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Who the Okies Really Were Long before Grapes of Wrath made “Okie” pernicious, anyone who knew Oklahoma recognized that Steinbeck had never been there and had no idea of its geographical or historical features. Sallisaw was not in the dust bowl. True, it did not wholly escape the dust--which at times covered desks as far away as Washington, D. C. On 6 July 1933 the Sallisaw local paper, the Democrat-American, declared that Sallisaw three days earlier had experienced a dust storm “very much like the sand storms of western Oklahoma. The winds came from the northeast blowing clouds of sand before it and breaking limbs from trees and overturning outbuildings.” The Miami (Oklahoma) News Record reported historic rainfalls in eastern Oklahoma on 21 March 1935, an inch and a half in Sallisaw. On the same day, a dust storm was so bad that the Ada News reported that a Kansas boy choked to death, and Guymon citizens could not find their way in the storm which was “the worst in memory.” The dust was so bad in parts of eastern Oklahoma “a trace of rain fell, creating a ‘mudfall.’” The Miami News Record on 27 March 1935 reported a 40 degree drop of temperature in parts of the state and new waves of silt in central towns (Enid had a “heavy dust storm”) and eastern towns (in Tulsa visibility was two miles and dust increasing). At that time there was no dust yet in Sallisaw. Throughout the 1930s you could, with normal luck, grow gardens and some crops in Sallisaw. Steinbeck knew the California migrant camps from his own investigations and from the massive documentation provided him by Tom Collins (the Tom of the Grapes of Wrath dedication), but his dead flat Sallisaw in Sequoyah County was a joke to those who knew the Ozarks, the Ouachita’s, the San Bois, and other mountain ranges in eastern Oklahoma. The Oklahoman, as quoted in the 23 October 1939 Pampa News (a town that knew the worst of the dust bowl), sneered at the idea of film crews coming to Sallisaw to film scenes for Grapes of Wrath: “The Sallisaw angle is a bit strange, for Steinbeck was ostensibly writing about Okies from the dust bowl, not from the limestone cliffs and perch pools of Big Lee creek.” According to the Oakland Tribune on 19 August 1939 (quoting the Oklahoman), “a screen army” scouting for locations in Oklahoma for “‘dust bowl’ scenes” had their jobs cut out for them: “Fiction being fiction, it was not necessary for Steinbeck to visit Oklahoma in order to compose the year’s fictional masterpiece. His imagination could plant drainage ditches and rail fences wherever the necessities of the narrative demanded.” The film crew “had better bring along a fair assignment of ditches and fence rails when they come to shoot the Oklahoma ‘dust bowl.’” Locals had plenty to be outraged about, and ignorance of the setting was an obvious and safe target. Steinbeck may have seized on “Sallisaw” as a name ludicrously quaint (had he heard the humorous Okie chant of town names, “Sallisaw Aline Waggoner Bowlegs”?), but he may have wanted Ma Joad to know the mother of Pretty Boy Floyd and Floyd himself, who in 1934 with national publicity had been shipped in a rough pine box to Sallisaw for burial a few miles away, in Akins. Although Steinbeck, everyone recognized, knew nothing about the geography of Oklahoma, he knew a little about how Oklahoma had been settled by whites and by eastern Indians. He understand from his friends and newspapers that white ancestors of many of the 1930s eastern Okies had been on this continent a long time. During the 1930s writers in newspapers and books did not print interviews with refugees about their ancestry, but they pointed out that these were, for the most part, native white Americans. Journalists needed to emphasize this, for they knew that California agri-business had exploited a succession of darker races and was slow to adapt to a crucial difference about the new influx. Carey McWilliams in Factories in the Field, which appeared August 1939, four months after The Grapes of Wrath, traced the way the great landowners in California had successively exploited “coolie and peon labor”--the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, and Mexicans. The new 1930s migrants were mainly white, a change commencing “about 1933, at the bottom of the depression.” Still, people did not focus on what was happening until “it was suddenly realized in 1937 that the bulk of the State’s migratory workers were white Americans and that the foreign racial groups were no longer a dominant factor.” Half a century later Robert Hardie, who had been a “disciple” of Tom Collins at the Weedpatch Camp, said that he had considered Steinbeck “an affable, down-to-earth guy” who “blended in pretty well” with the migrants (Rockford Illinois Register Star, 7 December 1986). On 14 November 1937 the Fresno Bee Republican quoted Hardie, by then the director of a federal camp for migratory leaders