Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [283]
CHAPTER TWELVE
Things Fall Apart
On a hydrographic map, the outline of the Ogallala Aquifer resembles the South American and African continents—broad and bulbous to the north, tapering to a narrow cape at the southern end. Driving its entire length—from southern South Dakota down into the heart of West Texas, where it feathers out just above the Pecos River—takes two long days and feels almost like a transcontinental trip, the more so because the landscape is relentlessly the same: the same flatness, the same treelessness, the same curveless thirty-mile stretches of road. All that changes is the crops: sorghum, then corn, then sorghum, then corn, then alfalfa, wheat, cotton—enough cotton, one would think, to clothe all humanity.
This was the country that Coronado traversed, looking for the gold cities of Cibola; it is the country that cost him half his men, his reputation, and nearly his life. In Coronado’s time, it grew nothing but short grass, on which millions of buffalo feasted; feasting on them were grizzly bears, prairie wolves, vultures, and an unknown number of Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne. The tribes, widely regarded as ferocious, merely reflected the landscape itself. Even the Indians used the open plains mainly for seasonal hunting, retreating to river valleys when the weather became extreme—which was a good part of the time. The southern high plains, from Colorado south to the hill country of Texas, never knew a permanent civilization, as far as archaeologists can tell. There was a Llano culture as early as 10,000 B.C., followed by others that came and went like snow. Around 1300 B.C., Pueblo Indians occupied the region, but abandoned it less than a century later. The Comanche, superb horsemen, may have shunned the open plains as much as possible because there was no tree where one could tie up one’s mount. A place where one couldn’t even secure a horse was no place to try to anchor a civilization.
White men were to learn that lesson, repeatedly, after the buffalo and the Indians were vanquished and gone. During the 1860s and 1870s the plains hosted great cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but those ended in drought, overgrazing, and falling meat prices. Depauperized of much of its grass and invaded by mesquite and weeds, the region emptied out. But a decade of wet weather and demand for bread during and after the First World War sparked a repopulation, and the plains became a sea of wheat. Then came the Dust Bowl. After each calamity, a residual population managed to remain, surviving on a few cattle, some defiant wheat, the government, and finally, oil and natural gas. It was one of those survivors who sank a water well, hooked up a new invention—a diesel-driven centrifugal pump—and discovered the region’s bounteous secret: underneath it, confined in a closed-basin aquifer, was enough fresh water to fill Lake Huron.
Everyone had always known there was water below. If you sank a well and erected a windmill-driven pump, you got enough for a family and a few head of stock. But windmills could bring up only a few gallons a minute and offered no clue as to how much water was actually down there. The centrifugal pump, which could raise eight hundred gallons a minute or more, did, and when geologists took a closer look they confirmed the evidence offered by the pumps. Under the plains was the trapped runoff of several