XXVI 
CHAPARRAL IS A PLAGUE 
I SN’T IT ODD that great stretches of the West, such, 
for example, as that vast expanse from San Antonio 
to El Paso, Texas, in which the state of New York might 
be lost, and which was once a rolling prairie land, have 
changed their nature and today are endless thickets of 
chaparral brush! 
Chaparral, a sort of brush reaching as high as a man on 
horseback, is a hardy and greedy growth that seems to lie 
in wait for bits of land that it can claim for its own. 
When a lumberman, for instance, cuts the timber off a 
mountainside in California, the chaparral rushes in, blan¬ 
kets it with a thick growth, and crowds all other vegeta¬ 
tion so vigorously that the latter has no chance. Over 
great areas wherever the land owner lets his fields lie 
idle, the chaparral begins its invasions. Even the vacant 
lots in many cities farther east tend to become chapar¬ 
ral thickets, in which young make-believe bandits hide 
themselves and in imagination go back to the methods 
employed by their robber-baron ancestors of a few 
centuries ago. 
But nowhere have the changes brought about by the 
crowding in of the chaparral been so marked as in the 
prairie regions of the Southwest. In west Texas, for in¬ 
stance, the open reaches of grassy plains offered one of 
the finest stretches of grazing lands that the world has 
known. The descendants of the cattle that Cortez and 
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