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MAKE DESERT FOREST AGAIN

'M.D.F.A. Hat'

All profits are donated to Mojave Desert Land Trust and Native American Rights Fund.
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Jokes
  • 200m BCE
    Tectonic plate shifts split the supercontinent Pangaea into conjoined landmasses forming North and South America, Eurasia, and Africa—and creating the Atlantic Ocean.
  • 75m-45m BCE
    High plateaus formed across North America during tectonic plate movement under Northern Canada.
  • 70000 - 11000 BCE
    Glacial Erosion transforms High Plateaus into the Rocky Mountains as they are known today. The Rocky Mountains, in turn, contribute to the creation of the Mojave and Nevada deserts.
  • 23000 BCE
    Earliest evidence of human population on the American Continent, arriving from East-Asia.
  • 550 BCE
    Chaugán, a game where a ball had to be driven with the fewest possible strokes becomes popular in the Persian and Greek Empires.
  • 1457
    The first recorded game of Golf is played in Scotland.
  • 1492
    Italian explorer Christopher Columbus crosses the Atlantic, searching for an alternative trade-route to Asia. He stumbles upon the American continent. This journey marks the beginning of centuries of European transatlantic colonization.
  • 1500
    The Eastern Shoshone Peoples from Southeastern Wyoming migrate south en masse. Climatic cooling, known as the "Little Ice Age." sparks their journey. They settle in Buffalo Plains (Colorado, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico).
  • 1607
    The Virginia Company of London, an English joint-stock company, founds the first colonial settlement, Jamestown, in the Colony of Virginia. They begin abducting and trafficking West African people to the Americas for forced plantation labor. They are the first of 13 million people enslaved by European colonizers in North America.
  • 1611
    King James I commissions a new English translation of The Bible rewritten to emphasize his divine right to power. The newly invented printing press brings the Bible out of the church's sole control and into the hands of Protestant reformers who settle England's North American colonies. Adapted passages include:
    "Genesis 1:26-28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."
  • 1620
    English Puritan Separatists cross the ocean and settle at Plymouth Rock.
  • 1638
    Théorie et traité de jardinage is published. This hugely influential book lays out the principles of French Formal Gardens - a style of ornamental gardening intended to epitomize monarch and European "man" dominating and manipulating nature to show his authority, wealth, and power. Geometric plans, overlooking vantage points, straight lines of singular vegetation, and border walls are employed to assert dominion. These principles shape the design of both Golf Courses and European Slave Plantations in the coming centuries.
  • 1640
    The English noun "club" is first used to refer to an association. It derives from 'clubhouse,' where an association keeps its golf equipment.
  • 1650
    The first Golf game in America is played by European settlers of Fort Orange, near present-day Albany, New York.
  • 1659
    Albany, New York. A public ordinance is issued to prevent playing golf in the streets due to too many broken windows.
  • 1700
    nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche people) split from Shoshone Peoples, moving south and forming Comancheria, a territory with a population of 40,000.
  • 1702 - 1713
    Queen Anne's War occurs between French and English colonists and their respective Native American allies. Battles break out on several fronts, including Spanish Florida, New England, Newfoundland, and Acadia. The Treaty of Utrecht marked the war's end, but Native Americans are not included in peace negotiations and lose much of their land.
  • 1715
    Yamasee Communities - frustrated with losing their hunting grounds and the high debts they owed white settlers of South Carolina - formed a confederacy with other local tribes and forced colonists to flee.
  • 1744
    The oldest surviving Golf rulebook is published for the Company of Gentlemen Golfers in Edinburgh, Scotland.
  • 1759
    "Cherokee Wars" begin from the valleys of Virginia to North Carolina and southward. Two peace treaties force the Cherokee to give up millions of acres of land to settlers, provoking them to fight for the British, hoping to keep what territory they had left.
  • 1770
    The first African golf course is built on Brunce Island in Sierra Leone by British slave traders.
  • 1776
    Representatives from 13 former European colonies sign The Declaration of Independence, declaring themselves The United States of America.
  • 1786
    The South Carolina Golf Club is formed in Charleston, the first official golf club outside of the United Kingdom.
  • 1780-1875
    In Comancheria, Disease and warfare incurred by contact with Spanish colonizers reduce nʉmʉnʉʉ population to 1,500.
