Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wash. (1950 pop. 4,584). The word settlers, as used there, is no nostalgic recall of old frontier days. Inside the door sit the 1951 settlers themselves, sun-weathered men & women who have come to Ephrata in search of a new frontier-the irrigated farmland created out of sagebrush desert by Grand Coulee Dam. They ask sober, practical questions, but in their eyes glows the same high excitement that built the U.S. The bureau believes that they are only forerunners of millions or tens of millions who can be given farms and homes in what is now desert...
This is only a sample, says the Bureau of Reclamation, of what its new machines, methods and concepts can do for desert country. Encouraged by recent successes, irrigation experts are now convinced that the rapidly growing U.S. can expand almost indefinitely within its present boundaries. West of the Rockies alone, they believe, 50 million acres can be watered into life. This would be like adding to the U.S. a new country comparable in agricultural productivity to France or prewar Germany...
Displaced Rattlers. Last week one pump was running, slowly filling a 27-mile lake in the desert-bottomed Coulee. As the water advances, it pushes ahead of it a wave of displaced rattlesnakes. One bu-reauman killed 51 in a morning...
When the water has filled the lake, it will creep through branching canals that lace like arteries through the plains. It is mournful country now, far more depressing than self-respecting desert. In rainy years, some parts of it produce a fair crop of wheat; successive waves of settlers have tried to make a go of wheat farming. Nearly all have failed and fled. Their houses stand empty, surrounded by grey-green sagebrush, symbols of desolation...
Moist Magic. It will be very green, for irrigated land outproduces most land that is only "sky-watered." Desert soil has not been leached by heavy rain of its soluble plant nutrients. The sunlight keeps plants awake and growing. Most important of all, a skilled irrigator can give his plants just the right amount of water. Natural rainfall seldom does this; most seasons have wet or dry spells that check plant growth...