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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1938 Excerpt: ...holds forth on tax rebates as a means to get farmers to install their own erosion control. Underneath the facetious conversation one detects a vein of thought--an attitude toward the common enterprise--which is strangely reminiscent of the early days of the Forest Service. Then, too, a staff of technicians, all under thirty, was faced by a common task so large and so long as to stir the imagination of all but dullards. The High Plains Are Taken Because the ground is chapt, for there was no ram in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads. Tes, the hind also calved in the field and forsook it, because there was no grass. And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass.--Jeremiah 14-6. Westward, the Mississippi Valley lifts with a slow persistent tilt until on the plains of semiarid western Kansas, toward the base of the Rockies, you stand on what seems to be level land 3,500 feet above the sea. The 5,000-foot contour is generally accepted as the western crest of the High Plains. As the valley floor climbs from the Mississippi to the Rockies, rainfall tapers off, at first almost imperceptibly, then abruptly, from copious to subhumid, to semiarid. The grass changes character: Tall grass on the humid prairies; short grass in the subhumid high plains; beyond, in the semiarid Southwest, desert grass or mesquite; and in the arid intermountain sections, desert shrubs. The ninety-eighth meridian marks, roughly, the dividing mark between a humid and dryland or irrigated agriculture. There rainfall eases off, as you go westward, from 30 to 25 inches, then to 20 to 15 to 10, or in desert places, to as little as 5 inches a year. The grass hugs dryer ground m...

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