Free Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner Page A

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