  • 1803
    Thomas Jefferson orchestrates the Louisiana Purchase, paying France fifteen million dollars, or $18 per square mile for 828,000 square miles of land almost entirely occupied by Native American communities, nearly doubling the territory of the United States. This calculated move gave Jefferson a preemptive right to obtain Native American lands by conquest and exclude other colonial powers.
  • 1804
    Thomas Jefferson initiates The Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore and study lands obtained in the Louisiana Purchase. The excursion lasted over two years: Along the way, they confronted harsh weather, unforgiving terrain, treacherous waters, injuries, starvation, and disease in the American West.
  • 1814
    Pro-American Creeks (Lower Creeks) and Creeks who resented Americans (Upper Creeks) fought a civil war. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama on March 27, American militia fought alongside Lower Creeks to defeat Upper Creeks. The battle ended with the signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson and the Creeks ceding almost two million acres of land.
  • 1816
    The Seminoles, assisted by runaway slaves, defend Spanish Florida against the U.S. Army.
  • 1830
    The Oregon Trail is developed by fur traders and subsequently becomes an essential route for about 400,000 white settlers as they migrate West.
  • 1835
    Seminoles fight to retain their land in the Florida Everglades. The U.S. Army massacres their entire population. Survivers agree to relocate to Indian Reservations in Oklahoma.
  • 1831
    The Trail of Tears begins, seeing the forced removal of Native American tribes, including the Cherokee and Seminole, from their native Southeastern homelands to designated reserves after the signing of the Indian Removal Act by U.S. President Andrew Jackson in 1830.
  • 1836
    The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed. It ends the Mexican-American War and results in the Mexican Cession of the northern territories of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México to the United States. Acknowledging the loss of Texas and recognizing the Rio Grande as Mexico's northern border.
  • 1845
    Journalist John L. O'Sullivan coins the term "Manifest Destiny." He claims that God ordained the white European population to spread its particular virtues and institutions across the continent.
  • 1845
    James Knox Polk becomes the 11th president of the United States, campaigning on an expansionist platform that saw the United States spanning from coast to coast.
  • 1848
    Gold is discovered in California.
  • 1860
    Under threat of genocide, The Mojave people submit to Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman of the U.S. Army.
  • 1860
    Abraham Lincoln is elected sixteenth president of the United States. Lincon is an avid golfer and also the first Republican President that opposes slavery in the United States territories. In response, The first Secession Convention meets in Columbia, South Carolina. South Carolina succeeds from the Union, followed by other southern states.
  • 1861
    The southern states that seceded create a government at Montgomery, Alabama, forming the Confederate States of America, with the express purpose of keeping African Americans enslaved.
  • 1861
    The Confederate Government attacks Fort Sumter, South Carolina, starting the American Civil War. Even throughout the civil war, Lincon rises at dawn each morning to play 18 holes of golf.
  • 1862
    President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Law of 1862, which encourages Western migration into Native American land by providing white settlers 160 acres of public land after five years of continued residency.
  • 1863
    President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order to begin the abolition of slavery.
  • 1864
    U.S. soldiers force 750 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho communities led by Chief Black Kettle to abandon their winter campsite near Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. When they set up camp at Sand Creek, volunteer Colorado soldiers attack, scattering them and slaughtering 148 men, women, and children.
  • 1864
    The U.S. Army force 9,000 Navajo people to walk over 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, for internment at Bosque Redondo, later known as The Long Walk of the Navajo.
  • 1865
    Union general William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscates as Union property a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John's River in Florida, including Georgia's Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed Black families in forty-acre segments.
  • 1865
    U.S. president Andrew Johnson overturns Sherman's Field Order, returning all included land to white plantation owners and displacing its newly settled Black population.
  • 1866
    U.S. government develops the Bozeman Trail through Native American territory to allow miners and settlers access to gold in Montana via the Powder River. For two years, an Native American coalition led by Lakota Chief Red Cloud attacks workers, settlers, and soldiers to save their native lands. The attacks are successful, and the U.S. Army leaves the area and signs the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868.
  • 1877
    The town of Nicodemus is founded in Kansas at the end of the Reconstruction Period. It soon became one of the most famous, mostly Black communities formed by freedpeople migrating West.
  • 1893
    Historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorizes that the American frontier is the defining process of American History, transforming Europeans into Americans, whose values focus on equality, democracy, optimism, individualism, self-reliance, and violence.
  • 1912
    American frontier expansionism concludes with the admittance of Arizona as the forty-eighth state.
