The American Desert,1955: A new way of life in the U.S.

TO the ordinary air traveler winging across the U.S. Southwest, the great American desert still seems an arid and forbidding waste of sand, dry lake beds and jagged rock mountains. But to the observant, a careful look reveals surprising signs of a new civilization rising among the ocotillos and greasewood. Thin asphalt ribbons stretch across the sand, linking black and white dots of clustered homes, blue bands of irrigation canals and rectangles of bright green new farms. From California's southern coastal ranges inland 375 miles to the central Arizona cities of Phoenix and...