Highway 99 in California

Similar to the manner in which highway 66 served as a main east-west route through the center of America, highway 99 provided (and still provides) one of the most important north-south routes through the state of California. From the city of Redding in the north, highway 99 continues down through California’s central valley all the way to the area of Bakersfield. This vital transportation option in the middle of California’s vast agricultural area made highway 99 an indispensable road for agricultural migrants such as the Joads. And it is one of the highways that Steinbeck specifically mentions in The Grapes of Wrath as the Joads leave the government camp where they had stayed for some time:

“The truck edged slowly over the big hump and into the road. Tom retraced the road he had driven before, past Weedpatch and west until he came to 99, then north on the great paved road, toward Bakersfield” (361).  

Billboards promising a high quality of life, like the one pictured here along highway 99, must have been bitterly ironic to dust bowl refugees who drove past them in a desperate search for any work they could find.