Water
Water, as we know, is a precious resource - in the arid western portions of Texas and
Oklahoma battles about water rights are waged even today. When the expected rains do not
materialize, the precariousness of water supplies becomes even more evident. In 1931, the
cyclical drought of the High Plains wrecked havoc. The overuse of land by tractors and single
crop farming methods, coupled with major erosion by wind and dryness, caused the fragile
top layer of soil to drift away. What remained was a barren landscape of sand dunes and piles
of dead animals.

The Real Refugees
However, we tend to think that all refugee farmers who left the Midwest during the 1930s
were exodusters - meaning they lived in the Dust Bowl. In fact, only 2-3% of farmers who
moved west hailed from drought country. The majority of migrants comprised folks from all
over Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas.

Prior to 1932 Oklahomans and
Texans who lived outside of big
cities didn't really feel the pinch
of the failed market. The main
concern of family  and tenant
farmers was the falling prices of
livestock and crops, the rains that
stayed away, grasshoppers and
bollweevils, and the larger farms
that mechanized. In southeast
Oklahoma and northeast Texas,
cotton farms whithered.  In the
western valley, sand replaced
the soil. While the late 1920s oil
boom sustained many communities
for a while, it didn't have an effect
on most farmers. Instead, as they
did not own the mineral rights,
farmers found themselves thrown off
the land by oil companies who bought
their mortgages. As the local  banks, facing closure, recalled loans and lost life savings,
farmers suddenly found themselves penniless, landless, and starving.

Going to California
During these desperate times, handbills advertising work began to arrive in towns all along
the Red River. California, the sheets said, was a land of milk and honey. Thousands of acres of
rich crops awaited thousands of agricultural workers. Pay was decent and land to cultivate
was available to buy. With nothing to lose, families loaded up their cars or trucks with their
meager belongings and made the long drive west in search of work.

The road didn't always prove a salvation, however. Cars ran on bald tires, with rope doing
makeshift duty for broken fan belts. Spare tires had to be sold for gas money. If the car broke
down completely - a great possibility given that they were old and driving thousands of miles
through the New Mexican and Arizona deserts - families ended up walking.
The refugees made their homes in camps alongside the road, living in tents or under
cardboard. They'd eat their rations of salt pork and canned vegetables, but more often than
not, women would make fried dough balls out of flour, grease, and water. Unencumbered by
formal schooling, kids were free to help out by bringing in food such as frogs, squirrels, and
birds. The plight of the migrants was vividly portrayed by WPA photographers like Dorothea
Lange, who captured the mass migration as research for Roosevelt's relief programs.

Once in California, the refugees found limited work opportunities. They competed against
thousands of others for picking jobs, at depressed wages. They also faced discrimination.
With disdain, they  were called "Okies," and their ways were mocked as "white trash."
Migrants moved into "Okievilles" or "Little Oklahomas," shanty towns built at the edges of
fields where they could live among their own kind. Black families fared even worse, as they
had to wait until whites found work before they could be hired. Latino migrant workers found
themselves repatriated to Mexico, although many were actually Americans!

Red River Viewpoint
Migrants didn't necessarily feel a sense of shame over their condition. Rather, and rightly so,
they blamed agricultural mechanization and do-nothing politicians. Oklahoman Peggy Terry
told Studs Terkel in his oral history collection, Hard Times, that "...we all had an understanding
that it wasn't our fault. It was something that had happened to the machinery. Most people
blamed Hoover..." (P. 47). It came as no surprise, then, that Red River Valley citizens who
stayed put elected more progressive leaders. Oklahomans voted for governor William Murray,
a.k.a Alfalfa Bill, and then Ernest W. Marland, both progressives - the latter one a New Dealer.
They also elected Will Rogers as state representative. Northeast Texans found a champion in
Representative C. Wright Patman, who fought corruption in Washington while appropriating
work relief funds. Socialists also gained a larger margin in state votes, at times garnering up
to 15%.

The Oklahomans and Texans
who moved to California needed
a voice in Washington, too.
However, being landless and
penniless, barred from voting
by militant Californians, they had
to fight injustices themselves.
Laborers of all colors and
creeds banded together to go
on strike for better wages and
working conditions, the most
successful being the 1933 San
Joaquin Valley strike. Labor
organization persisted up until
World War II, which makes one
wonder what America would
look like today if we hadn't
engaged in the war.

Relief!
President Roosevelt's New Deal
slowly but surely raised most people out of the Depression, and when sustaining rain fell on
the Great Plains in 1939, grown men cried. The rapid arms build-up for World War II and its
resulting infrastructure finally ended the greatest economic crisis in modern American
history.

The migration of thousands of Oklahomans and Texans to California  definitely changed the
cultural landscape of all three states. California was introduced to southern ways; Texas and
Oklahoma became much more progressive in their outlook. The Great Depression, therefore,
is not old history but a vibrant legacy that touches us to this day.
Caddo, Bryan County,
Oklahoma during the Great
Depression by Dorothea Lange.
Library of Congress.
Migrant family from Muskogee,
Oklahoma. By Dorothea Lange.
Library of Congress.
An Oklahoma landlord tells
how he threw out his
tenant farmers:

In '34 I had I reckon four renters
and I didn't make anything. I
bought tractors on the money the
government give me and get shet
o' my renters. You'll find it
everywhere all over the country
thataway. I did everything the
government said - except keep
my renters. The renters have
been having it this way ever since
the government come in. They've
go their choice - California or the
WPA.

Donald Worster. Dust Bowl: The
Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 58.
Migrant family from Idabel on
the road to Calfornia. From the
Library of Congress.
Dust storm in the Panhandle. Library of Congress.
Poverty does not know race at a farmer's
meeting in Oklahoma. Library Of Congress.
Desperation Road -
The Red River Valley
Migration
Carter County Oklahoma (near Ardmore). By
Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress.