This site features daily historical railroad posts from the Big Bend/Columbia Plateau region of Washington state. As a personal site, this is my online filing cabinet of interesting things I've come across about railroading in the area. Thanks for stopping by!
Shoutout to Kirtus Dolorina for stopping by to borrow other people's work!
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Zane Grey's Washington; The Desert of Wheat (1919)
Walt Kik (from Davenport) wrote about the influence the book had on him at that time: “When I was a dreamy kid, I was forced to spend some of my choice teenage years in California. To relieve my torture, Lady Luck handed me Zane Grey’s novel, “The Desert of Wheat". It was concocted right after World War I. Zane spent part of a summer around the Almira-Hartline area, where he stimulated his imagination enough to create this special yarn. Homesickness would set in when I read his description of those long sloping summer-fallowed fields south of Almira, where horses and their loads of drag-weeders were making dust that would hang in long ribbons across the fields in the evenings around about quitting time. Obsession would set in when Grey described how the summer breeze would make acres and acres of wheat wave. The chapter gathered a lot of thumb marks.”
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Walt Kik (from Davenport) wrote about the influence the book had on him at that time:
“When I was a dreamy kid, I was forced to spend some of my choice teenage years in California. To relieve my torture, Lady Luck handed me Zane Grey’s novel, “The Desert of Wheat". It was concocted right after World War I. Zane spent part of a summer around the Almira-Hartline area, where he stimulated his imagination enough to create this special yarn.
Homesickness would set in when I read his description of those long sloping summer-fallowed fields south of Almira, where horses and their loads of drag-weeders were making dust that would hang in long ribbons across the fields in the evenings around about quitting time. Obsession would set in when Grey described how the summer breeze would make acres and acres of wheat wave. The chapter gathered a lot of thumb marks.”
I love these local connections!
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