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Prominent Okies included singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie and country musician Merle Haggard. John Steinbeck wrote about Okies moving west in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which was filmed in 1940 by John Ford.
Learn about the Dust Bowl refugees who left the southern plains states for California in search of work and better life. Explore the challenges, hardships, and cultural conflicts they faced along the way.
15 sty 2010 · The influx of migrants depressed wages, satisfying farm owners, but the "Okies," unlike the Hispanics, tended to stick around after the harvests. Because they arrived impoverished and because wages were low, many lived in filth and squalor in tents and shantytowns along the irrigation ditches.
15 sty 2010 · Okie is a derogatory term for migrant agricultural workers from Oklahoma, especially during the Great Depression. Learn about the origin, usage, and history of this term and its association with the Dust Bowl and California.
Okies were refugee farm families from the Southern Plains who migrated to California in the 1930s to escape the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Learn about their origins, hardships, culture, and legacy in this article.
John Steinbeck did not invent the term "Okies," nor did his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath present their story for the first time. The term was loosely applied to the flood of folks coming from the south-central region, left with little means by the Great Depression, the drought, and the dust storms.
Although the Dust Bowl included many Great Plains states, the migrants were generically known as "Okies," referring to the approximately 20 percent who were from Oklahoma. The migrants represented in Voices from the Dust Bowl came primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri.
