by:
W hen Frederick Jackson Turner searched for the meaning of the
frontier, he took water for granted. At the meeting point of
civilization and wilderness, Turner claimed, American pioneers
developed the essential qualities of democracy and the American
character. In their development, pioneers faced obstacles and
hardships -- Indians to remove, forests to clear, sod to break, rivers
to ford. They did not face thirst or chronic drought.
In Turner's frontier, effort earned its proper rewards in opportunity
and abundance. A generous, providentially arranged environment gave
the United States the raw material for expansion on an extraordinary
scale. The only sad news came in 1890 with the ostensible close of the
frontier. Nevertheless, by that time expansion had fixed American
expectations in a tone of optimism. The legacy of the frontier, on
the Turner model, would be an ongoing faith in the individual's right
to opportunity and the nation's right to material abundance.
Turner is known as an environmental determinist, famous for his
assertion that nature changed Europeans into Americans. In fact, his
presentation of nature was abstract, providing little sense of
particular places with particular qualities. The wilderness may have
mastered the colonist and then been mastered in turn, but this
transaction took place in a realm closer to poetry than to prosaic
historical reality. Mastered or mastering, Turner's wilderness took
water for granted, and a large share of the continent -- Nevada,
Arizona, much of New Mexico, California, Utah, and eastern Oregon and
Washington -- vanished from frontier history.
The conventions of the Turner thesis did their part to obscu re the
significance of deserts. Another trend in historiography had a similar
effect. Exposing the exaggerated myth of the "Great American Desert,"
historians inadvertently drew attention away from the actual deserts.
Professional historians, personal exp erience shows, will still hear
the declared intention to study the desert as an intention to explore
"the Myth of the Desert." It is odd, but not altogether surprising,
that environments of such powerful reality became associated in the
intellectual's mind with myth and symbol.
Certainly deserts have accumulated a great deal in the way of symbolic
meaning; (any other conclusion would provide a very odd ending for
this particular book.) But that meaning rests on a very solid basis of
physical actuality -- aridity set against hum an needs for water. The
history of American deserts offers a chance to revitalize questions
long discredited by a simplistic environmental determinism. How do
environments affect human behavior? How do people newly introduced to
a particular place figure out what to make of it, both conceptually
and literally? One could hardly prepare a better experiment by
conscious design: Remove a crucial variable and see what changes.
Reduce water, and watch how people adapt or find an alternative to
adaptation.
In 1848, when Mexico surrendered its northern territory, the United
States came into possession of major tracts of desert. What made this
seem a worthwhile acquisition? Why would a nation with a dominant
interest in agricultural expansion want so much unwatered land?
California and a few river valleys in the interior were territories of
recognized value. The intervening arid space had the primary function
of connective tissue; something, after all, had to connect Texas to
California. The de serts in the middle had value primarily as a land
passage, a route for overland travel and eventually for railroads.
The American desert found its initial significance as a place to
cross, to get from one livable place to another. The overland trail in
general was an adventure for many participants, an experience of
novelty, challenge, and opportunity. While a degree of hardship was
intrinsic to the challenge, the desert went too far. In desert travel,
hardship went past adventure and into ordeal. Dust and
heat were burdens enough: jornadas, the utterly waterless stretches
of as many as fifty miles, put the endurance of both humans and
animals through a brutal test. This was, after all, a form of
transportation in which the loss of the oxen, mules, or hors es put
the travelers in a fearful and precarious situation. The desert
passage was an experience of vulnerability, discouragement,
exhaustion, and, at the end, triumph and relief.
Deserts as a result put a particular strain on the optimistic
expectations of pioneers. In 1849, the emigrant Peter Decker noticed
this warning sign near the Humboldt Sink: "Expect to find the worst
desert you ever saw and then find it was worse than you expected." Warned or
not, emigrants still found the desert a shock -- the fullest proof
that the overland route to profit and improvement was not an easy one.
The hardships of the desert, set against expectations of a continent
that made at least minimal provisions for the needs of travelers, led
to the widespread perception that the desert was the most "real" of
environments, the place where, as Twain put it, reality drove romance
into full retreat. In the face of such intractable reality, emigrants
became innocents betrayed; routes that looked clear and direct on maps
turned out to be ordeals; so-called rivers were small, bitter, and
given to sudden disappearances. The desert passage was an interlude of
shaken confidence; the visual distortion of mirages was only one of
the ways in which nature, in the desert, seemed to cheat.
