Grass Is Gold: One Family's Part In Settling the State of Washington

By Thelma Kay Miller

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815802277
• ISBN13: 9780815802273
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: Christopher Publishing House
• Length: 171 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

GRASS IS GOLD - A BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY by Thelma Kay Miller

The remarkable story of the settling and developing of the Palouse section of Whitman County, Washington. By itself this story is an exciting narrative history. But Thelma Kay Miller goes even further and includes the heart-warming account of her family's role in making this particular section of Washington one of the most productive and attractive areas in the United States. The events are factual and the people are real, many of whom are ancestors of present-day residents of Whitman county. Their origin, modes of travel and the inncorporation of the towns, together with an intricate pattern of agricultural development, is the framework against which the story unfolds. As the people who lived this story are real, their love for the land and one another is also real. The economic history of the Palouse is characterized by a change from a grassland and livestock production to one of the richest and most productive, commercially farmed wheatlands in the USA. The Palouse is a crescent shaped formation of 5,000,000 acres of loose, spongy, volcanic soil. Perhaps orginating from the once active volcanoes of the Cascades, the soil was wind and stream deposited to a depth of twenty-five feet over the lava flows in four soil series - Ritzille, Walla Walla, Athena and Palouse. The deep topsoil, moisture absorbent and free from gravel stone and clay, is rich in calcium and other soluble minerals due to the humus of the surface layers formed under semi-arid grasslands. These grasslands are still evident for eighty-two miles on the brakes of the Sanke River and the eyebrows on the northeast slopes, where they have not been plowed out. The large dunes have been reshaped into an intricate pattern of low rounded hills by the Palouse River and its tributaries, the Union Flat and Rebel Flat Creeks which, in turn are paralleled by the Sanke River, Little and Big Penawawa Creeks and the Latah. Wheat production has long been the lifeblook of the Palouse - and of these extensive wheatlands it can be truly said - "GRASS IS GOLD".