Western Rim Research Articles

Migratory Agricultural Workers on the Pacific Coast

O UR SOCIAL agencies, rooted in the traditions of England's parishes more than a century ago, are geared care for residents. Our educational institutions, although they arose on a fast-moving frontier, were built for the children of settlers. In general, our laws look with favor on the freeholder, the tax-payer, the local citizen who is part of the They were passed for the benefit and protection of neighbors. Migrants are tolerated or welcomed only when their work is needed or they have money spend. When they become penniless and without visible means of support, they are given the social facilities of the community grudgingly or denied them entirely, and as vagrants they are urged, or even subsidized with enough gas and oil, get along the next community. In the states on the western rim of the country, agricultural employers have long depended on mobile workers harvest their crops. Since the Wheatland hop field riots 25 years ago and the studies of Carleton Parker, the problems of the itinerant worker have been brought home the West, but they remain largely unsolved. Indeed, their complexity has grown, for race groups have multiplied and families have more and more entered the fields as migrants, bringing women and children where originally there were mainly roving single men. With expanding acreages under irrigation supporting ever more orchards, vegetables, and cotton with their heavy and highly seasonal demand for hand laborers, the dependence of far western agriculture on migratory labor has never been greater than now. It is essential the success of agriculture that the harvests shall proceed in peace, but in I933 and I934 the harvesting of crops was interrupted by more than fifty strikes. While there were few outbreaks in I937, the growers report agitators in the field, are apprehensive, and are organized from Arizona Washington. According press reports, probably exaggerated, the Associated Farmers claim 3S,ooo militant farmers, 2S,000 in California and io,ooo in Arizona, Oregon and Washington, ready to fight the subversive activities of the Communists and their allies, including the C.I.O. The reasons for dependence on migratory labor, and for the peculiar labor relations which characterize irrigated agriculture in the Far West,

Sinkholes of the Cumberland Plateau

In a recent paper' Paris B. Stockdale has described an unusual sinkhole occurring in the sandstones near the eastern escarpment of Walden Ridge, at a considerable stratigraphic distance above the Bangor limestone. The origin of this sinkhole, known as Montlake, is believed to have been the collapse of a great thickness of shale and sandstone into a cave developed by normal solution in the Bangor limestone. Although this sinkhole is probably the most striking example of its type, it is but one of a number of similar sinkholes known to occur in the Cumberland Plateau and Walden Ridge. A similar, though smaller, sinkhole is present in Bledsoe County, Tennessee, at the western escarpment of Walden Ridge, at the head of a small hollow, tributary to Sequatchie Valley. This sinkhole is shown on the Pikeville Special Quadrangle and is located about 4 miles east of Pikeville, in the south-central portion of the central rectangle, just west of the headwaters of Coalbank Creek. It is about 60 feet deep, with a steep, clifflike eastern wall, but with a gentler slope on the western side. Although the Sewanee conglomerate, which forms the crest of Walden Ridge and the walls of the sinkhole, dips gently eastward, the western rim of the sinkhole is slightly lower than the eastern rim, and it contains many large blocks of Sewanee conglomerate, which have irregular dips. There is no permanent lake in this sinkhole, as is the case at Montlake, but all the drainage is definitely toward it, and a small stream entering from the east wall disappears into the bottom. No spring was found to emerge at any similar elevation along the escarp-

Forest Geography

SOME months ago Prof. Asa Gray delivered to the Harvard University Natural History Society a lecture on Forest Geography and Archæology, which has been published in two recent numbers of the American Journal of Science, The lecture referred mainly to the forests of North America, and in speaking of these, Prof. Gray referred to them not exactly as they are to-day, but as they were before civilised man had materially interfered with them. In the first part of the lecture Prof. Gray showed how the distribution of forests is mostly dependent on the distribution of moisture, and thus explained the great difference which exists in this feature between the eastern and western States. The Atlantic “forest primeval,” he stated, a few generations ago covered essentially the whole country from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada to Florida and Texas, and from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. This Atlantic forest of the United States is one of the largest and almost the richest of the temperate forests of the world. Then going westwards from the Mississippi come prairies and open plains; beyond these is the Rocky Mountains, forest again, but only in narrow lines and patches; but after passing the Sierra Nevada, the western rim of the basin, we come to what is in some respects the noblest and most remarkable forest in the world. In the long valley of California it almost disappears again, to resume its sway in the Coast Ranges, with altered features, some of them not less magnificent and of greater beauty. Thus there are two forest-regions in North America—an Atlantic and a Pacific, each dependent on the oceans which they respectively border. Prof. Gray then goes on to show how the distribution and nature of these forests are dependent mainly on moisture and temperature, proceeding to prove that the difference in the composition of the Atlantic and Pacific forests is not less marked than that of the climate and geographical configuration to which the two are respectively adapted.