This black and white photograph has three paragraphs of black text on a silvery-white background. The text reads as follows: "There were mustang here in the beginning I know because Leon Nunnally got off the train to Seattle in 1937 and took a job chasing them for the Northern Pacific. Even before the railroad they ran cattle on this land and when it came they pastured sheep too. Wild rye, shoulder and head tall, grew right to the river. Spiked wheat, Idaho fescue, Indian rice spread everywhere. The Wahluke Slope was serviceable range until the bunchgrass was finished. Once the horses were gone it was empty country. On the map the Grand Coulee Dam brought water to the entire Columbia Basin from day one, but it was not until after the war that they ever filled Banks Lake and not until 1961 that we saw any water on this side of Saddle Mountain. That was way over on the eastern end of the Slope. Every few years then would come another extension of the canal, another block of sage broken out. You could climb the basalts at the top of O Road and see in the wind just how far the water had come by watching where the dust blew up over new ground. To anyone contemplating apples or especially vines the Mattawa acreage has laid like the promised land awaiting the blessing of regular rain. Its soil is sand on a gravel bed, textbook sterile and full of air. No root rot, no grubs, no past. Make it what you need. It sits high with a long southern face tipped to the sun, inclined enough to spill the cold. One hundred and ninety frost-free days."
