layey soil, where it is held so long that the
ground is saturated for weeks or months at a time. South of the tropical
portion of South America the vast pampas of Argentina closely resemble
the North American prairies and the drier plains to the west of
them. Grain in the east and cattle in the west are fast causing the
disappearance of those great tussocks of tufted grasses eight or nine
feet high which hold among grasses a position analogous to that of the
Big Trees of California among trees of lower growth.

It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true 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 the