Read Online Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marc Reisner
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the morning, one of them flings a glance upriver and freezes. There are two boats coming down, and, unless they are ghosts, the people inside them seem to be alive.
It had taken three months and six days for the expedition to travel from Green River to Grand Wash Cliffs. Though wilder water than the Colorado is routinely run today, few river runners would dispute that the Powell expedition accomplished the most impressive feat of perilous river exploration in history. But the expedition ended, as fate would have it, on an ironically tragic note. While Powell and those who stayed with him were being fed and pumped for information by the Mormons, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn were lying dead on the rim of the Grand Canyon, murdered by a band of Shivwits Indians. Later there were rumors that they had molested a Shivwits girl, but the Indian wars were raging and they may have been killed simply for taking the band by surprise. That the Shivwits shot Powell’s companions full of holes contains a cold irony, for years later, after Powell had sat around many campfires with them, the Shivwits tribe would come to regard the one-armed major as their most faithful white friend.
When John Wesley Powell first left Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1867, bound for Denver and the valley of the Green River, the region he crossed was virtually empty. It was like modern interior Alaska, after removing Fairbanks. Indians were more common than whites, and buffalo were much more prevalent than Indians. By the time he reached the ninety-eighth meridian, about two-fifths of the way across Nebraska, the light dusting of settlers’ towns and farms had thinned out to nothing. Before him were another five hundred miles of virgin plains, almost uninhabited by whites; then there was Denver, a rowdy little town that owed its existence mainly to furs and gold, and not much else until one got to Salt Lake and California.
On each successive trip west the changes took away Powell’s breath. The breaking wave of settlement was eating up half a meridian a year; from one season to the next, settlements were thirty miles farther out. By the late 1870s, the hundredth meridian had been fatefully crossed. There were homes sprouting in central Nebraska, miles from water, trees, and neighbors, their occupants living in sod dugouts suggestive of termite mounds. Farms began to grow up around Denver, where a type of agriculture thoroughly alien to America’s farmers—irrigation—was being experimented with. (Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune —the publisher whose words “Go west, young man” galvanized the nineteenth century—was mainly responsible for this; he had dispatched his agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, to a spot north of Denver to found a utopian irrigation colony which, not surprisingly, became Greeley, Colorado. The colony appeared to be a success, even forgetting the large annual contribution from Greeley.) On their way across the plains, travelers could see huge rolling clouds of dust on the southern horizon, caused by cattle drives from Texas to railheads at Dodge and Kansas City. The plains were being dug up; the buffalo were being annihilated to starve the Indians and make way for cows; the vanishing tribes were being herded like cattle onto reservations.
This enormous gush of humanity pouring into a region still marked on some maps as the Great American Desert was encouraged by wishful thinking, by salesmanship, that most American of motivating forces, and, most of all, by natural caprice. For a number of years after 1865, a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains. Guides leading wagon trains to Oregon reported that western Nebraska, usually blond from drought or black from prairie fires, had turned opalescent green. Late in the 1870s, the boundary of the Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of
It had taken three months and six days for the expedition to travel from Green River to Grand Wash Cliffs. Though wilder water than the Colorado is routinely run today, few river runners would dispute that the Powell expedition accomplished the most impressive feat of perilous river exploration in history. But the expedition ended, as fate would have it, on an ironically tragic note. While Powell and those who stayed with him were being fed and pumped for information by the Mormons, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn were lying dead on the rim of the Grand Canyon, murdered by a band of Shivwits Indians. Later there were rumors that they had molested a Shivwits girl, but the Indian wars were raging and they may have been killed simply for taking the band by surprise. That the Shivwits shot Powell’s companions full of holes contains a cold irony, for years later, after Powell had sat around many campfires with them, the Shivwits tribe would come to regard the one-armed major as their most faithful white friend.
When John Wesley Powell first left Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1867, bound for Denver and the valley of the Green River, the region he crossed was virtually empty. It was like modern interior Alaska, after removing Fairbanks. Indians were more common than whites, and buffalo were much more prevalent than Indians. By the time he reached the ninety-eighth meridian, about two-fifths of the way across Nebraska, the light dusting of settlers’ towns and farms had thinned out to nothing. Before him were another five hundred miles of virgin plains, almost uninhabited by whites; then there was Denver, a rowdy little town that owed its existence mainly to furs and gold, and not much else until one got to Salt Lake and California.
On each successive trip west the changes took away Powell’s breath. The breaking wave of settlement was eating up half a meridian a year; from one season to the next, settlements were thirty miles farther out. By the late 1870s, the hundredth meridian had been fatefully crossed. There were homes sprouting in central Nebraska, miles from water, trees, and neighbors, their occupants living in sod dugouts suggestive of termite mounds. Farms began to grow up around Denver, where a type of agriculture thoroughly alien to America’s farmers—irrigation—was being experimented with. (Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune —the publisher whose words “Go west, young man” galvanized the nineteenth century—was mainly responsible for this; he had dispatched his agricultural editor, Nathan Meeker, to a spot north of Denver to found a utopian irrigation colony which, not surprisingly, became Greeley, Colorado. The colony appeared to be a success, even forgetting the large annual contribution from Greeley.) On their way across the plains, travelers could see huge rolling clouds of dust on the southern horizon, caused by cattle drives from Texas to railheads at Dodge and Kansas City. The plains were being dug up; the buffalo were being annihilated to starve the Indians and make way for cows; the vanishing tribes were being herded like cattle onto reservations.
This enormous gush of humanity pouring into a region still marked on some maps as the Great American Desert was encouraged by wishful thinking, by salesmanship, that most American of motivating forces, and, most of all, by natural caprice. For a number of years after 1865, a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains. Guides leading wagon trains to Oregon reported that western Nebraska, usually blond from drought or black from prairie fires, had turned opalescent green. Late in the 1870s, the boundary of the Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of
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