  • 1921
    White mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, many armed by police, murder hundreds of Black civilians and burn down the Greenwood Business district. An estimated 10,000 people are left homeless.
  • 1945
    The first detonation of a nuclear weapon (codenamed 'Trinity') in the Jornada del Muerto desert permanently alters the Earth's crust, heralding a new geological era: The Anthropocene.
  • 1946
    Golfer Bill Powell returns from serving in World War II and is denied play on public courses due to his skin color. In defiance, Powell builds Clearview Golf Club in Ohio, becoming the first African American professional golf course owner.
  • 1945
    Richard Morgan is born in Fresno, California, to William and Barbara Morgan.
  • 1947
    Joseph Wilson is born at Providence Saint Joseph Maternity Center, Los Angeles, to Brian and Selma Wilson.
  • 1961
    Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) lifts its "Caucasian Only" policy.
  • 1962
    John Ford directs How The West Was Won, an epic western chronicling four generations of American pioneers. Dozens of marquee names worked with over 12,000 extras, 630 horses, hundreds of horse-drawn wagons, and a stampede of 2,000 buffalo. 'How the West Was Won' garners three Oscars for best screenplay, film editing, and sound production. It is one of the only dramatic films produced in the spectacular, three-screen "Cinerama" format.
  • 1963
    Joseph Wilson attends Senior Prom with Elizabeth Smith at Riviera Country Club.
  • 1969
    U.S.-led Apollo 11 space mission successfully lands the first man on the moon, beating Russia in a race to be the first extraterrestrial colonizers.
  • 1971
    American Astronaut, Alan Shepard plays golf on the moon.
  • 1973
    Richard Morgan serves his first tour in the Vietnam War with the US Marines under Operation Arch Light.
  • 1975
    Prominent PGA Golf Administrator Clifford Roberts states publically: "As long as I'm alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be Black."
  • 1977
    Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) accepts female members for the first time.
  • 1990
    The PGA Tour announces it will not hold tournaments at clubs that discriminate based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. In response, many prominent clubs withdraw their participation in the PGA Tour.
  • 2002
    A USDA Report shows that Black people own less than 1% of the United States' rural land. The value of that land altogether is 14 billion dollars. The report shows that white people own 96% of rural land. It values United States agricultural land at 1.2 trillion dollars.
  • 2003
    Time Magazine reports that three-quarters of the nation's 5,232 private golf and country clubs have no Black members, and of the 74 private country clubs in the Chicago area, ten said that they had Black members, 26 enrolled women.
  • 2003
    Ku Klux Klan leaders demonstrate in support of Augusta National Golf Club's right to refuse membership based on sex and ethnicity. Augusta National Golf Club is host to the Master's Tournament, one of four major championships in professional golf.
  • 2006
    Trump National Golf Club opens in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, where Joseph and Richard meet for the first time. It joins 1,126 other full-sized artificially irrigated golf courses in the state.
  • 2007
    California suffers the worst drought since record-keeping began.
  • 2008
    African-American golfer Tiger Woods earns the title of foremost world champion. In response, Golfweek publishes a picture of a noose on their magazine front cover.
  • 2016
    Joseph Wison and Richard Morgan cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who is elected 45th President of the United States. He immediately withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement.
  • 2017
    Donald Trump signs a presidential memorandum approving construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Native American nations country-wide oppose the pipeline's threat to the environment and surrounding sacred sites. Militarized police remove Sioux Communities fighting construction, and operations continue.
  • 2019
    President Trump appoints Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic, as the Environmental Protection Agency head. Pruitt removes the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era policy aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production.
  • 2019
    New legislation removes restrictions on factory mercury emissions, methane emissions, automobile greenhouse gas production, air pollution in national parks, landfill methane emissions, and regulations on power-plant emissions.
  • 2019
    Joseph Wilson and Richard Morgan acompany artist and filmmaker Jonah King into the Mojave Desert where they attempt to play a game of golf. King documents this excursion, creating a new Cinerama-format film titled How The West Was Won.
  • 2020
    Rising temperatures due to Climate Crisis result in 8,836 wildfires engulfing California's state, destroying Four million three hundred fifty-nine thousand five hundred seventeen acres of land.
  • 2020
    Donald Trump is playing golf at the Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, when he is informed that Joe Biden has beaten him in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

    During his time in office, Donald Trump spent an estimated $140,000,000 of taxpayer money on golf.