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By Root 1561 0

triggered by the same fatal congelation of hope and drought that caused the plains to empty half a century earlier. The longest severe drought in the nation’s history—the one that Bureau of Reclamation planners, ever optimistic, now use as their “worst-case scenario”—began to descend over the West in 1928. For seven years in a row, precipitation remained below normal. The snow that fell on the plowed-up fields of the Dakotas was so light that the ground, bereft of insulation, froze many feet down; the snow evaporated without penetrating and the spring rains, those that came, slid off the frozen ground into the rivers, leaving the land bare. The virgin prairie, grazed well within its carrying capacity by thirty million buffalo, could probably have withstood the wind and drought; ravaged by too many cattle and plowed up to make way for wheat, it could not. If not the worst man-made catastrophe in history, it was, at least, the quickest.

By 1934, the National Resources Board reported that thirty-five million acres—Virginia and then some—had been essentially destroyed; 125 million acres—an area equivalent to Virginia plus Ohio plus Pennsylvania plus Michigan plus Maryland—were severely debilitated, and another hundred million acres were in marginal shape. “We’re through,” wrote a wheat baron from the shortgrass territory. “It’s worse than the papers say. Our fences are buried, the house hidden to the eaves, and our pasture, which was kept from blowing by the grass, had been buried and is worthless now. We see what a mistake it was to plow up all that land, but it’s too late to do anything about it.” In the wake of the Dust Bowl, the short-term prospect was bankruptcy; the long-term prospect was the migration of three-quarters of a million itinerant paupers to California, Washington, and Oregon.

As the grizzled Okies advanced on California in their ancient LaSalles, Dodges, and Model T’s, mattresses and washbasins strapped to the rooftops, they seemed to represent, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “the threat of social revolution by a rabble of crazed bankrupts and paupers—a horrid upheaval from below ... which could only end in driving all wealth and respectability from the state.” Since the population of Hall County, Texas, to cite one example, had dropped from forty thousand to one thousand, and the states of North and South Dakota lost at least 146,000 people, the laws of probability demanded that there had to be at least a grain of respectability in the human tide—mayors and preachers were migrating along with toothless dirt farmers and petty thieves—but to those who were being invaded, the Okies were an appalling mob. They had to be settled somewhere; anywhere but here.

One of the more promising places to settle them was the Central Valley of California—more specifically, in the arid and morosely bleak southern two-thirds known as the San Joaquin Valley. The irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley—60 percent of all the prime farmland in a state made up mostly of mountains and high desert—had been an unrequited obsession with California for half a century. By the late 1800s, a few parts of it had been privately reclaimed by farmers and irrigation districts rich enough to build small dams, but most of the valley was a vista of wild blond grassland and wheat. Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature’s (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.

By 1930, a million and a half acres were under irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley, and a subterranean thicket of 23,500 well pipes had sucked up so much groundwater that the prognosis for irrigation was terminal within thirty to forty years. In some places, the water table dropped nearly three hundred feet. It was a predicament of their own making, but the farmers were not about to blame themselves; guilt-free life-styles took root in the San Joaquin Valley long before Marin