Today’s word of the day is febrifacient: a thing that produces fever. In his 1845 “Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California”, Lansford Hastings noted the obvious of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain Region: it doesn’t rain much here, while in the winter “snow falls very frequently, though not to a great depth.” Sounds like a bad place to live, but not to worry! In the classic enthusiasm of westward expansion, Hastings found the silver lining: in the desert there are no swamps!

There are few portions of the world, if any, which are so entirely exempt from all febrifacient causes. There being no low, marshy regions, the noxious miasmatic effluvia, so common in such regions, is here, nowhere found.