" ..millionaires competing for acreage..."

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In an eerily prescient passage from ' Desert Trails, ' Chase comments

about dates..and the Coachella Valley, in 1918, when his comments

would have seemed unbelievable. I mean " ..millionaires competing

for acreage??? " 

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" The pioneer date experimenter, Mr. Fred Johnson, showed me four trees from

which he had realized in the previous year between four and five hundred dollars.

Tempted by these phenomenal figures, desert farmers are raising seedling date-

plants by hundreds of thousands, while those who can afford it are planting offshoots;

that is young palms imported from the famous regions of Tunis, Algeria, Arabia, and

Persia. The industry is well past its experimental stage, and my forecast of the future

of this valley is that twenty years from now it will be a waving forest of palms, with

millionaires competing for acreage, in the renowned date-garden of the United States. "

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photo by JS Chase, Coachella Valley, circa 1916