The idea of the Great American Desert is almost as old as the nation itself. Lewis and Clark, while they did not use the term in their official report, did mention the disturbing lack of timber and numerous dry stream beds along the upper Missouri. But Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, whose report of an expedition to the Rockies preceded Lewis and Clarks by four years, did use the term “desert” to describe what he found between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. In fact, nearly all of the West’s early explorers described a landscape “wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” John Bradbury and Henry M. Brackenridge in 1811, and Thomas Nuttall in 1819 made mention of a “pathless desert” in this region. Brackenridge wrote in 1817 that, “the prevailing idea, with which we have so much flattered ourselves, of these western regions being like the rest of the United States, susceptible of cultivation, and affording endless outlets to settlements, is certainly erroneous.”
By the eighteen-thirties “the Great American Desert was firmly established on the maps and in the American mind,” according to Wallace Stegner. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, though he never visited the region, describes the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains as “unequal and sterile,” where “granitic sand and irregular masses of stone, among which a few plants force their growth,” evokes “the bones of a skeleton whose flesh has been consumed by time.”
Even such modern New Western myth-busters as Patricia Nelson Limerick still believe that the Great American desert is a myth. “This was not a desert: at the worst, this was grazing land, and, at the best, this was land for dry farming. There were cyclical rains, and rivers, and springs. The judgment ‘desert’ had been hasty—and wrong.”
For most Americans of this frontier time period there was “no hope of immediate settlement of the plains”—it was “only a wasteland for eight hundred miles west of the 100th meridian, and from British Colombia to Mexico,” says Stegner. But thirty or forty years later, in the 1870s, a number of circumstances, combined with nationalistic exuberance and expansive wishful thinking began to erode the idea that much of the West was a desert. The 1870s were a particularly wet decade on the plains, and the growth of a stable market for crops in Denver around the gold rush had induced many farmers to try their hand in the region. William Gilpin, first territorial governor of Colorado, had already elaborated in an 1860 book the continental mission of the United States, and became one of the primary boosters of plains settlement. Manifest Destiny had, by this time, become a creed—official policy for a generation of Americans.
The delusions of empire and the vagaries of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny necessitated the denial of the elemental realities of the West. “The semi-arid plains between the 100th meridian and the Rockies, plains which had barred settlement and repelled Spaniard and Anglo-American alike,” for boosters like Gilpin, “were no desert, nor even a semi-desert, but a pastoral Canaan.” They would even go so far as to claim that rain would follow the plow. Popular magazines and local newspapers took up the cause and all sorts of enterprises developed to move settlers onto the plains. It worked, and by 1878, entries under the Homestead Act in Nebraska, Kansas, Dakota and Minnesota had exceeded two and a half million.
The triumph was short-lived, however. Many of these farmers soon felt themselves the victims of a grand hoax. First of all, the standard allotment under the Homestead Act of 160 acres was insufficient. It has been well testified to that no farmer, however diligent, could make a living on such a spread in a country with an annual rainfall of less that twenty inches. Beyond this, the climate was fierce. Hugh snows, particularly in the north, buried the land for months at a time; plagues of locusts came regularly and ate everything in sight; winds blew away the soil cleared of its cover by the plow; and the very marginality of the business of farming destroyed most of these homesteaders before they even got established. The relatively few that hung on did so by acquiring more land, or by tapping underground sources of water with windmills.
Aside from farming, there were entrepreneurs on the plains who took advantage of the wide expanse of “free” grass. During the 1860s and 1870s the plains, particularly the southern half of the region, played host to an expanding cattle industry. But this episode also was short lived. Drought, overgrazing, and falling meat prices ended the reign of the cowboy. “Depauperized of much of its grass and invaded by mesquite and weeds, the region emptied out,” wrote Marc Reisner, in his book Cadillac Desert. Yet another cycle in the boom and bust history of the American West. The next boom for the plains came a few decades later, during and after World War One. A demand for bread and a decade of wet weather “sparked a repopulation, and the plains became a sea of wheat,” writes Walter Prescott Webb. This lasted little more than a decade. The Dust Bowl once again depopulated the Great Plains. This is what Webb meant when he called the American West a “Perpetual Mirage.”
One would think that this story would hold a great lesson. A lesson that would make us think twice about the value of the West as a home for so many people. Land has a very definite and almost quantifiable carrying capacity; that is, the amount of life a region can sustain. The story of the Great Plains should—in a perfect world—cause us to question, not only our ability to survive in such a region, but also our affect on the balance of nature.
