Again the Covered
Wagon
by Paul S. Taylor
Associate Professor of Economics, University of California
Photographs by Dorothea Lange
July 1935
Vast
clouds of dust rise and roll across the Great Plains, obscuring
the lives of people, blighting homes, hampering traffic, drifting
eastward to New York and westward to California. They carry
the natural riches of the plains and deposit them broadcast
over the nation. Exposed by cultivation which killed the protecting
grasses, and powdered by protracted drought, the rich topsoil
is being stripped from tens of thousands of acres by wind erosion,
leaving land and life impoverished.
Dust,
drought, and protracted depression have exposed also the human
resources of the plains to the bleak winds of adversity. After
the drifting dust clouds drift the people; over the concrete
ribbons of highway which lead out in every direction come the
refugees. We are witnessing the process of social erosion and
a consequent shifting of human sands in a movement which is
increasing and may become great.
At
Fort Yuma the bridge over the Colorado marks the southeastern
portal to California. Across this bridge move shiny cars of
tourists, huge trucks, an occasional horse and wagon, or a Yuma
Indian on horseback. And at intervals in the other traffic appear
slow-moving and conspicuous cars loaded with refugees.
The
refugees travel in old automobiles and light trucks, some of
them home-made, and frequently with trailers behind. All their
worldly possessions are piled on the car and covered with old
canvas or ragged bedding, with perhaps bedsprings atop, a small
iron cook-stove on the running board, a battered trunk, lantern,
and galvanized iron washtub. tied on behind. Children, aunts,
grandmothers and a dog are jammed into the car, stretching its
capacity incredibly. A neighbor boy sprawls on top of the loaded
trailer.
Most
of the refugees are in obvious distress. Clothing is sometimes
neat and in good condition, particularly if the emigrants left
last fall, came via Arizona, and made a little money in the
cotton harvest there. But sometimes it is literally in tatters.
At worst, these people lack money even for a California auto
license. Asked for the $3 fee, a mother with six children and
only $3.40 replied, "That's food for my babies!" She was allowed
to proceed without a license.
White
Americans of old stock predominate among the emigrants. Long,
lanky Oklahomans with small heads, blue eyes, an Abe Lincoln
cut to the thighs, and surrounded by tow-headed children; bronzed
Texans with a drawl, clear-cut features, and an aggressive spirit;
a few Mexicans, mestizos with many children; occasionally Negroes;
all are crossing over into California.
"It seems like God has forsaken us—back there
in Arkansas" |
The westward movement of rural
folk from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and adjacent states, whence
most of the refugees to California are now coming, of course
is not new. The rise of cotton production in Imperial Valley
in 1910 started migration of cotton pickers and growers from
the Southwest. The spread of cotton culture to the San Joaquin
Valley in 1919 accelerated the interstate movement; many came
seasonally to harvest the cotton and returned, while others
remained as a permanent accretion. The present migration, therefore,
follows channels cut historically. But it moves, with the tremendous
added impulses of drought and depression behind it, which increase
its westward volume, and which may be expected to reduce the
usual backflow.
The immediate factors dislodging
people are several. Clearly, although piecemeal and in some
bewilderment, the emigrants tell the story: "We got blowed out
in Oklahoma."—"Yes sir, born and raised in the state of
Texas; farmed all my natural life. Ain't nothin' there to stay
for—nothin' to eat. Somethin's radical wrong," said an
ex-cotton farmer encamped shelterless under eucalyptus trees
in Imperial Valley. A mother with seven children whose husband
died in Arizona enroute explained: "The drought come and burned
it up. We'd have gone back to Oklahoma from Arizona, but there
wasn't anything to go to."—"Lots left ahead of us—no
work of no kind."—"It seems like God has forsaken us back
there in Arkansas."
Curiously,
not only drought and depression but also flood and the very
measures which mitigate the severity of depression for some
people have unloosed others. A large party of Negroes from Mississippi
entering California at Fort Yuma in March reported that they
had "just beat the water out by a quarter of a mile." A destitute
share-crop farmer, stopping tentless by the highway near Bakersfield,
with only green onions as food for his wife and children, had
striven to buy a farm in Oklahoma and lost it. But he announced
proudly that he had left Wagner County "clear," owing no one.
In his story were echoes of crop-restriction, naturally only
of its sadder side, and of conflict between cotton share-croppers
on one hand and "first tenants" and landlords on the other.
"It knocks thousands of fellows like me out of a crop. The ground
is laying there, growing up in weeds. The landowner got the
benefit and the first tenant [who finances the crop and provides.
teams and tools, feed and seed] says 'I can't furnish [subsistence
during the growing season] any more,' so the share-crop tenant
'on halves' goes on FERA; he's out. It's putting 'em-down, down,
down. It looks to me like overproduction is better than not
having it." Another refugee who had been farm laborer and oil
worker in Oklahoma, said, "Since the oil-quota, I've had no
work."
