(3 of 5)
Farther north, on the Mojave Desert, Rancher Stoddard Jess has built one of the desert's tidiest agricultural arrangements. His chief crop is turkeys, 55,000 birds or more each year, and better than 100,000 poults. In a complex of freshwater ponds, he raises a million rainbow trout from fingerlings. The trout fatten on entrails from the dressed turkeys and on worms grown as a crop on the ranch. Water from the ponds irrigates fields of corn, and the turkeys are turned loose to fatten on the corn.
Out of the Submarines. The desert influx got its first big push with World War II. The military services and aircraft industry, seeking space for maneuvers and testing, as well as the desert's clear, dry weather and year-round sunshine, were the first to move out in expansive style. They sank hundreds of wells, established mushrooming service installations: Edwards and George Air Force Bases in the Mojave, the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station near Inyokern, the Army's Camp Irwin at Barstow, Marine Corps depots and bases at Mojave, Barstow and Twenty-nine Palms, and other big bases at Las Vegas and in the Arizona Desert around Tucson and Phoenix. At Frenchman Flat, 70 miles north of Las Vegas, the AEC set up its nuclear-weapons test site.
Where the military pioneered, citizens followed in vigorous and increasing waves. People who looked for a healthy climate, pleasant living, new opportunities and the freedom of elbow space found them in the desert. Modern technology was ready to help combat the desert's age-old barriers. A dozen years before, old settlers slept in wet sheets or went to bed in "submarines," welded metal boxes over which cooling water was pumped during the night. Now, at war's end, there was modern air cooling and refrigeration. In homes, offices and resorts, men found. they could live, work and play in air-conditioned comfort and move about in air-conditioned cars. Big machines and modern techniques met other problems, from the drilling of deep wells and the mass production of swimming pools to the erection in double-quick time of whole towns, planned to order.
In Arizona, guest ranches once advertised desert seclusion. Now surrounded by housing developments and shopping centers, they are eying distant locations, wondering how far to retreat to avoid still another move. As the settlers push out of Los Angeles, buying up one desert tract after another, realtors bulldoze farther and farther into the desert.
Big Dreams. With the increasing pool of skilled workers, payrolls are swelling at desert plants and industries. The wartime installations, now permanent, compete for workers with newer desert arrivals such as the $50 million complex of chemical and metal plants at Henderson, Nev. Aircraft workers, fleeing the smog and traffic of Los Angeles, find work with North American, Lockheed or Northrop at new assembly and testing plants on the Mojave.