The Great Plains, and the American West in general, has become the world’s bread basket. Today, the agricultural output of this region is huge. But have we here built a house of cards? Since World War II the West has relied heavily on underground sources of water—the Ogallala aquifer in the plains states—and, on massive federally funded water projects—dams and ditches and canals. But aquifers are a non-renewable resource and reservoirs silt up and turn dams into waterfalls.
The American West is “the most ambitious desert civilization the world has seen,” says Reisner. Confronted by the desert, Anglo-Americans, based on the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist, have attempted to inhabit, by the millions, a country that would, under normal conditions, countenance only dispersed groups of thousands. Huge cities and small towns dot the maps of the West. But they are widely scattered. When one looks closely at a political map of the American West, one gets the impression that this land is for the most part empty. Indeed, it is empty. The American West is an oasis civilization. Bernard DeVoto, in The Western Paradox, says: “The West is a desert. Its mountains are the oasis that make its society possible.”
“One does not really conquer a place like this,” as Reisner has said. “One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.” Anglo-American efforts, over the past century and a half, to transform this desert into a Garden of Eden have been monumental—Promethean. But what have we really achieved? In reality, we have turned only a “Missouri-size” portion of the desert green—and that primarily with non-renewable groundwater. Large cities huddle like outposts against a fierce wilderness. Think of the air-conditioned make-believe world of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso—like the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola. What will these cities become when the water runs out?
In 1949 Frank Zybach of Strasbourg, Colorado, invented the center-pivot irrigation system—a huge rotating sprinkler centered on a well. This new technology would have a profound effect on the plains states. “By 1979, there were more than 15,000 of these units in use in Nebraska alone, and they had transformed the plains landscape from a giant checkerboard to rows and rows of bright green checkers,” wrote Donald Worster. This was, of course, another great boom for the plains. But it has had the effect of rapidly depleting the Ogallala aquifer. “By the late seventies, farmers were mining the aquifer at ten times its recharge rate, taking out an amount over the rate of replenishment equivalent to the entire Colorado River flow.” Worster estimates that the Ogallala could be exhausted by the first or second decade of the twentieth century. The next bust for the plains states seems to be visible on the horizon.
Turning the desert green seems almost Biblical dogma in this country. As Marc Reisner has shown in his book Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, nearly all the major federally funded water projects in the West—and, in fact, throughout the country—are big financial losers. Furthermore, the water these projects delivered was not really needed, and the hydro power generated by the dams was surplus. There was something driving these massive public works projects other than human need. Subduing the wilderness, transforming the barren wastes of the West into Canaan had become, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, “an established national preoccupation.” The implications of this prevailing ideology were unabashedly imperialistic, and the justification was “moral, patriotic, religious, economic and scientific” says Worster. It was our duty as Christians and patriotic Americans to accept and pursue this form of “progress.”
Not everyone agreed, however. Many people felt that untrammeled wilderness had, in and of itself, intrinsic value; that human needs did not always take precedence over the needs of wild nature. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act designating over two million acres of northwestern Wyoming as Yellowstone National Park. This marked the world’s first instance of large-scale wilderness preservation in the public interest. The wilderness ideal had officially set itself up as an opposition to the prevailing ideology. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond the millennium this opposition would blossom into the environmental movement.
Particularly in the West it inevitably followed that these two outlooks would collide—and it would be a safe bet that this collision would occur over water. The first major collision would be over the Hetch Hetchy Valley in northern California. The city of San Francisco, perpetually in search of a supply of fresh water, had for years had its eye on the valley as a site to build a dam and create a reservoir, both for water and for hydroelectric power. The problem was that the Hetch Hetchy Valley lay within the environs of Yosemite National Park—designated a wilderness preserve in 1890. But in April of 1906 the city of San Francisco suffered an earthquake and fire, and the added urgency and public sympathy for the city’s search for an adequate water supply helped her cause. In May, 1908 Secretary James R. Garfield approved the project.
A bitter battle ensued and the final decision would be made by lawmakers in Washington. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, was at the center of the war for Hetch Hetchy. Muir and his followers, along with many other similar groups—the flourishing “cult of wilderness”—launched a national protest campaign. Though the campaign was hugely successful, Congress and President Wilson decided in favor of San Francisco, essentially stating that the needs of people and civilization were more important than wild untarnished nature.
