Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [28]
In the West, the Homestead Act had several later incarnations. The Desert Lands Act, the Timber Culture Act, and the Timber and Stone Act were the principal ones. Neither Congress nor the General Land Office, which was responsible for administering the acts, could ever comprehend that the relative success of the land program east of the Mississippi River had less to do with the perseverance of the settlers or the wisdom of the legislation than with the forgiving nature of the climate. In the East, virtually every acre received enough rainfall, except during years of extraordinary drought, to grow most anything that didn’t mind the soil and the temperature. (Unlike much of the West, which suffers through months of habitual drought, the East gets precipitation year-round; in the spring and early summer, when crops need water most, much of the East is exceptionally wet.) Since the growing season, except in the extreme north, was at least five months long, even an ignorant or lazy farmer could raise some kind of crop.
In the West, even if you believed that the rainfall was magically increasing, you still had to contend with high altitudes (the western plains, the Snake River Valley, and most of the irrigable lands in the Great Basin would float over the tops of all but the highest Appalachian Mountains) and, as a result, chronic frost danger even in May and September. Then there were the relentless winds, hailstones bigger than oranges, tornadoes, and breathtaking thunderstorms. There were sandy lands that would not retain moisture and poorly drained lands that retained too much; there were alkaline lands that poisoned crops.
The General Land Office bureaucrats sat in Washington pretending that such conditions did not exist. Their job, as they perceived it, was to fill little squares with people. They extended no credit, provided no water, offered no services. And the permutations of the Homestead Act that found their way into the western versions of the law sometimes added to the farmers’ burdens. Under the Timber Culture Act, for example, you had to plant one-quarter of your quarter section with trees, a stipulation inserted because it was thought that trees increased the rainfall. In West Texas, where, meteorologically speaking, all that is predictable is the wind, you would have to spend most of your time replanting your fallen-down trees. Under the Desert Lands Act, which applied to land so arid even the government realized that farming was hopeless without irrigation, you had to demonstrate “proof of irrigation” before you could own the land. Unless you owned reasonably flat land immediately adjacent to a relatively constant stream which did not, as most western rivers do for much of their length, flow in a canyon, complying with the Desert Lands Act was almost out of the question. A mutual irrigation effort by the inhabitants of a valley was, perhaps, a possibility. That was what the Mormons had done, but they were a close-knit society linked by a common faith and a history of persecution.
The members of Congress who wrote the legislation, the land office agents who doled out land, and the newspaper editors who celebrated the settlers’ heroism had, in a great many cases, never laid eyes on the land or the region that enclosed it. They were unaware that in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana—to pick three of the colder and drier states—there was not a single quarter section on which a farmer could subsist, even with luck, without irrigation, because an unirrigated quarter section was enough land for about five cows. The Indians accepted things as they were; that is why they were mostly nomadic, wandering toward greener grass and fuller herds and flowing water. If whites were going to insist on living there—fixed, settled, mortgaged, fenced—the best they could do with the land was graze it. But in those three states, an economical grazing unit was,