Hundreds of thousands of flooded Mississippi River valley residents spent months in temporary housing. They received meals from the Red Cross. They cursed the federal government's failure to help. In many cases, they left their hometowns and started anew in strange places hundreds of miles away.

	Online Graphic: The Katrina Diaspora -- states throughout the country have taken in Gulf Coast evacuees.

It was 78 years ago, in an era far different from the present, and New Orleans itself was spared heavy damage. Still, the scope of the devastation from that Great Mississippi Flood may most closely resemble in American history what Hurricane Katrina has wrought over the past two weeks, and its impact still to come.

The 1927 disaster displaced, at least temporarily, nearly 1 percent of the nation's people, many of them sharecroppers. One effect was a spike in the Great Migration of rural black Southerners to Pittsburgh and other Northern industrial cities, which involved resettlement over decades of at least 5 million individuals.

Other calamities have uprooted Americans on a massive scale, most notably the 350,000 Okies who ventured west in the 1930s when their farmland turned barren in the Depression Dustbowl. Disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed tens of thousands of homes, although residents of those cities didn't necessarily leave town.

Most catastrophes, as with modern-day hurricanes Andrew or Ivan, cause only temporary dislocation. In the wake of Katrina, however, hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents are living in shelters, motels, military bases or with friends and relatives far from home. The majority are from New Orleans, many of them poor. All are pondering how to rebuild their lives and whether to ever go home.

Some will return to the sultry, singular city and culture they've just fled, as soon as the infrastructure allows. Others could become the most significant group of domestic migrants in decades, and their influence could become wide-ranging in communities far from New Orleans that welcome them now.

As with the migration of the Okies, the newcomers could ignite class conflict. As with the Great Migration of Southern blacks, racial conflicts may arise or be exacerbated. As with both migrations, those who resettle elsewhere also can be expected eventually to contribute their talents and labor to their new communities.

At the moment, however, for all the people around the country who are providing food, clothing and shelter to Gulf Coast evacuees on an emergency basis, such concerns are premature. There are so many uncertainties, and so much immediate help to provide.

"What you've got here is a mass movement of a whole city that is going to take a long time to revive in any kind of way, especially for a large part of the residential population," said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who specializes in migration issues. "Whether they come back, nobody really knows. This is a totally new situation."

To go back home or resettle
Katrina has washed nearly 1 million people out of their homes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, for months in many cases -- perhaps years. At least a quarter-million have been dispersed to official shelters provided by governments and private agencies from Texas to Utah to West Virginia. The majority have made use of whatever network they have among relatives or friends -- even offers of help extended to strangers via the Internet.

The Pittsburgh area has received no evacuees through official channels, but families and individuals have traveled here through their own connections to secure a comfortable, affordable place to sleep and regroup.

New Orleans native Susan Dyer, a resident of suburban Slidell, La., has become a house guest in Elizabeth Township but will rejoin her husband in their own home "as soon as the power is back on." The couple are in their 50s, retired, with attractive property they can't imagine abandoning despite the extensive renovations it will need.

Dyer had counted on taking care of two grandchildren in Slidell so her daughter, Bevin, could take college courses in Louisiana to become a psychiatrist. Now, her baby sitting services may no longer be needed.

Bevin Dyer has a boyfriend, Matt Sholtz, whose mother is providing temporary living quarters for the family at her home in Pittsburgh. Sholtz' customer service job in New Orleans no longer exists, so he'd prefer restarting here.

Bevin Dyer, 26, figures she'll spend the next year taking classes at Penn State-McKeesport while mulling whether to return to Louisiana, resettle in Pennsylvania or look elsewhere.

"It's a hard decision to make when you don't know anything about the town," she said. "We're trying to take it one step at a time, but things seem to go five steps at a time."

Some Katrina refugees have less hesitation. They have nothing to return to, in their minds, so why go back?

"To be honest, I don't think there's going to be any more New Orleans," said Judy Jones, a Supplemental Security Income recipient who was shopping with her sister last week at a Super Target, outside their temporary quarters at the Houston Astrodome. She's hoping for federal assistance to resettle in Baton Rouge.

"New Orleans is going to be a whole other city when they get finished with it," Jones said.

Gregory Davis, 43, a carpenter who fled New Orleans Aug. 31, was scanning newspaper want ads last week while living in Houston's Reliant Center with his wife and 9-year-old daughter. "I'm planning on getting me a job, and I'm going to build a house out here, too," he said.

Havidan Rodriguez, a sociology professor who directs the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, noted that more than half of the housing units in New Orleans are rental properties. Renters, unlike homeowners, lack a critical incentive to rebuild and might be willing to start afresh wherever help is offered.

