Mountains, and a place that marks the highest point in Oklahoma. Come wrangle tarantulas and summit mesas with us at Black Mesa State Park!