Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [27]
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.
While Benton sat in Missouri flogging pioneers westward, Gilpin stood in Colorado welcoming them and shrieking for more. And there was no scarcity of Bentons and Gilpins in the states between. Kansas’s Board of Agriculture was reporting a statewide average of 44.17 inches of precipitation in 1888 and 43.99 inches in 1889. It has never rained that much in Kansas since. There was also a Kansas Bureau of Immigration, which announced that the climate in Kansas was, without exception, the most desirable in the United States. Summer might linger into November, and then “at the close of February we are reminded by a soft gentle breeze from the South, that winter is gone.” At the same time, a story began to circulate among disillusioned settlers about a mule standing in a field of Kansas corn. It grew so hot that all the corn around him began to pop, and mistaking it for a blizzard, he froze to death.
Nebraska had its Bureau of Immigration, too, which specialized in isothermal belts. These were longitudinal and latitudinal bands within which, by natural laws, the most advanced muscular and mental development, as well as the most heroic achievements of invention and creative genius, were invariably produced. The most significant isothermal belt in America ran right through Nebraska. As evidence, you had only to look at Colorado, which was farther south and west and full of dirty Spaniards and Indians. Coloradans, of course, shrugged off this type of thing: they were busy describing their own miracles.
Capitalists, newspaper editors, lonely pioneers, local emperors of Gilpin’s ilk—all had a stake in retreating deserts. But they were not the only ones. Abolitionists, for example, did, too. In the 1850s, when Kansas seemed likely to be the next state admitted to the Union, something approaching warfare broke out between those who would have made it a free state and those who would have tolerated slavery. Horace Greeley, an avowed abolitionist with considerable interest in the West, found the climate in Kansas wonderful and the rainfall abundant. In such a state, Greeley said in his influential editorials, a 160-acre homestead could produce an ample living. A plantation, of course, demanded more land—but if Kansas was full of yeoman farmers working 160-acre plots, plantations and slaves were not likely to intrude.
One hundred and sixty acres. If anything unifies the story of the American West—its past and its present, its successes and its dreadful mistakes—it is this mythical allotment of land. Its origins are found in the original Homestead Act of 1862, which settled on such an amount—a half-mile square, more often referred to as a quarter section—as the ideal acreage for a Jeffersonian utopia of small farmers. The idea was to carve millions of quarter sections out of the public domain,