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In many ways, America is the land of plenty. But for 1 in 6 Americans, hunger is a reality. Many people believe that the problems associated with hunger are confined to small pockets of society, certain areas of the country, or certain neighborhoods, but the reality is much different. Right now, 17 million families in America are struggling with hunger. These are often hard-working families who simply cannot make ends meet and are forced to go without food for several meals, or even days. Read on....

Voted best book 2011 - Western Novel from Patrick de Witt

Secrets to Beautiful, Easy and Sustainable Ornamental Gardening in the Interior West

The Cowboy
The Limitless Land that he Roamed.

No folks here, real or fanciful, ever acted out a role on a more spectacular stage than the Old West provided for cowboys. West of the Misssissippi, the prairie undulated in ripples of grass for a thousand miles, then rose toward the cool summer pastures of the high Rockies. Beyond the Rockies, the land dropped to the red-brown wash of the intermountain basin, then climbed again to the pastures of the Sierra foothills in California. Few pieces of country seemed more inviting to a cattleman than- “land for nothing!” as some exulted. Though the West may have looked like paradise to the cattle investors and ranch owners, there were days when it felt like hell to the ordinary cowhands. The contrast in altitude between mountains and lowlands bred killing extremes of hot and cold. A Montana winter night could freeze a steer in its tracks at 50 below, while summer noon on the Arizona desert might well be more than 110. The winds could be deadly, rolling over the treeless prairie from Houston Bay to Texas, dropping the thermometer 50 degrees in one day. Ranch hands called these winds “blue northers,” and despised them. Such brutal elements helped to carve the shape of the land, and together with the land, they shaped the character of the cowpuncher, - hard-scrabble and as,- tough as the mesas that he rode. In his resolute way, a more fascinating man than the half-fanciful one of the Western sagas.

In 1876, the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. was still divided into two parts, one settled, one wild. The boundary between them was the 98th meridian, a line where diminishing annual rainfall caused eastern forests to stop and grasslands to begin. To the east, 31 states were settled by 42 million people. To the west of the meridian lay all the parts of seven states and nine territories, populated by a mere two million souls. The few towns of any size were scattered across an enormous territory whose uncivilized land and peoples had long been scorned by even the most farsighted Easterners.

Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people.To us it was tame... Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us.When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "wild west" began.
Luther Standing Bear, Lakota Sioux, 1933

It is to be feared that a great part of (the West) will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized men..... Here may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in geology, the amalgamation of the “debris” and “abrasions” of former races.
Washington Irving. 1836

What do we want with this vast, worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs?.... I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it now is.
Daniel Webster 1838

We seem to have reached the acme of barrenness and desolation.
Horace Greeley, 1859

Sometimes we have the seasons (in Nevada) in their regular order, and then again we have winter all the summer and summer all winter... It is mighty regular about not raining though... But as a general thing... the climate is good, what there is of it.
Mark Twain, circa 1865