![]() ![]() In 1936 the Los Angeles Police established a Bum Blockade at all the major entrances to the state. Almost 100,000 of the 252,000 migrants to California followed Highway 66 to its western terminus in Los Angeles where they largely blended in and quickly lost any identity as Okies. Not all of the migrants were farmers (a Farm Security Administration survey indicated that unemployment more than drought caused the migrants to relocate), and a substantial number of the Okies made their way to the cities. They packed up what belongings they could get into the family truck or car and began the three-day (or more) trip to California along Route 66. But as the weather got worse and their personal economic situations became desperate, the Okies took action. The essential optimism of the people, always hoping for better weather and a better crop next year, probably kept them from moving earlier. The migration started in earnest in 1935, peaking in 19. Both jobs and relief seemed to be paying more in California, and the migrants' friends and relatives who had moved to the Golden State in large numbers in the 1920s invited them to enjoy a better life. The Okies were drawn to California by a vision of the West as a land of greater opportunity, especially the chance to own a small plot of fertile soil. Finally, at least in southeastern Oklahoma, farmers possessed a migratory habit of mind and simply continued their pattern of moving west. Moreover, when the Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid farmers not to grow crops, it was often the tenants who would be left landless. Mechanization of farming, especially the introduction of tractors, pushed people off the land. A large number of these farmers were tenants-60 percent of Oklahoma farmers rented their farms-and consequently were less rooted. In drought conditions the topsoil blew away and the land became even less likely to support crops. ![]() Many of the migrants from the Plains and Southwest farmed marginal land. But a larger number of Oklahoma migrants, for example, came from the more humid, though drought-stricken, southeastern part of the state than from the Dust Bowl region of the northwest and panhandle. Drought conditions on the Plains, starting in the early 1930s and intensifying in mid-decade, were surely a cause for leaving. Though this migration was commonly associated with the Dust Bowl (vividly portrayed in Pare Lorentz's 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains), the impelling forces were complex. ![]() Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas all contributed heavily to the numbers trekking west, not only to California, but also to Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. This pattern became associated with Oklahoma because that state provided a plurality of migrants from 1935 to 1940, the peak of the phenomenon. A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a vital reappraisal and vibrant celebration of people and environments closely intertwined.Okies is a term applied generally to people from the American Southwest who migrated to the Pacific Coast, particularly to California, during the Great Depression. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. OKIE PENOCHI SWAMP SONG SERIESIn Swamp Songs, Tom Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. For centuries, they – and their inhabitants – have been the object of our distrust. Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit – and only partly of this earth. ![]()
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