Exodus from Oklahoma

The Joads were certainly not alone in their exodus from Oklahoma. The climatic and economic conditions forcing them to flee their homes afflicted many others in a similar manner. As Steinbeck describes it in The Grapes of Wrath:

"66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight" (118).

The Joad family and many of their fellow refugees traveled on Highway 66 at a time close to when this picture of the highway (on this page) was taken in Oklahoma in the 1930s or 1940s. Markku Henriksson describes the situation in his Route 66: A Road to America’s Landscape, History, and Culture:

"During the Depression, some 330,000 Okies, 15 percent of the state’s population, moved out, mainly to California, along Route 66. One of the worst draughts of the century coincided with the Depression in the early 1930s. A bushel of wheat that had cost $1.16 in 1925 was worth only $0.33 in 1931. The cultivation methods that relentlessly exhausted the soil served to complete the devastation. The topsoil was gone with the wind" (92).