Cadillac Desert (8 page)

On each successive trip west the changes took away Powell’s breath. The breaking wave of settlement was eating up half a meridian a year; from one season to the next, settlements were thirty miles farther out. By the late 1870s, the hundredth meridian had been fatefully crossed. There were homes sprouting in central Nebraska, miles from water, trees, and neighbors, their occupants living in sod dugouts suggestive of termite mounds. Farms began to grow up around Denver, where a type of agriculture thoroughly alien to America’s farmers—irrigation—was being experimented with. (Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York
Herald Tribune
—the publisher whose words “Go west, young man” galvanized the nineteenth century—was mainly responsible for this; he had dispatched his agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, to a spot north of Denver to found a utopian irrigation colony which, not surprisingly, became Greeley, Colorado. The colony appeared to be a success, even forgetting the large annual contribution from Greeley.) On their way across the plains, travelers could see huge rolling clouds of dust on the southern horizon, caused by cattle drives from Texas to railheads at Dodge and Kansas City. The plains were being dug up; the buffalo were being annihilated to starve the Indians and make way for cows; the vanishing tribes were being herded like cattle onto reservations.

This enormous gush of humanity pouring into a region still marked on some maps as the Great American Desert was encouraged by wishful thinking, by salesmanship, that most American of motivating forces, and, most of all, by natural caprice. For a number of years after 1865, a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains. Guides leading wagon trains to Oregon reported that western Nebraska, usually blond from drought or black from prairie fires, had turned opalescent green. Late in the 1870s, the boundary of the Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of the Great Basin. Such a spectacular climatic transformation was not about to be dismissed as a fluke, not by a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent. A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was “Rain Follows the Plow.” Since the rains coincided with the headlong westward advance of settlement, the two must somehow be related. Professor Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, was a leading proponent. “Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled,” he announced in declamatory tones, “towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and roads made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture.... I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature, and not periodical, and that it has commenced within eight years past, and that it is in some way connected to the settlement of the country, and that as population increases the moisture will increase.” Ferdinand V. Hayden, who was Thomas’s boss and one of the most famous geographers and geologists of his time, also subscribed to the theory. (Hayden happened to be a notable rival of John Wesley Powell, who believed otherwise.) The exact explanations varied. Plowing the land exposed the soil’s moisture to the sky. Newly planted trees enhanced rainfall. The smoke from trains caused it. Vibrations in the air created by all the commotion helped clouds to form. Dynamiting the air became a popular means of inducing rain to fall. Even the Secretary of Agriculture came out for a demonstration in Texas. “The result,” he reported, “was—a loud noise!”

The notion that settlement was changing the climate on the flat, loamy, treeless plains rang irresistibly true to the subsistence farmer from the East who spent more time clearing his land of rocks and stumps than plowing and harvesting. Hamlin Garland, the writer, was the son of such a subsistence farmer, a man hounded out of Wisconsin by trees and hills. “More and more,” Garland was to remember, “[my father] resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much of his quarter section remained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug and young oaks to be uprooted in the forest.... [B]itterly he resented his uptilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep in the minds of his sons that for years, thereafter they were unable to look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired.”

The Irish potato famine, a bad drought in the Ohio Valley, the reflexive restlessness which, Alexis de Tocqueville thought, set Americans apart from the Europeans they had recently been—all of these, too, were behind the flood. When Hamlin Garland’s family settled in Iowa, they had no neighbors within sight. A year later, they were surrounded, fencepost to fencepost. “All the wild things died or hurried away, never to return,” wrote Garland mournfully. “The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the fragrant fruits, the busy insects ... prairie wolves [that] lurked in the grass and swales ... all of the swarming lives which had been native here for countless centuries were utterly destroyed.” If poor immigrants arrived in Iowa and found land too expensive, they could either return East and look for some hardscrabble farm they could afford—in West Virginia, perhaps, or New Hampshire—or continue on to Nebraska. Since rain was bound to follow the plow, they went to Nebraska. Merchants in St. Louis and other railhead cities, who dreamed of markets expanding in three directions at once, became cheerleaders for the New Meteorology. So did land speculators, who figured that even if it was nonsense, they could buy out the burned-out homesteaders for a pittance and convert their farms to rangeland. But nothing did away with the Great American Desert quite as effectively as the railroads.

