2022-05-10_GENERAL DOCUMENTS - M1993041

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45 The period 1929-1945 proved to be one of dramatic change for Boulder County and the entire state. After the euphoric period of the 1910s and trauma of Ku Klux Klan control of Colorado politics during the early 1920s, residents hoped for a period of calm, and as President Harding termed it, "a return to Normalcy. " These hopes were shattered in 1929 when, after the New York stock market crashed, Colorado and the rest of the nation began a slide into the Great Depression. By 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt took office, promising the nation a "New Deal, " many Boulder County residents found themselves on the verge of financial collapse (Mehls, et al . 1985: 68-69, 72) . To further exacerbate the already desperate situation, the Colorado plains entered another dry cycle during the early 1930s. Rains did not fall, irrigation ditches and reservoirs began to dry up, and crops wilted in the fields. As the dry cycle continued, wind erosion began to take its toll on the heavily disturbed soil structures, and dust storms, not as severe as those farther south, became commonplace (Mehls 1984a: 155-157) . Franklin Roosevelt's first administration set out immediately to help the nation through federal economic intervention. For Boulder County and the Dowe Flats area Roosevelt' s farm programs had the greatest impact . Crop price stabilization through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and later efforts at soil conservation were the foremost of these programs. They allowed farmers who had not already gone out of business to remain on their land, but failed to fully revitalize local agricultural production. Farmers in the region did not totally recover from the Depression until 1940 and the beginning of World War II . Table 2 Historic Chronology for the Dowe Flats Study Area Tradition Period/Phase Date Euro-american Exploration & A.D. 1700 - 1845 Fur Trade Gold Rush & A.D. 1858 - 1870 Early Settlement