The same may be true for the less educated, lower-income sector of New Orleans' minority population. The city's pre-Katrina population of nearly 500,000 was two-thirds African-American. The per capita income is 20 percent below the national average, according to the 2000 census, and the economy has lagged behind those of Southern counterparts, such as Houston and Atlanta.

"The person you have to worry about [not coming back] is a person who has just been living from paycheck to paycheck, and whatever job they had has been ruined," said Nicholas Lemann, a New Orleans native who is dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

His own relatives plan to return, he said, because they are older and out of the workforce. He and others agreed that the longer young people stay away, the less likely they will ever return. Their new lives may take root too deeply before New Orleans becomes habitable again.

"If it takes a year or two, there will be significant resettling back in New Orleans," Frey suggested. If it is much longer than that, "then people sort of get on with their lives."

Lemann's 1991 book, "The Promised Land," traced the South-to-North black migration of the 20th century. That was different from whatever will take place following Katrina, he said, because it involved so many people over such a long period and lacked any government coordination.

The 1927 flood was merely one blip among many contributing to that migration: boll weevils were ravaging the cotton industry, agriculture was being mechanized, African Americans were repressed under Jim Crow laws and lynchings were common, replacement workers were needed in northern factories during World War II, and northern jobs paid better after the war.

Unique traditions
Among Katrina's official government evacuees is about 300 New Orleans residents, nearly all black, who arrived last week at the West Virginia National Guard training center at Camp Dawson near the small town of Kingwood, 30 miles east of Morgantown in Preston County. The area is hilly, quiet, with virtually no minorities, said Joe Thornton, a spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety.

The evacuees aren't there because they wanted to go to West Virginia, and some didn't even know where they were going when they boarded the plane. They just knew it was someplace better than the New Orleans Superdome or convention center. They're supposed to be at the camp for six weeks and to get assistance in figuring out where to go next.

"Some of them say, 'I love it here [in rural West Virginia] and it's peaceful and I want to stay here.' Others say they eventually want to go back. ...I get a sense of a pretty even split," said Thornton, who pointed out that a number of the evacuees already are commenting on the chilly weather compared to home.

He said West Virginia officials also will explore ways to resettle those who want to remain in the state, but in more urban settings such as Charleston or Morgantown. These cities don't resemble New Orleans, but they come closer than little Kingwood.

Other Katrina victims have been moved to states as remote and culturally different from the French Quarter as Utah. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials did not return calls seeking explanations for why some places so distant from the Gulf Coast and so lacking in racial diversity are receiving refugees, while cities like Pittsburgh are not.

James N. Gregory, a University of Washington professor of history who has authored books on migrations of both the Okies and Southerners, said it's conceivable that the warm reception for Katrina victims around the country could change if and when local communities become burdened by their needs. Both Dustbowl refugees in California and blacks who moved to northern cities encountered negative reactions.

"They will find new homes, and do so under very disadvantageous circumstances with results that are very hard on them, and also very challenging for a lot of communities that play host," Gregory said. "Today's sympathy can turn into tomorrow's resentment, regret and anger at the new populations.

"When large numbers of poor families started showing up in the central valley of California, and also in Los Angeles, at a time when the federal government was providing very little assistance, then the burden of caring for those new residents fell to those towns and cities, and sympathy dried up pretty quickly."

Just as the extent of government aid could be critical in helping evacuees to successfully relocate, it also will be a big factor in how many decide to rebuild in New Orleans or along the Gulf Coast, experts said. The $62 billion approved by Congress so far could go a long way toward that effort, depending on how it assists individual property owners and businesses.

John M. Barry, a New Orleans resident and expert on the 1927 flood, said something less tangible also could lure many evacuees back home: a passion for their unique region. The most recent census showed that three of every four residents of metropolitan New Orleans were natives of their state, a far higher percentage than in cities such as Dallas and Atlanta.

The creole-cajun-Mardi Gras culture that has evolved in New Orleans exists nowhere else, and family and community ties appear to be more meaningful than in most urban areas. Even "the sultriness, the humidity" is part of its identity, Barry said, and might be missed by natives.

"I think that New Orleans is easily the most insular major city in the United States -- it's sort of ingrown," said Barry, a Tulane University scholar who wrote "Rising Tide: the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America."

"For two weeks everything shuts down [for Mardi Gras], and for six months people prepare for it. It cannot be created elsewhere. ... While certainly there are going to be many people relocated who will not return, in this one instance the insularity of the city is going to be an asset."