How crowded is the American Redoubt? To put things in perspective: Delaware measures 2,489 square miles and has about 910,000 residents. Meanwhile, Connecticut is 4,845 square miles and has about 3.5 million residents. But consider Idaho’s two largest counties: Idaho County, Idaho is 8,503 square miles and has 16,267 residents, and Owyhee County, Idaho is 7,696 square miles and has 11,526 residents. Then there is Phillips County, Montana, with 5,212 square miles and 4,253 residents. And how about Sweetwater County, Wyoming? 10,491 square miles (think of it as more than two Connecticuts or three and a half Delawares) yet is has 43,806 residents. Or consider Harney County, Oregon. It is 10,226 square miles but has just 7,422 residents. That is less than one person per square mile. Now that is elbow room!
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Bruce in north Idaho reports: “As you probably know, the wheat woes hitting the rest of the world, and perhaps areas of the central U.S., are not being felt by our farmers here in the Northwest. You can find some broad, general statistics posted by the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. My neighbor’s son had a good wheat harvest on the family farm outside Great Falls, Montana, and the folks harvesting wheat on the Rathdrum Prairie of north Idaho are also having good yields close to 80 bushels per acre. Someone told be that wheat farms down around Walla Walla were getting close to 125 bushels per acre. I don’t know what the yields have been in the valleys north and east of Bonners Ferry, but from the golden crops I saw there back around July, I’d guess they did very well. The wet spring and hot, dry summer were exactly the right combination for wheat growing in the Northwest.”
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U.S. Railroads Are Booming, Thanks to Bakken Oil. (The Bakken regions extends into eastern Montana.)
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An Idaho headline: Hunter bit by grizzly bear.
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