For those who took time for further reflection, the significance of
the desert could only become more troubling. Faced with aridity, the
project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a
non-negotiable limit. By all the conventional standards for value and
habitability, the desert was an irrational environment, a betrayal of
the promise of abundance fulfilled elsewhere in North America.
Certainly the American agrarian ideal had never been put to a worse
test.
With the discovery of minerals, beginning in the late 1850s, the
significance of the desert shifted. Nature had prepared the scene for
a treasure hunt, placing gold and silver in the most trying locations.
Would the Americans and their acquisitive impuls es be up to the
challenge, ready to follow the traces of mineral wealth despite the
most discouraging travel and living conditions? The answer was a
solid yes. If William Lewis Manly could be persuaded to return to
Death Valley, then the prospector's urge carried as much force in
deserts as in mo untains. Mining gave deserts a new value, but it was
the transitory value appropriate to extraction. From a place to get
across, the desert had become a place to get things out of, a meaning
that hardly encouraged feelings of responsibility or attachment in
the new arrivals. The high hopes of prospectors also led them to see
the deserts as a harsh and extreme version of reality. The man who
hoped for riches and found nothing, or even the man who found minerals
too difficult to extract without major investment, was a man meeting
-- and resenting -- reality.
For both overland travelers and prospectors, deserts offered hardship
and scarcity without much compensation in the form of aesthetic charm.
Beauty in the desert could only be discovered with a margin of safety.
As Mark Twain noted, "nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs," and
nothing improved desert scenery like a reliable water supply, a refuge
from heat and direct sunlight, a safe form of transportation requiring
little individual exertion, and an ele ment of choice -- to visit the
desert voluntarily, and to leave at will.
One further prerequisite to desert appreciation deserves mention. Most
nineteenth-century Americans, those in a position to have an opinion
at all, had felt that progress lay in the a dvance of civilization and
the retreat of the desert. Along with leisure, choice, and safety,
desert appreciators, from the turn of the century on, frequently had
one other qualification: discontent with American society. To the
degree that one found civilization unattractive, one could admire the
most intractable of environments for its purity. The convention of the
desert as "the most real" of landscapes carried through, although with
a reversed and now positive meaning. Deserts that had not submitted to
development were, to the appreciators, the most authentic of places,
where existence was stripped to its essentials, without pretense and
without artifice.
As turn-of-the-century appreciators began to find a new value in the
unmastered desert, irrigationists began to celebrate new opportunities
for mastery. Large-scale manipulation of water, with federal backing,
would at last make the desert suitable for the agrarian life. Unlike
emigrants, miners, and appreciators, irrigationists denied the final
reality of deserts. They saw them instead as ultimately transformable;
they could be remade into farms through the alchemy of irrigation.
Irrigation, it is something of a surprise to remember, fell under the
category of conservation. In 1900, constructing reservoirs to hold and
redistribute water meant conserving resources for more efficient use.
The implications here were striking: a forest, managed by
conservationist, sustained-yield principles, was still a forest; a
desert, managed by conservationist princi ples, became something else
entirely -- a farm, a garden, even the site of a town or city. The
basic fact of low rainfall remained the same; the air might remain dry
and clear, but the landscape changed character altogether.
The conditions of deserts thus made the difference between
conservation and preservation noticeable from the beginning. On
matters involving mountains and forests, preservationist John Muir and
conservationist Gifford Pinchot could for a time imagine the mselves
as allies, until the Het ch Hetchy controversy divided them. In the
desert, there were few possibilities for such mistaken alliances. John
Van Dyke may have been the best contemporary candidate for the role of
"the John Muir of desert"; he knew from the beginning that
conservation, in the form of irrigation, only meant destruction of the
purity he wished to preserve.
To say that the distinction was noticeable in hindsight and in the
eyes of some contemporaries is not to say that everyone perceived it.
