in the sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia
and Africa where one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and
scarcely see a sign of vegetation-nothing but barren gravel,
graceful wavy sand dunes, hard wind-swept clay, or still harder
rock salt broken into rough blocks with upturned edges. In the
broader sense of the term, however, America has an abundance of
deserts--regions which bear a thin cover of bushy vegetation but
are too dry for agriculture without irrigation. On the north such
deserts begin in southern Canada where a dry region abounding in
small salt lakes lies at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains.
In the United States the deserts lie almost wholly between the
Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which keep out any
moisture that might come from either the west or the east.
Beginning on the north with the sagebrush plateau of southern
Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven hundred miles
in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In southern
California and Arizona the sage-brush gives place to smaller
forms like the saltbush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect.
Next comes the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south
into Mexico. One of the notable features of the desert is the
extreme heat of certain portions. Close to the Nevada border in
southern California, Death Valley, 250 feet below sea-level, is
the hottest place in America. There alone among the American
regions familiar to the writer does one have that feeling of
intense, overpowering aridity which prevails so often in the
deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a Weather
Bureau thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace
Creek, where the only flowing water in more than a hundred miles
supports a depressing little ranch. There one or two white men,
helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa, which they sell at