The ideal of wilderness preservation in America had lost the battle, but, as this controversy demonstrated, it was well on its way to winning the war. Roderick Frazier Nash concludes the chapter on Hetch Hetchy in Wilderness and The American Mind by pointing out that “the most significant thing about the controversy over the valley was that it occurred at all. One hundred or even fifty years earlier a similar proposal to dam a wilderness river would not have occasioned the slightest ripple of public protest.” He goes on to say:
“Older generations conceived of the thrust of civilization into the wilderness as the beneficent working out of divine intentions, but in the twentieth century a handful of preservationists generated widespread resistance against this very process. What had formerly been the subject of national celebration was made to appear a national tragedy… The extent and vigor of the resistance to San Francisco’s plans for Hetch Hetchy constituted tangible evidence for the existence of a wilderness cult. Equally revealing was the fact that very few favored the dam because they opposed wilderness… While placing material needs first, they still proclaimed their love of unspoiled nature. Previously most Americans had not felt compelled to rationalize the conquest of wild country in this manner. For three centuries they had chosen civilization without any hesitation. By 1913 they were no longer so sure.”
The dam and reservoir at Hetch Hetchy Valley served for a long time as a sort of rallying cry for preservationists and environmentalists—in the vein of “remember the Maine,” or “remember the Alamo.” But in the early 1960s Hetch Hetchy was replaced by the Glen Canyon dam and subsequent Lake Powell in Utah—which impounded the mighty Colorado River and created “the biggest sewage lagoon in the American Southwest,” as Ed Abbey dubbed it—as the focal point of preservationists’ mantra. Russell Martin, in A Story That Stands Like a Dam, says that “Glen Canyon had become somehow hallowed, the most potent symbol of environmental destruction in the nation…” The damming of rivers all over the West has in fact become one of the central issues in the environmental movement. For all, no where else is there a more vivid and stunning reminder of what man can do to nature than a powerful river reduced to a sort of sewage system.
With this American mind-shift toward preservation of wild places came a correspondingly profound shift in our attitudes toward the desert landscape. “From being a loathsome and ugly environment, the desert increasingly came to be a landscape modern people would deliberately seek out.” The explanation for this shift, according to Donald Worster, was that “for [a] generation of Americans deserts came to answer certain powerful needs, among them a desire for solitude, for beauty, for uncluttered existence, for the nonhuman.” Marking the turning point were two books; one by a disillusioned housewife and Illinois transplant, Mary Austin; the other by a stoic forty-two-year-old Rutgers art professor, John C. Van Dyke. Both authors were gifted with prose, and both approached the desert as a place of beauty and solitude, a landscape for the seeker after inner truth. Thus began a long tradition of writing about the desert that includes such figures as Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Everett Ruess, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez and numerous others.
Edward Abbey expressed what many of us feel about the American West in what has become a sort of cult classic—Desert Solitaire. At the beginning of a chapter on water he relates a conversation he had with a tourist from Ohio while working as a park ranger at Arches National Monument:
“‘This would be good country,’ a tourist says to me, ‘if only you had some water.’
“He’s from Cleveland, Ohio.
“‘If we had water here,’ I reply, ‘this country would not be what it is. It would be like Ohio, wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. Instead of this lovely barren desert we would have only another blooming garden state, like New Jersey. You see what I mean?’
“‘If you had more water more people could live here.’
“‘Yes sir. And where then would people go when they wanted to see something besides people?’
“‘I see what you mean. Still, I wouldn’t want to live here. So dry and desolate. Nice for pictures but my God I’m glad I don’t have to live here.’
“‘I’m glad too, sir. We’re in perfect agreement. You wouldn’t want to live here, I wouldn’t want to live in Cleveland. We’re both satisfied with the arrangement as it is. Why change it?’
“‘Agreed.’”
Abbey has captured a growing sentiment in the West—that this place is different, and that water is the primary reason for that difference. I know personally several people who have moved to the West in order to cure their “claustrophobia.”
I must avoid prognostication; I am no prophet of the apocalypse. But it is not prophecy to recognize that we are flirting with disaster here in the American West. We have perhaps created here the greatest desert civilization in the history of man. It is axiomatic to say that civilizations are cyclical, that they are born, grow, fade and die. History also tells us that civilizations in arid lands do not last very long. The most enduring of these examples—Egyptians along the Nile River—as Worster points out, “learned to use [the river] without violating its order,” and that “they respected the river…” Since Egypt converted to western style agriculture in the early nineteenth century the Nile valley as an agricultural region has been in steep decline.
Social and environmental historians like Worster and Nash have shown that Americans generally lack respect for the natural world which sustains them. We have clearly not learned to use our national resources without violating the natural order. Thus it is highly doubtful we can sustain a desert civilization for as long as Egypt did. Furthermore, the Egyptian civilization was comparatively small in size and far less ambitious. The American West has outgrown itself, and in a region dedicated to growth for its own sake—the motive force of a cancer cell—the danger increases everyday. What is to happen to the huge number of people who live in these western states when the Ogallala dries up? Most of the dams on western rivers were built during a forty year period and most have about the same life-expectancy. So what is to happen when these dams begin, one or two at a time, to reach the end of their usefulness?