A publicist like George Wharton James, alternating between praise of
irrigation and praise of the untouched desert, evidently felt no sense
of contradiction. The explanation lay in the apparent scale of the
deserts: in 1906, with such vast spaces of arid land and such a light
populat ion, it hardly looked as if one had to make difficult choices
of priority. Americans could build towns and create farms, and there
would still, it seemed, be plenty of unchanged land suitable for
contemplation.
For all their differences, both manipulators of water and
preservationists held one hero in common. In the twentieth century,
individuals of either persuasion could use the name of John Wesley
Powell with reverence. This is not to say they agreed on the proper
spirit in which Powell's name shoul d be invoked. Federal officials
chose the name of Lake Powell for the reservoir behind the Glen Canyon
Dam; Abbey found such a use of that honored name mortifying.
Who was Powell, and how did he come to be the target of such opposed
loyalties? Born in New York, he grew up in Ohio and developed a
lifelong interest in nature and a loyalty to the family farm. Civil
War service in the Union Army cost him an arm, but nothing in the way
of determination. After the war, he organized his own expeditions to
lit tle-explored areas in the West, becoming an expert in arid lands.
He eventually obtained government sponsorship and led one of the three
main civilian surveys. In 1881, he succeeded Clarence King as director
of the United States Geological Survey. His 869 descent of the
Colorado River was the first recorded exploration of that river and
its canyons. His 1878 Report on the Arid Lands was also unprecedented
as a sober assessment of the region's resources and the most sensible
approach to using them.
It was no mystery that Powell could appeal to such different groups.
Preservationists could admire Powell the adventurer -- the sensitive,
eloquent, and courageous explorer of the river. Reclamationists could
admire Powell the planner -- the practical forecaster of future uses
and value. The wise man of the arid lands worked as a patron for both
causes.
For neither group was Powell a smooth fit as elder statesman.
Preservationists had to look away from his use of phrases like "the
redemption of the Arid Region." The deserts had been lost and were now
to be saved, and this was not altogether what the pre servationists
wanted to hear from Powell. While his Colorado River narrative
revealed an individual fascinated by the forms of arid terrain, his
stance in The Report was hardly that of an appreciator of deserts in
their unimproved state. Powell wanted "the legislative action
necessary to inaugurate the enterprises by which these lands may be
rescued from their present worthless state." Certain areas were beyond
redemption, even for grazing. "In very low altitudes and latitudes,
the grasses are so scant as to be of no value," Powell said; "here the
true deserts are found. The conditions obtain in southern California,
southern Nevada, southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, where
broad reaches of land are naked of vegetation." As an explorer, Powell
found all terrains of value; as a policy-maker, he was willing to draw
a distinction between the valuable and the valueless.
The reclamationists, on the other hand, had their reasons to quote
Powell selectively. In a way that would distinguish him from many
people who claimed to be his successors, Powell always admitted that
water and usable lands were in limited supply. "Within the Arid
Region," he said, "only a small portion of the country is irrigable."
Throughout his career, according to his biographer Wallace Stegner,
Powell insisted "that no more than 20% of the West could ever be
reclaimed even with the most economical use of water." Powell also
wanted a prolonged and careful survey of reservoir sites to precede
any major developments. Congress authorized a major irrigation
survey in 1888, and Powell, as the second director of the United
States Geological Survey, was authorized to withhold lands in the
public domain from settlement until they could be surveyed and
classified. Frustrated western congressmen used budget cuts to reduce
the effectiveness of the geological survey and recover access to
public land.
Powell earned his enemies in several ways, but certainly his prime
offense was to insist on the arid character of much of the West, and
on the limits aridity would place on traditional western freedom and
impulsiveness. He was, on that count, something o f an embarrassment
to his attempted admirers. At an 1893 National Irrigation Congress
meeting in Los Angeles, Powell as the featured speaker disagreed
forcefully with his hosts; their visions of utterly unlimited
irrigation struck him as folly. William Ellsworth Smythe, placing
Powell as "first on the roll of irrigation champions," still showed
scars from these battles. Powell "was a soldier, a poet, a scientist,
a lover of his kind," Smythe said, "but in no sense a man of practical
commercial instincts."
In the twentieth century, for both reclamationists and
preservationists, Powell made a less-than-manageable founding father.
