ABSTRACT
The Plains inhabitants, often called “Okies” or “Arkies” for the Oklahoma or Arkansas that they migrated from, moved “in all directions” searching for respite from their troubles. If lucky, they had a jalopy laden with a life’s possessions: food, clothing, bedding, and furniture. The road has always been associated in the American imagination with transition, optimistic change, and the possibility of re-making oneself, but not in the Depression. Lange was hired after the harshest years of the Dust Bowl, one of the United States’ worst environmental disasters. Years of intense heat with little rain had led to drought. This drought, in combination with colliding weather patterns and uncaring farming practices, resulted in dust storms that could be so bad that they reached from the Great Plains to three hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. Lange and Taylor proposed that the Great Plains inhabitants were alienated from the land, saw it as something to profit from, instead of stewarding.
