Word: sagebrush
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...along his country's porous border with the U.S. Soon his headlights pick out four scraggly youths preparing to scale the 12-ft.-high steel fence that separates the town of Agua Prieta from Douglas, Ariz. As he slows the pickup, the teenagers scatter like rabbits toward the sagebrush. "Wait! Don't run! We're not here to arrest you," yells Macias. "We want to help you. The problem is on the other side...
...misery in California could extend all the way to fall. While the rest of the U.S., east of the Rockies, is sneezing on ragweed from mid-August to the first frost, Southern Californians are expected to suffer from a surfeit of sagebrush and Russian thistle. This year, says Berger, "it's only going to get worse. These are the kinds of plants that thrive in disturbed soil, as in mudslides, and we've certainly had a lot of those lately...
Explosive attacks on the powers that be didn't start with the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. In December 1905, in Caldwell, Idaho, a sagebrush railroad town near Boise, a bomb attached to a garden gate killed the state's former Governor, Frank Steunenberg. Blame for the murder was quickly pinned on traveling "sheep dealer" Harry Orchard, who confessed to being a paid assassin for the Western Federation of Miners, one of the era's most powerful labor unions. The union's highest officials were indicted, and the young Clarence Darrow hired to defend them. The result was a kind...
...prisons and legal brothels surrounded by barbed wire. In the sky, fighter-bombers execute mock dogfights and shoot laser-guided munitions at dummy air bases built from bales of hay. Gold mines--some old and haunted, some new and bustling--dominate corroded mountainsides, and the land in between is sagebrush open range populated by scrawny cattle and dotted with eerie bunkerlike structures with names like "U.S. Navy Centroid Facility." From the south, near the infamous secret air base known as Area 51, talk-radio guru Art Bell spreads news of UFOs and sunken continents. To the northwest, in the Black...
...silver. Miners came in the mid-1800s, and visions of a different kind of silver drew even more speculators when casinos began to open in the 1960s. Nevada is traditionally Democratic, but an influx of newcomers in the 1980s has given Republicans a foothold here. But however inhospitable the Sagebrush State may be to farmers (and moderates), Democrats see the Second District's open seat as fertile ground...