Paul Taylor: “Again the Covered Wagon”

Context

The context of “Again the Covered Wagon” was the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the migration of many tens of thousands of midwesterners from Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and other states to California in search of work and a better life. The term Okies emerged to refer to migrants from Oklahoma, while Arkies were those from Arkansas. Life had already been a struggle for these Americans because of the Great Depression, one feature of which was falling cotton prices in farm communities. It became more of a struggle for farmers in the Midwest because of severe drought, an unprecedented heat wave, and winds. Compounding the problem was overcultivation. In the 1910s and 1920s, landowners throughout much of the Midwest had converted grasslands into crop production, and for a number of years they enjoyed substantial profits. By eliminating the grass cover that kept topsoil in place, however, they paved the way for immense dust storms—some of them hundreds of miles in width and reducing visibility to three feet—during the 1930s. The most severe of these storms took place on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935. High temperatures, combined with extended drought and an advancing Canadian cold front, created the perfect conditions for a dust storm that displaced three hundred thousand tons of topsoil, some of it reaching as far as the East Coast.

Faced with these conditions, perhaps as many as four hundred thousand migrants picked up and headed west, many of them following the historic U.S. Highway 66. Entire extended families, including dogs, packed into jalopies and old trucks laden with their few possessions, much in the same way that nineteenth-century settlers had headed west in the covered wagons of Taylor's title. Along the way, they camped out by the side of roads. Their arduous journey was imaginatively recreated in John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. Arriving in California, they sought work primarily in seasonal harvesting. While many settled in the Los Angeles area, they began to form a majority of the population in rural areas.

As increasing numbers of migrants made their way through Fort Yuma, the portal over the Colorado River into southeastern California, the authorities made efforts to stem the flow. Police officers, in what was dubbed the “bum blockade,” tried to turn migrants back. Often they demanded money for a California driver's license from people who were virtually penniless. Those who made it into the state usually moved from farm to farm in search of work. Many lived in dilapidated quarters provided by growers or in “Hoovervilles”—shantytowns outside of town that cropped up across the United States and were named after President Herbert Hoover, who was widely blamed for the Great Depression. In time, the federal government would set up migrant camps to accommodate them.

The migrants often met with hostile receptions. Native Californians referred to them as “hillbillies” and “fruit tramps.” They were often derided as ignorant and dirty, and many native Californians warned that the migrants would sponge off the government, although Harold E. Pomeroy, director of the State Emergency Relief Administration, told a meeting of state department heads that comparatively few “dustbowlers” were seeking government relief. A further concern was that the crowding of migrants in camps posed a health threat. In 1936, a shantytown with fifteen hundred occupants was burned by outraged Californians who feared disease.

These conditions persisted throughout the remainder of the decade. With the onset of World War II, many migrants moved to California's cities to work in shipyards and aircraft factories. By the 1950s, only about a quarter of the Dust Bowl migrants were still working in agriculture.