The Great Wall of America Runs Through Oklahoma

If you’ve ever driven across western Oklahoma, one of the weirdest and most out-of-place things you may or may not notice is the Great Wall of America.

No, it's not made of stone and it certainly wasn't created thousands of years ago, but it does exist. It's called the Great Plains Shelterbelt. It's like a 1250-ish mile-long grove of trees that was planted almost 100 years ago to combat Mother Nature during the Dust Bowl.

The idea came out of absolute desperation. Back in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was destroying the heartland. Huge portions of Southwest and Western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and Kansas were covered in a thick blanket of fine silt. Mix in the historic drought during that time, and it was one of the darkest times in Oklahoma.

The Dust Bowl Disaster

Crops failed, cattle choked, children died, and families packed up to head west in hopes of escaping the sandy hell. It wasn’t that folks didn’t know how to farm. They did. In fact, as agricultural machinery was becoming more prevalent, they just went a little too far in raising really successful crops without knowing how to treat the sandy soils of the plains.

Practically every available square mile of land was stripped and prepped to raise a crop. Primarily wheat and other cereal grains. The native grasses were torn from the soil, and when the winds literally came sweeping down the plains, it stripped the fertile topsoils off by the ton. Without that top layer of organic soil, it became more like farming in a desert.

Planting Hope Across the Plains

While I hate to give credit to the government, they actually came up with this clever idea. Planting trees. Like a lot of trees. Tens of thousands of miles of trees.

The idea was to build a giant living barrier that could both work as a windbreak and hopefully hold the soil down.

From Canada to Texas, America planted row after row of hardy trees. Elms, hackberries, Russian olives... anything that could survive the harsh wind and dry conditions. This is also why Oklahoma and Texas are absolutely choked with western red cedar trees.

When the Winds Finally Calmed

Unbelievably, it worked. The winds stopped stripping the soil, and farming slowly came back.

That's not to say the fix was immediate, this was decades in the making. The Shelterbelt didn’t stop every haboob (what we know as a dust storm), but it helped just enough to prevent our soils from blowing east. It was only a few years until farmers started seeing the difference. Less dust, more moisture, and better yields.

What’s Left of the Shelterbelt Today

Some of those trees are still standing today. The Parallel Forest in the Wichita Mountains, down by Lawton, is an original remnant of this huge undertaking.

I’ve seen a few of those old shelterbelts myself, mostly around Altus and further west out towards Gould and Hollis. There’s a certain look about them... Of course, these days, some of those big groves of trees have died off. Time, drought, and neglect have taken their toll, and as land gets passed on, the reason previous generations let forests live in some of the most fertile soils in the country gets forgotten.

A Lesson Buried in the Soil

You’ll see gaps where storms tore through or where landowners cleared space for new equipment. But even in decline, they still stand as a reminder of how people once fought back against nature.