The pioneers who took up homesteads on the raw sagebrush land of the great Columbia Basin were men and women of real fortitude and courage. Their struggles to make homes and raise crops, with the great scarcity of water which then existed, is an epic to match that of other earlier Western pioneers. Laura Tice Lage (1896-1985) was a child of ten when the Joseph W. Tice family moved to a homestead north of the present town of Othello, Washington. Other homestead lands nearby were being rapidly taken up. She retained vivid memories or those early years, and in Sagebrush Homesteads she recounts many of the experiences of her parents and other homestead families between 1906 and 1914. With these pioneers, the reader will again walk those dusty roads, through both humor and pathos, and a wealth of homestead lore.

Joining her husband in the fight to create a home out of a rugged stretch of sagebrush, rattlesnakes, and sand in Eastern Oregon, Jane Kirkpatrick uneasily relinquishes the security of a professional career; the conveniences of electricity, running water, and a phone line; and, perhaps most daunting, the pleasures of sporting a professional manicure. But the pull of the land is irresistible, and the couple dreams of gathering their first harvest from a yet-to-be-planted vineyard. Rather than the simple life they had envisioned, Jane and Jerry find themselves confronting flood and fire, government bureaucracies, and runaway calves, among other disheartening setbacks. Jane frequently questions the sanity of pioneering in this remote area, known as Starvation Point, and she fights against panic with each trip they make down the seven-mile, boulder-strewn, rut-carved “driveway” she calls “the reptile road,” which threatens to spill them into the ravine with every lurch of the truck. But as she learns to navigate her new life, this novice rancher discovers that disappointment, isolation, and danger can’t compete with the generosity of their rural community, the strength of family bonds, and the faithfulness of the God who planted in their hearts the dream of carving a refuge out of an inhospitable land.

"The Great Basin, centering on Nevada and including substantial parts of California, Oregon, and Utah, gets its name from the fact that none of its rivers or streams flow to the sea. This book synthesizes the past 25,000 years of the natural history of this vast region. It explores the extinct animals that lived in the Great Basin during the Ice Age and recounts the rise and fall of the massive Ice Age lakes that existed here. It explains why trees once grew 13' beneath what is now the surface of Lake Tahoe, explores the nearly two dozen Great Basin mountain ranges that once held substantial glaciers, and tells the remarkable story of how pinyon pine came to cover some 17,000,000 acres of the Great Basin in the relatively recent past. These discussions culminate with the impressive history of the prehistoric people of the Great Basin, a history that shows how human societies dealt with nearly 13,000 years of climate change on this often-challenging landscape"--Provided by publisher.

The Green River runs wild, free and vigourous from southern Wyoming to northeastern Utah. Edward Abbey wrote in these pages in 1975 that Anne Zwinger's account of the Green River and its subtle forms of life and nonlife may be taken as authoritative. 'Run, River, Run,' should serve as a standard reference work on this part of the American West for many years to come." —New York Times Book Review

v. 13, 16-23 include reports and addresses of the Commonwealth conference, 1931, 1934-41.