In 1867, the Kansas Pacific did not reach the Pacific—few of the railroads which veiled themselves in oceanic mists ever did—but it did reach as far as Abilene, Kansas. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad was already to La Junta, Colorado, and branching south to Santa Fe. The Union Pacific made Cheyenne, and two years later it met the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah, spanning the continent. The Southern Pacific linked Texas to San Francisco. The Northern Pacific hitched Montana to Duluth. The initial result of such unparalleled expansion was an ocean of debt. The federal government had arranged the loans, but what was a loan worth if you didn’t see how you could raise the income to pay it back? Of course, there was a way for the government to help with that problem: after all, it did own plenty of land.

During the four decades following the Civil War, 183 million acres went out of the public domain into railroad ownership. To call it a bonanza is to understate the matter significantly. The railroad land grants were a gift the size of California plus the major part of Montana. The deeded lands usually paralleled the railroad’s track; reproduced on maps, they resembled jet streams flowing in reverse. Anyone who bought land from the railroads would be utterly dependent on them for getting his harvests to eastern markets and receiving supplies in return. When the time came to set rates, the railroads could charge pretty much what they pleased. But first they had to seduce the settlers who were still content to battle stumps in Kentucky or endure peonage in Germany and Ireland. J. J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern, said as much himself. “You can lay track through the Garden of Eden,” he told an acquaintance. “But why bother if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?” The upswing in precipitation, and the crypto-science that explained it, were exactly what was needed. From there it became a job for advertising.

The creative juices flowed. A publicist working for the Rio Grande and Western Railroad noticed, while gazing at a map of the territory of Deseret—now Utah—a faint resemblance to the cradle of civilization. The Rio Grande and Western promptly published a map of Deseret that contained an inset map of Palestine (“The Promised Land!”), calling attention to their “striking similarity.” “Follow prairie dogs and Mormons,” went a pamphlet of the Burlington line, “and you will find good land.” (It failed to mention that prairie dogs, which build their homes underground, cannot do so in wet or soggy ground, and therefore loathe any place receiving a decent amount of rain.) A Northern Pacific circular proclaimed, with no evident sense of shame, that not a single case of illness had been recorded in Montana during the previous year, except for indigestion caused by overeating.

Many of the railroads published their own newspapers, full of so-called testimonials from alleged Kansas farmers who were raising a hundred bushels of corn to the acre, from settlers who had traded rags for riches in five years. “Why emigrate to Kansas?” asked a testimonial in Western Trail, the Rock Island Railroad’s gazette. “Because it is the garden spot of the world. Because it will grow anything that any other country will grow, and with less work. Because it rains here more than in any other place, and at just the right time.” The railroads were careful to conceal their ties with the land-sales companies they owned, and with the journalists to whom they gave free passage and free meals, if not paychecks. One such journalist, Frederick Goddard, produced a popular publication entitled
Where to Emigrate and Why.
The Laramie Plains of Wyoming, he said, were a good place, “as ready today for the plow and spade as the fertile prairies of Illinois.” (The Laramie Plains are five thousand feet higher than Illinois; the growing season is at least fifty days shorter; there is about a third as much rain.) Western Nebraska was also a delight. A few patches of drift sand, perhaps, but calling it a desert was preposterous. By drift sand, Goddard may have meant the Sand Hills, a fifteen-thousand-square-mile expanse of thirsty dunes which, to this day, remains mostly uninhabited and unfarmed.

