Glenn County is hardly a place that conjures up images of gang violence. This is a land scratched from the tender Sacramento Valley earth in endless rows of almond trees, nodding fields of wheat, and plains as flat and hot as a baking sheet.

Along Interstate 5 north, it is a rest stop on the way to no place in particular. In an area larger than Rhode Island, there are seven stoplights.

Yet it is here, in this isolated agricultural cradle, that someone stopping for gas was chased and stabbed for wearing rival gang colors. It is here that a teen was killed in a shooting at the local cinema.

The stories are the same across the iron belt of upper Minnesota, the cornfields of Illinois, and the alpine valleys of Utah. Rural America has a gang problem.

What began a decade ago with the widening of the drug trade and the migration of many gang members has now taken root in the heartland. Searching for a sense of belonging and the trappings of a seemingly more exciting urban life, farm workers' sons and high-school dropouts have swelled the ranks of rural gangs, bringing street fights and shootings to areas that had only seen such things on "NYPD Blue."

While gangs remain a more pressing problem in cities, their spread into even the most remote niches of America has upended the small-town idyll of communities nationwide. As a result, these towns are transforming their law-enforcement efforts, seeing gangs as a primary public-safety concern.

"There has been much more activity in rural areas ... in the past 10 years," says Walter Miller, a consultant to the US Department of Justice in Cambridge, Mass.

He himself documented the trend in one study for the Justice Department that traced youth gangs from 1970 to 1998. Most notably, 41 percent more cities with populations between 1,000 to 2,500 people saw gangs arrive by 1998.

The reasons for the jump vary from region to region. In Midwestern towns, law-enforcement officials say gangs in Chicago and Minneapolis have spread their crack-cocaine trade farther beyond beltways. "It's all price driven," says Jim Wright of the Minnesota Gang Strike Force in Duluth. "If you can drive five or six hours and make five times more money, you're going to do it."

The last two murders there have been gang-related, and when a gang member went on trial across the border in Wisconsin 1-1/2 years ago, the prosecutor's house was firebombed. In Mount Vernon, Ill., at the height of its gang problem in 1994, the community of 17,000 had six homicides.

Yet in many parts of the West, gangs seem to have flourished for a different reason: boredom. Here in Glenn County, where a trip to the big city means driving to Chico, gangs offer something to do - an escape from the agricultural depression that grips the county.

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