Word: semiarid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Long and dusty experience has shown that several thousand acres is the minimum necessary to make farming pay in this semiarid region. But when homesteading began here just after the turn of the century, 320 acres was thought to be a bountiful sufficiency. Or so the railroads' seductive brochures enthusiastically proclaimed. To ambitious city dwellers in Boston and Albany, and London and Cracow, it all made glorious sense. The 320 acres of government land were there for the taking, free to anyone enterprising enough to pay a $22 filing fee and build fences. Hard work would turn a clerk into...
...well known that Los Angeles was a formidable frontier until it was civilized by Walter O'Malley. O'Malley was one of those rare pioneers. Where others saw semiarid desert populated by Chumash Indians -- Los Angeles was then little more than a bedroom suburb of the Mojave -- he saw season attendance of three million and the elimination of rainouts. He planted groves of orange trees, dropped hints among all of his friends about the possibility of a film business, suggested the birth of an aerospace industry (Mr. Northrup to O'Malley in their now-famous meeting: "Aerospace? Explain!") and relocated...
...California's semiarid desert climate, no one expects much moisture from May to October, but the months of December through March are generally rainy, with January the wettest. Not this season. From Oct. 1 through the beginning of February, only 5 in. of rain fell vs. an average of 28 in. for that period. Reservoirs are half full at best; some are empty. At Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, pumping for groundwater has opened a half-mile-long, 12-ft.- deep, 4-ft.-wide crack close to a runway used by the space shuttles. Enough trees have died...
Mathers estimates that at one time there were between 125 and 150 homestead families on his 50,000-acre spread, each trying to live with a few cows and sheep and harboring vain hopes that crops that sprout so effortlessly in Illinois would do the same in semiarid Montana, which gets less than 15 in. of rain annually. They are all gone now, tiny homes fallen in, schoolhouses vanished, everything blown away by the same winds that lofted the sandy soil as far as the Atlantic seaboard in the 1930s. A few of the homestead titles are held by descendants...