Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [21]
But an eminent Nebraska natural scientist, Samuel Aughey, looked at the tree planting data and noted that the rains began before the trees. His natural conclusion was that it must be settlement. “There is, however, another cause, not heretefore mentioned, most potently acting to produce all the changes in rainfall that the facts indicate have taken place. What then is that cause?” Aughey wrote. “It is the great increase in the absorptive power of the soil, wrought by cultivation, that has caused, and continues to cause an increasing rainfall in the State.”23
Now that had a nice ring to it. By farming the land, settlers made the climate around the land better. That’s a theory on which people can hang all kinds of real estate speculation—and so they did. Charles Dana Wilber, a promoter for the Burlington Railroad and the great state of Nebraska, gave the arid West’s boosters a catch phrase summarizing Aughey’s work: “Rain follows the plow,” Wilber declared.24 He was quite amazingly wrong. As the dust bowl of the 1930s would show, drought followed the plow, as small farmers proved unable to keep erosion in check themselves or band together to reduce those problems as they did in later years.25
Regardless, railroad boosters took that catchphrase into the cities of Reconstruction-era America to tout the Great Plains. In the process, of course, their own land holdings and business operations would get much more profitable. Albert N. Williams, in The Water and the Power, stated,
The rail companies, attempting to build up the regions which they served, put a battalion of high-pressure salesmen into crowded and troubled Eastern cities, there to shout the wonders of the Great Plains: Kansas and Nebraska, for the most part. These schemers carried with them artists’ conceptions of farming in that dry and dusty region—wonderfully colored prints of farmers standing beside twenty-foot corn stalks, hundred-pound squishe, or whatever the plural of squash is, melons which would break a man’s back in the picking, and other agricultural wonders.26
The boosters had a problem, though. People had heard that the West was as dry as a bone. John Wesley Powell had told them in 1869 that anywhere west of the hundredth meridian and east of the Pacific Coast was just too damn dry for anyone to seriously consider living and farming.27 And that’s where Wilber’s work came in handy: Why, sure, it had been too dry . . . but settlement was fixing all that. Williams continued,
When the normally cautious New Englander would suggest that he had heard from travelers that the Plains were as dry as a bishop’s cupboard, he would be told either one of two fantastic fictions: that the very act of plowing up the unbroken sod made it rain; or that there was a strange natural phenomenon taking place, a “Rain Belt” which was moving eastward from the Rocky Mountains at the rate of twenty miles a year, and that the canny investor would do well to put himself in hock for as many parched acres as he could swing, after which he had only to wait a short time until the Belt would arrive, upon which occasion he could subdivide and sell to less foresighted individuals at a fat and un-Christian profit.28
It was a good sales pitch and it worked like a charm. People came from all over. Then, the rain stopped and the region regressed to its climactic mean. About half the settlers of western Kansas tucked tail and ran back East from 1888 to 1892, painting their wagons with bumper sticker–like slogans such as “In God We Trusted, In Kansas We Busted.”29 Some turned to “rainmakers” who fired explosions into the skies or cooked up special chemicals, usually including sulfur from traveling wagons.30
The practical among them who still had money left bought windmills to bring up the subsurface water. The rest—broke, starving, and nearly out of water—built their own. Webb wrote,