He wrote his major books at a time when a clash between use and
appreciation did not seem inevitable. In Powell's own time, the
Colorado canyonlands, the region of his adventuring, wer e so
difficult and remote that their use was not at issue. His landscape of
appreciation and his landscape of use were simply different places.
When the clash came, appeals to Powell's authority predictably
produced inconsistency.
There are, after all, two basic ways of looking at an isolated river
canyon -- two points of view comparable to the usual responses to a
figure-ground drawing. With the drawing, one can see a vase in the
center, or one can see the silhouettes of two faces; with a river
canyon, one can see the sculptured space in the middle, an ideal place
for physical and visual adventuring, or one can see the two walls of a
reservoir, a construction site where nature has done the bulk of the
work and humans only have to supply the plug. When flood control,
storage of water for municipal use, and, most significantly, the
generation of electricity provided the rationale for Colorado River
dams, the point of view based on utility became for a time the
politically dominant one.
By the mid-twentieth century, no standard of utility offered a clear
guide to desert policy. The deserts could not sustain unlimited
multipurpose use. Eventually, the purposes clashed with each other. It
was only in part a matter of utility versus contem plation,
hydro-electric dams and mining versus recreation. Recreation, by the
1960s, had no simple meaning; between the so-called industrial tour
dependent on access by automobile, and advocates of self-reliance and
minimal intervention, there was at most a narrow strip of common
ground.
A simple model of sequential phases in American attitudes toward
nature had limited relevance for deserts. By this model, pioneers
initially feared and hated nature in the form of wilderness; nature
had them overpowered and they, sensibly, resented it. Then, in a
transitional phase, pioneers fought to conquer nature, and the balance
of power slowly shifted. In a final phase, pioneers mastered nature;
they were, by that very act, no longer pioneers. The completion of the
conquest then m ade it possible to appreciate nature; and in an
apparent happy ending, Americans could create national parks, museums
for the last stand of a safely defeated enemy.
The first two phases--fear and powerlessness, followed by a struggle
for mastery--do in fact correspond to the early phases of desert
history. But the existence of a final, resolved state of mastery and
appreciation is simply illusory. Mastery remains partial; reckonings
with the desert's basic scarcity of water have only been postponed by
the mining of ground water and the usual overallocation of the
Colorado Basin water. Appreciation also remains partial and
conditional. Like George Wharton James, the same individuals might be
perfectly willing to find beauty in the exposed landscapes that al
armed people one hundred years before, and also perfectly willing to
see those landscapes transformed in the higher interests of
agriculture, real estate development, or recreation.
Choosing among conflicting uses of scarce resources is a difficult
matter for any government, perhaps especially so for a democracy. Many
square miles of the American deserts are still in public ownership;
the question of their use is still a subject for public policy and for
public opinion. What do the American people want to do with their
desert? If few of them are going to use it, or visit it, directly,
how do they want it used, and by whom? Is it in the public interest
for the followers of William Ellsworth Smythe to continue the program
of mastery, or is it in the pub lic interest for the followers of Van
Dyke, Krutch, and Abbey to hold the line on the side of preservation?
Will the initiative instead stay in the hands of the heirs of George
Wharton James, ritualizing a windy form of appreciation that permits,
even fac il itates, the commercial transformation of the deserts?
Eventually, the depletion of ground water and excessive demands on
rivers will provide a clearer conclusion to questions about the
desert's future. In the meantime, the significance of the desert now
centers on one question. By what principle of legitimacy are Americans
to claim and allocate the desert's scarce resources?
Turner claimed that 1890 marked the close of the frontier, and yet
frontier-like enterprises failed to observe that deadline. To the same
degree, the prophets who defined limits on the basis of aridity spoke
prematurely. Speculation, boom towns, extractive industries, major
population shifts, development of vacant land -- many of the central
phenomena of the frontier -- ran continuously past 1890 and past the
borders of aridity. Nineteenth-century territorial expansion blended
into twentieth-century economic expansion in a way that left few
boundaries in time or space. The deserts seemed to draw line, and
Americans pushed past it. Can Americans now choose for themselves an
appropriate line -- and hold to it?
