CHAPTER
13
THE TOWNS OF BOX ELDER T J. he chief means through which people make their mark upon the landscape are in their farmland and cities. Before the coming of people, particularly the nineteenth-century coming of industrialagricultural people, Box Elder County was virtually a desert land, its topography broken here and there by watercourses, springs, m o u n tain peaks and ridges, and their attendant oases of green amid the alkali playa, grass, sagebrush, and rock of the high desert which make up the valleys, slopes, and alluvial fans of the Great Basin. Those who settled Box Elder County at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century had to i m p o u n d available water resources, divert the flow of the natural watercourses, and bring the precious life-giving water to bear on the virgin soil in order to raise the crops they needed for subsistence in a largely inhospitable land. Plowing, planting, ditching, and fencing of the land have resulted in the patchwork of fields which dot the arable land of Box Elder County with many-hued and multi-textured crops. In addition, those early colonists had to build settlements—places both habitable and inhabited—where water could be concentrated for gardens, mills,
