>>4065552It was the California gold rush and all the older gold rushes in the 1800's that brought people to the west coast in real numbers, but before all of that farms were being sold for pennies because the white house wanted to capitalize on the Louisiana purchase, years and years of stripping the land to make acres on acres of farm lands eventually eroded the top soil enough that once a drought or some type of disease hit, all farm land plants that are holding everything together will die, and nothing is stopping all this dirt from being blown around.
These people failing in farming the dust of their homes, they'd been living and working at for years, then had to move to find jobs, which since the dust bowl was primarily farmlands and thus was economically unviable, plus with all the talk of gold rush out in the Californian Rockies, means they needed to move far away, hence why a lot of coastal and mountain cities formed on the west coast as quickly as they did. Better to live on an ocean then in a desert.
So lack of near by options and the encouragement of the gold rush.