What, after all, are the deserts worth? The legacy of the overland
trail was a judgment of arid vacancy. That legacy lasted into the
twentieth century and up to the present. Describing the distinctive
landscape of the Far West, the historian of the twent ieth-century
West Gerald Nash demonstrated the power of the overland legacy: "The
only vestiges of life," he said, "could be found in towns and cities
that served as oases -- ce nters of human activity in the midst of the
seemingly endless sea of nothingness." From that perspective Krutch's
and Abbey's energetic attempts to popularize desert appreciation -- to
replace an image of vacancy with life and activity -- were writings in
the sand.
To add to the irony, technology and war had found new use for vacant
space. World War II redirected much of the western economy toward
defense industries and military development. The large-scale testing
of planes, tanks, guns, and bombs required wide open spaces --
unoccupied land that would be easy to acquire and suitable for
simulated attack. The deserts provided ideal locations undeveloped
enough so that little in the way of improvement would be lost,
isolated so that secrecy could be maintained. Since undeveloped
deserts were already by popular consensus vacant and useless, bombing
could hardly hurt them. In Arizona's Yuma Proving Ground and Luke Air
Force Base, in Californiar's China Lake Naval Weapons Center,
Randsburgh Wash Test Range, Camp Irwin Edwards Air Force Base,
Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base, and Chocolate Mountains Aerial
Gunnery Range, in Nevada's Tonopa Test Range, Nellis Air Force Range,
and Atomic Energy Commission Nuclear Testing Site, in New Mexico's
White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss Military Reservation, and in
Utah's Dugway Proving Groundsand Wendover Bombing and Gunnery Range,
defense projects made it clear that an "endless sea of nothingness"
had its uses.
When the scientists at Los Alamos needed a place to test the first
atomic bomb, the New Mexico desert met the job requirements. The place
called Trinity on the old Jornada del Muerto connecting El Paso to
Santa Fe was, as Lansing Lamont wrote, "the perfect place to test the
bomb." It was "isolated," "flat," "so uninhabitable that the nearest
signs of civilization were a pair of abandoned coal mining towns, Troy
and Carthage.... If disaster occurred, few besides the scientists at
Trinity would be victims." Even Joseph Wood Krutch commented on the
fit between place and purpose: "There must be very few places in the
United States so suitable for such an experiment; few, that is to say,
either so remote or so devoid of anything to be destroyed." It was
almost providential -- the way in which aridity had reserved certain
regions from settlement, and therefore left them suitable for
bombing.
To the north and west of Trinity, twentieth-century enterprise
revealed other ways of making use of deserts. When mining proved a
changeable and unreliable base for prosperity, the state legislature
of Nevada entertained other routes to revenue. In 1931, the
legislators added wonderfully to the resources of Nevada by legalizing
gambling. Here was a sensible and practical way of capitalizing on
uncertainty; gambling followed symmetrically in the traditions of
Americans in deserts. Overland emigrants had been gamblers, staking
their lives on the uncertainties and risks of desert traveling.
Prospectors had been gamblers, staking their resources and sometimes
their lives on the chances and hazards of desert treasure-hunting.
Irrigationists were gamblers, staking their enterprise on the
unlimited extendability of desert water sources and on the changing
currents of national politics. Tourist and town promoters were and are
ga mblers, staking their businesses on the uncertain capacity of the
deserts to sustain heavy settlement and use. The eager crowds who
flocked to the tables and slot machines of Las Vegas were well within
the tradition of travelers in, as John W. Audubon described it in
1849, "a doubtful country."
When gamblers fail to get what they want, it is second nature for them
to claim betrayal. Describing contemporary Americans, Richard Barnet
has analyzed the response to resource scarcity: "The new mood," he
said, "is no conventional pessimism, but rather a loss of faith rooted in a sense of betrayal." For four centuries
nature in the New World offered Euro-Americans promises of abundance.
One region reneged on that promise from the beginning. Facing the
uncooperative behavior of nature in the desert, nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans
experienced at least briefly a version of that "loss of faith rooted
in a sense of betrayal." William Ellsworth Smythe and his heirs have
done their best to shore up the faith, but the doubts aroused by
aridity do not go away. This is the stage in the game in which the
gamblers could profitably refrain from further bets, and reconsider
their strategy.
PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK
Desert Passages, pp. 15-26