(NEXSTAR) – It’s been nearly a century since an economic collapse and ecological crisis uprooted Americans during the Great Depression, forcing farmers from their lands.
After the stock market crashed in 1929 and a brutal, seven-year drought followed two years later, hundreds of thousands of people from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri journeyed west to escape the infamous Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl was the “greatest man-made ecological disaster in American history,” according to California’s Capitol Museum website.
When World War I started, the government encouraged farmers to grow wheat as land was cheap in the Great Plains and there was a need – in both the U.S. and war-torn parts of Europe – for the crop. Unfortunately, wheat replaced the native grasses that kept the soil from eroding. When it stopped raining, the earth dried out and strong winds choked the air with dust.
While the flood of migrants found a more comfortable climate in California, where agriculture was thriving – they could not escape the Great Depression. The wave of migrants far outnumbered the available jobs, and the vast supply of workers brought down the going wage rate.
(Original Caption) The automobile was often the only hope for the future to many families fleeing from the Dust Bowl in the Southwest during the depression years of the 1930’s. Many of these families left their homes in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, etc., for a better life in California. Here migrant cotton field worker and family on the way to the West (OK, AZ, and CA were often their itinerary). Photograph, erly 1930’s. 
(Original Caption) San Francisco, CA: Unemployed demonstrate in San Francisco during the Depression carrying picket signs for the Communist party. photograph, 1930’s. 
(Original Caption) 12/03/1931-Los Angeles, California: Aimee Semple McPherson-Hutton the noted evangelist of Los Angeles recently opened a soup kitchen, where the hungry of Los Angeles are fed. When the photographer called to get a picture of Aimee, he found instead Mr. Hutton, the recent bridegroom of the Evangelist. Photo shows David Hutton with some of the hungry men of Los Angeles. Acme Photograph BPA#2 3824 
(Original Caption) 12/03/1931-Los Angeles, California: Aimee Semple McPherson-Hutton the noted evangelist of Los Angeles recently opened a soup kitchen, where the hungry of Los Angeles are fed. When the photographer called to get a picture of Aimee, he found instead Mr. Hutton, the recent bridegroom of the Evangelist. Photo shows David Hutton with some of the hungry men of Los Angeles. Acme Photograph BPA#2 3824 
(Original Caption) 6/18/1933-Lancaster, CA- Scene from life in one of the Franklin D. Roosevelt reforestation camps in Lancaster, California, where 200 men from the State of Ohio are at work. These men are building roads through the mountains to permit the Forestation Department to send equipment to any part of the Angel Forest reserve where fire might occur. 
(Original Caption) Los Angeles: Unemployed Commandeer House. Unemployed men enter the door of the unoccupied house in Los Angeles which they recently took over after notifying relief associations that they would move in if provisions were not made for their housing. There was no police interference. 
(Original Caption) 1/12/1933-Sacramento, CA: A Chinese section in the hunger parade at Sacramento, CA, to present demands to the state legistlature had its own banner in the Chinese alphabet, too. The banner, borne by Chinese unemployed from Los Angeles bears a demand for $50 a month unemployment insurance with $10 for each dependent, protest against deportation of yellow races, and other demands. 
Carrying kitbags young men are off to work camps in California as part Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ which included a Social Security Act. (Photo by Henry Guttmann Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 
(Original Caption) California: New Jobless Exchange Opened In Los Angeles. All unemployed residents who are heads of families living within four cornered boundaries may, by registering secure both work and food from the Unemployment Cooperative Relief Association in Los Angeles, California. They will get it by trading labor for food, by the swapping of the two fundamentals of life, thus eliminating money. Photo shows jobless men receiving food in exchange for labor. 
(Original Caption) 09/29/32-Los Angeles, California- All unemployed resdents who are heads of families, living within four corners boundaries ma, by registering, secure both work and food from the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Association. They will get it by trading labor for food, thus eliminating money. Men lined up waiting to be registered at the jobless exchange. 
(Original Caption) 2/11/1932-Los Angeles, CA – Thousands of unemployed are seen here as they gathered in Los Angeles recently, but quickly scattered when police appeared on the scene and arrested leaders alleged to be Red agitators. 