“The utmost care has been exercised to admit nothing ... that cannot be depended upon as correct.” “All claims may be fully sustained, upon investigation.” “If hard work doesn’t agree with you, or you can’t get on without luxuries, stay where you are. If you don’t have enough capital to equip and stock a farm, if you are susceptible to homesickness, if you do not have pluck and perseverance, stay where you are.” At a time when a five-course dinner in a fancy restaurant cost $1.25, the Union Pacific and the Burlington spent $1 million on advertising for Nebraska alone. Even so, sooner or later the railroads were bound to run out of settlers—long before they ran out of land. Then it became a problem of moving the more intrepid ones westward so that others could fill their places. The strategy used most often had to do with the effects of western climate on health. In 1871, the Union Pacific described the climate throughout eastern Kansas as “genial and healthy.” With irresistible logic, the railroad asked, “What doth it profit a man to buy a farm ... if he and his family lose their health?” That was enough to bring pioneers from the malarial swamps of Louisiana. Eleven years later, when eastern Kansas was filling up with settlers and five million acres of Union Pacific land remained unsold at the other end of the state, the climate in eastern Kansas suddenly turned unhealthy. For their own benefit, the railroad began advising settlers to “get to the higher elevations of the state.”

Meanwhile, in Europe, an enormous harvest of souls was waiting to be converted. Western railroad agents frequently showed up in port cities, where they held court under striped awnings and dazzled groups of murmuring listeners with claims they wouldn’t dare utter in the States. Swedes, who seemed to have a tendency toward homesickness, were promised a free passage back to Europe if they returned to port with a small quota of relatives in tow. The steamship companies, which were having trouble filling their expensive ships—partly because they had a chronic inclination to explode—were happy to cooperate. When a new ship docked in New York harbor, the mob of land-sales agents rushing aboard was like a migration in reverse. The terms of sale—10 percent down, 7 percent interest, interest alone required for the first three years—could have been regarded as usurious, since deflation was the chronic economic ailment of the time. But terms like this were not to be found in Europe. Neither, for that matter, was land.

The number-one allies of the railroads in their efforts to bring settlers to the West were the politicians, newspaper editors, and territorial jingoists who were already there. No one excelled William Gilpin in this role. Gilpin, who had been a member of John C. Fremont’s expedition to Oregon in 1843, was the prototypical nineteenth-century Renaissance man of the American West: soldier, philosopher, orator, lawyer, geographer, governor, author, windbag, and booby. In an essay—“Geopolitics with Dew on It”—published in
Harper’s
magazine in 1943, Bernard DeVoto called Gilpin’s thinking typical of what passed, in nineteenth-century America, for science: “a priori, deduced, generalized, falsely systematized, and therefore wrong.” He might have added “dotty.” Imagining himself in space, Gilpin saw the North American continent as a “vast amphitheater, opening toward heaven”—an enormous continent-wide bowl formed by the Rockies and the Appalachian ridges which was ready, as far as Gilpin was concerned, “to receive and fuse harmoniously whatever enters within its rim.” A capitalist-expansionist mystic as only the nineteenth century could offer up, Gilpin thundered to a meeting of the Fenian Brotherhood in Denver, “What an immense geography has been revealed! What infinite hives of population and laboratories of industry have been set in motion! ... North America is known to our own people. Its concave form and homogeneous structure are revealed.”

The hives of population of which Gilpin spoke were the 1,310,000,000 people who, he was convinced, could fit comfortably within his continental bowl—and because they could fit, then it was weakness of will to settle for anything less. Obviously, a desert had no place in such a galvanic vision. “The PLAINS are not deserts,” Gilpin shouted in one of his books, which was modestly titled
The Continental Railway, Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents,
“but the OPPOSITE, and the cardinal basis for the future empire now erecting itself upon the North American continent.” Empire was a passion with Gilpin, as it was with his mentor, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton, in addition to being the father of John C. Fremont’s wife, was the father of Manifest Destiny, which was to become the rationalization for those excesses that its companion doctrine, Social Darwinism, could not excuse.