Bakersfield, at the apex of the southern end of California's Central Valley, has been the focus of great migrations four times--in a gold rush in 1885, when oil was discovered there in 1899, during the 1930s when so-called Okies drove their jalopies from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas across the Southwest on U.S. 66, and again in the 1980s, when Bakersfield and Kern County grew more rapidly than California's biggest metro areas. Bakersfield's gold is gone, its oil rigs still pump, but the migration that made the deepest imprint occurred in the 1930s. The Okies drove over one thousand miles of brown landscape, headed through the Tehachapi Pass and finally found the vast green San Joaquin valley, with its irrigated fields and its eucalyptus-shaded towns--the richest farming country in the world--bright under the sun.