(Original Caption) 6/18/1933-Lancaster, CA- Scene from life in one of the Franklin D. Roosevelt reforestation camps in Lancaster, California, where 200 men from the State of Ohio are at work. These men are building roads through the mountains to permit the Forestation Department to send equipment to any part of the Angel Forest reserve where fire might occur. Photo shows workers lining up during chow time at the camp. 
(Original Caption) 6/18/1933-Lancaster, CA- Scene from life in one of the Franklin D. Roosevelt reforestation camps in Lancaster, California, where 200 men from the State of Ohio are at work. These men are building roads through the mountains to permit the Forestation Department to send equipment to any part of the Angel Forest reserve where fire might occur. Photo shows a boxing match during recreation hour. 
(Original Caption) 8/14/33-San Francisco, California: Constance King and Mae Chinn, of the Chinese Y.M.C.A., San Francisco, shown with the N.R.A. signs which they are pasting in windows of shopkeepers who are complying with the code of the act. The signs have Chinese translation alongside the English words. 
(Original Caption) Depression in the 1930s. Signs showing depressed wage scales. ca 1935. Photograph. BPA2# 1050 
A group of teenage boys roll a log across a clearing at the CCC camp in California State Redwood Park. During the Great Depression, Civilian Conservation Corps provided summer work at its camps for unemployed youths. | Location: California State Redwood Park, California, USA. 
A family of migrant workers fleeing from the drought in Oklahoma camp by the roadside in Blythe, California. (Photo by Dorothea Lange/Getty Images) 
Two Dust Bowl refugees walk along a highway towards Los Angeles. passing by a billboard imploring them “Next Time Try the Train – Relax”. 
(Original Caption) 10/1/1939-Visalia, California- DOCTOR’S OFFICE ON WHEELS FOR “GRAPES OF WRATH” PEOPLE. Squatter camp: living in refrigerator box cars beside the irrigation ditch. The people are called “Grapes of Wrath” people from the book of the same title by John Steinbeck. 
(Original Caption) 10/1/1939-Visalia, California-Dinner in the clean surroundings of a Farm Security Administration camp. The people are called “Grapes of Wrath” families from the book of the same title by John Steinbeck. 
A family of migrant workers, including young children, harvests grape vines in a vineyard of Visalia, California. 
(Original Caption) 10/1/1939- Visalia, CA: Dr, F.H. Redwell and Mrs. Clarise Tucker, nurse both of the state department of public health, immunizing a squatter family for small-pox and typhoid fever. Back of station wagon serves as shelf for medical equipment. 
November 1938: Pickers leaving the fields at noontime in a small cotton farm in Kern county, California. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images) 
(Original Caption) 9/21/38-Marysville,CA.:At U.S. Marysville camp for Dust Bowl refugees in California, a little boy in the Nursery school gets his dose of cod liver oil.
“Even with an entire family working, migrants could not support themselves on these low wages,” according to the Library of Congress. Unsanitary “ditchbank” encampments sprung up along the irrigation ditches in farmers’ fields, and instead of settling down the migrants were forced to travel throughout the state based on the various harvest times for different crops.
Many migrants never even made it into the state after an arduous cross-country trip – they were turned away at the border.
During this time, California, along with several other states, forcibly sent roughly 2 million people of Mexican ancestry to Mexico as part of a Mexican Repatriation Program designed to save jobs for “real Americans,” according to UC Davis. California, which removed an estimated 400,000 people, passed a bill in 2005 officially apologizing for the “unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent, between the years 1929 and 1944, to Mexico.”
After the start of World War II in 1939, the U.S. and Californian economies improved thanks to the defense industry’s new need for production. Some migrants who had desperately been looking for jobs on farms ended up joining the military or finding work at shipyards and defense plants along the West Coast.
Over the years, many of the migrants who were once derogatorily referred to as “Okies” and “Arkies,” regardless of the state they left, would go on to settle down in California, finding stability and laying down roots for future generations.
