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882 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 1982
The line was an “isohyet” – a line drawn on a map so that all points along it have equal rainfall. This particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits in the United States along which the annual rainfall averages thirty inches; and a rainfall of thirty inches, when combined with two other factors – rate of evaporation (very high in the Hill Country), and seasonal distribution of rainfall (very uneven in the Hill Country, since most of it comes in spring or autumn thundershowers) – is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully. Even this amount of rainfall, “especially with its irregular seasonal distribution,” is, the United States Department of Agriculture would later state, “too low” for that purpose. East of that line, in other words, farmers would prosper; west of it, they couldn’t. And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian – almost exactly the border of the Hill Country. At the very moment, in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.