Commentary and stories from the towns, farms, and ranches of the modern West
The mysterious cliff dwellings in the American southwest are fascinating places. They are historical registers that teach us just a little of ancient times, of people who were farming here long before Columbus. The people who lived here are the true founders of American agriculture. Some of these dwellings are very remote. A few, …
Continue reading Farming Has a Long History in the West
The story of the American west is a checkered one, with heroic struggles and devastating misdeeds. It’s war and peace on an immense scale, spanning a continent and hundreds of years. The men and women that built the west are made of the same clay and grit that we are - we are their …
You can take a joke too far, as a young man from Bakersfield found out recently. He didn’t realize that just the mention of Area 51 fires up a lot of people. So many people took his joke seriously, that some of them - maybe as much as 2 million - are actually thinking they …
Ballarat, California is a town on the edge of nowhere, a collection of mud huts and tin shanties in one of the most hostile deserts in the world. The town was born to serve those fortune hunters known as the Rainbow Chasers. The Rainbow Chasers hunted minerals all around the Mojave Desert. One of the …
Back when I was growing up in a small town on the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico was just a line in the sand - sometimes a barb wire fence, sometimes a totally imaginary line stretching across those hundreds of miles of desert. We’d go out in that desert to explore old lava …
Continue reading Make the Border Wall an Asset, Not a Liability
