Free Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

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,