3:23am May 4, 2014

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The popular conception is that the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were not only the catalists but the causes of the “Okie migration”. It is true that these were major contributing factors but they were not the only causes. Large numbers of Oklahomans and others from neighboring states started moving West in the first decade of the 1900’s. Many farmers had come to the Mid-West seeking cheap land and a better way of life. When the land failed them or they failed to make the land pay off, they moved even farther west, in search of greener pastures.

The migration that began at the beginning of the 20th century peaked during the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s but even then, the largest number of imigrants were from southeastern Oklahoma, not the panhandle. As far as Oklahoma was concerned, the panhandle was considered to be at the center of the dust bowl. Documentation and stories infer that the migration started with the stock market crash of 1929 and ended on December 7, 1941 with the start of World War II. While it is true that the whole country went into depression around the time of the stock market crash, rural farming America had been in depression since the end of The Great War. We tend to remember and record history in terms of spectacular events. The boundaries of historical events are not necessarilly clearcut, well defined lines.

Buck and Voicy Baggs along with their children left Haskell County, Oklahoma in the summer of 1925, a good 4 years before the stock market crash. It was also 6 to 8 years before the “official Dust Bowl”. Buck and his family joined a caravan of other mid-westerners headed for California along a series of interconnecting, mostly dirt, roads that would, not until 2 years later, be commissioned and named Route 66. The Okie migration did not end at the beginning of WWII although it surely deminished. When I was a child living on my father’s cotton farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California. A man and his family stopped in front of our house. They had all of their worldly possessions stuffed into and tied to the outside of their old delapidated car. The man asked my father if there was any work availible. Henry answered that he was just starting to hire cotton choppers and then asked the man where he was from. The man answered, “We just got here from Quinton, Oklahoma.” The year was 1947.
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Ron Baggs

Important note about understanding how history happens. Also, this is literally my family history: My grandfather (Henry) traveled to California from Oklahoma, standing on the running board of the car his father got from selling the farm. I am amazed to read everything he’s put together.

And no, I’m not going to post anything else, but this had to be said. Sometimes people assume that things that don’t fit their preconceptions about how things happened, aren’t real. The reality is that their preconceptions are usually a gross oversimplification, at best.

One example from my own life: People tell me it’s impossible that my mother was told she had caused my ‘infantile psychosis and childhood schizophrenia’ through bad mothering during infancy, because this happened in the nineties. In their eyes, that point of view went out in the seventies. In reality, views like that go out gradually and unevenly, and there are still people who believe in the Refrigerator Mother theory (hello, Peter Breggin and many other psychoanalytic psychiatrists). We just happened to have the extreme misfortune to hit an outlier.

Another autism-related example: Autism hit the DSM in 1980, but that doesn’t mean that everyone instantly understood what it was or how to diagnose it. In 1987, the DSM was updated so that the criteria were much more lax, but there are still people to this day using essentially the 1980 criteria and insisting that anyone who can communicate is not autistic.

Never assume that history happens in blocks that start and stop at discrete points in time. History doesn’t work like that because human beings are extremely numerous, extremely spread out both geographically and culturally, and extremely diverse and individual.