The Desert of Wheat

The Desert of Wheat

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Title: The Desert of Wheat
Author: Zane Grey
Release Date: November 21, 2003 [EBook #10201]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ZANE GREY

THE DESERT
of
WHEAT
1919


CHAPTER I
Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a
tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth
world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of
waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men
who had conquered over sage and sand.
These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft
gray and golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on
distant hills, so far apart that nature only seemed accountable for those
broad squares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the
waving horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and
fruit were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling
strings of dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay
back from the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky,
heavy with substance.
A thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat
and half was fallow ground; and all of them, with the shallow valleys
between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was
austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green
his home site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth
and freshness. Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled,
many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old.
Here and there a straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill,

becoming a thin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone
hot, the wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse
hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was
not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert
of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to
decay and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this
wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried
and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of
green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of
mellow harvest; and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat
under the hot sun. A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the
long, slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving
lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny
hands; it was sublime because not a hundred harvests, nor three
generations of toiling men, could ever rob nature of its limitless space
and scorching sun and sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep
back toward the desert that it had been.
* * * * *
Here was grown the most bounteous, the richest and finest wheat in all
the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man,
the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917, should
come from a vast, treeless, waterless, dreary desert!
This wonderful place was an immense valley of considerable altitude
called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on
the west, the Coeur d'Alene and Bitter Root Mountains on the east, the
Okanozan range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south. The
valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past.
The rainfall was slight except in the foot-hills of the mountains. The
Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered
on three sides what was known as the Bend country. South of this vast
area, across the range, began the fertile, many-watered region that
extended on down into verdant Oregon. Among the desert hills of this
Bend country, near the center of the Basin, where the best wheat was
raised, lay widely separated little towns, the names of which gave

evidence of the mixed population. It was, of course, an exceedingly
prosperous country, a fact manifest in the substantial little towns, if not
in the