The Harvest of the Western Plains

For four centuries, the vast expanse known as the Western Plains had been a bleak, windswept wilderness of scrub brush, cracked clay, and barren gullies. Lying in the rain shadow of the Sorrow Mountains, the land had been systematically starved of irrigation by greedy downstream lords who hoarded the river flows. When drought struck, dust storms swept across the plains, turning ancestral homesteads into desolate ghost towns and forcing hundreds…