Free Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner Page B

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