Emerging from a pea field in California's Central Valley, migrant farm workers paid by the pound carry their harvest to a roadside scale. Horace Bristol made this photograph while traveling through the Central Valley with author John Steinbeck. Bristol had approached Steinbeck about collaborating on a book length project about California's farm workers. They spent five or six weekends together, interviewing workers and making photographs in labor camps and on the road. Steinbeck then withdrew from the project to concentrate on what would become his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath .

Though his original collaboration with Steinbeck was abandoned, the photographs that Bristol had made appeared in LIFE magazine shortly after the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath. Bristol's images were used in casting producer Darryl Zanuck's film version of Steinbeck's novel. Bristol's images appeared in LIFE again upon the film's release. These once-famous photographs remained in storage, nearly forgotten to the world, until 1985, when Bristol's son asked him if he had read The Grapes of Wrath . This image is one of only forty surviving photographs from Steinbeck and Bristol's now immortal journey through California's Central Valley.