After all, there is no desert. Within the memory of comparatively
young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the
Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a
region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as
half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky
Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable
rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of
snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of
lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. It was rutted by chasms
and washes, the channels of rivers that thundered with a passion of
water for a single month in the year, and were ash-dry for the other
eleven. Some stretched eastward toward the Mississippi, some southward
toward the Gulf, and some westward toward the Pacific. It was an empire
of wild grandeur, of majestic heights and appalling depths, of silent
waste places, of barbaric beauty of coloring, of volcanoes and the
titanic work of volcanoes, of fierce wild beasts and wilder men; but
it was a desert. Here, for months at a time, no rain came to moisten
the parched earth, and there were few clouds to obscure the heat of
a blazing sun. The earth became dust and ashes, all but uninhabited
and impassable, here grown up to cactus and greasewood and sage, here
to gray grass, here to nothing--a place where animals dropped in
their tracks from heat and thirst, and shriveled there, undecaying,
until their ragged hides crumpled like parchment over their gaunt
skeletons. Many a pioneer bound for the El Dorado of California felt
the tooth of the desert, and left his bones to whiten on the trail as
a dreadful evidence of the rigor of these waste places. This was the
Great American Desert, the irreclaimable waste of fifty years ago, the
dread-spot of the continent. To-day you may seek it in vain.
When reduced to its essence, the work of every great explorer and
pioneer in the West has consisted in showing that the desert was no
desert. It was a cramped and mendicant imagination and a weak faith in
humanity that first called it a desert, and it has required the life of
many a bold man to dispel that error. The pioneer cow-man came in and
saw the dry bunch-grass of the plains. "This is no desert," he said;
"this is pasture-land," and straightway thirty million cattle were
feeding on the ranges. A colony of Mormons, driven to the wilderness
by persecution, saw, with the faith of a Moses, green fields blooming
where the cactus grew, and in a few years a great city had risen in
the midst of a fertile valley, and a new commonwealth had been born. A
Powell came and disclosed the possibilities of the desert when watered
from rivers that had long run to waste, and a hundred valleys began to
bloom, and millions of acres of barren desert to grow the richest crops
on the continent. Miners came, found gold and silver and copper in the
hills, and built a thousand camps; the railroads divided the great
desert with a maze of steel trails until it was a veritable patchwork
of civilization; and timid tourists came and camped, and went away
better and braver. To-day several million Americans are living in the
desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time,
and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green
hills of New England.
A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where
he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true
desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places.
I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as
far as the eye can reach--sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling
mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus,
gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no
man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever
will again. But what is that sound--_click_, _click_, _click_--that
comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert.
Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly,
for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have
a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed
for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all
its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here
are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in
carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place,
having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and
so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the
_click_, _click_ of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an
indomitable, conquering humanity.
Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that, and you will
see a still stranger sight--a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed
iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm,
weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically
dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind
burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and
grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the
bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the
sand, with the water following in a broad brown band.
[Illustration: View among the cacti.]
"Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will
irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years
there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that
mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the
city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near
those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all
the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for
gold; see herders setting up windmills; see farmers boring holes for
artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat
roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels,
and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man
dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and
your heart will throb with the pride of it--this splendid human energy
and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their
homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they
die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying
wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak
and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh
at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a
little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future.
Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts.
Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are
still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his
physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so
incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him
and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may
be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards
of a spring, and die there of thirst.
To him, in such cases, it is all as much of a desert and quite as
dangerous as if there were not a human habitation within a thousand
miles. But to the man who is reasonably schooled in the wisdom of
trails and the signs of water, the desert has been robbed of nearly
all its terrors. With proper care and preparation he may go anywhere
without fear, although frequently not without acute discomfort and
even suffering.
The desert still maintains its fastnesses in the West. There are some
spots better entitled to the name than others, but each year these
fastnesses are shrinking before the advance of human enterprise, as the
water might rise over the land, leaving the high and difficult places
to the last. So these islands are scattered through several States and
Territories, mostly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah
and Oregon, in the great valley lying between the main ridge of the
Rocky Mountains, on the east, and the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and
the Coast Range on the west. Chief among them are the Mohave Desert,
in southeastern California, a territory as large as Switzerland;
the Colorado and Gila deserts of southwestern Arizona and Southern
California; the marvelous Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona; and
the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. Opening northward from the Mohave
Desert lies Death Valley, perhaps the most desolate and forbidding
spot in America, though comparatively small in extent. Yet there are
few places even in these desert strongholds that are wholly without
life of one sort or another, and a large proportion of them could be
reclaimed, if water were available. Even as it is, not one can bar
human activity; railroads have been built directly across three of
the worst of them; mines are being opened, and oil-wells driven; land
is being reclaimed by irrigation; and even in the fastnesses of Death
Valley there are many mining-camps and an extensive borax industry. In
all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully
forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the
man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, where fire has
followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste
thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green
forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which
nature molds even the most unpromising material; the other is hideous,
grotesque, pitiful, a reminder of the reckless wastefulness of man.
The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty
of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first,
yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls
and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a
man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not
more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert
for the long hot stretches of their open land.
Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon
its power of resistance to thirst. One marvels at the consummate
ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities,
turning every capability to the conservation of such little water
as there is. Everything in the desert has its own story of economy,
patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore
the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all
other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants
and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks
upon the men who dwell in its wastes.
Everywhere there are evidences of the terrible struggle for water--a
struggle in which men who come to the desert must instantly engage:
every wagon that crosses the desert carries its barrel of water; every
man who sets out takes with him a canteen; every ranch has its windmill
and its water-barrel. Water is the only thing that is not free. Stop
at a desert well, and a sign offers water at ten cents or five cents a
head for your horses.
Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who
has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in
the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and
beautiful.
Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert,
suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a
deep, clear blue above--nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air--the
stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy,
a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the
far-off echoing scream of some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl?
The horses loom big and dark where they feed in the near distance;
here and there on the top of a dry yucca-stalk an owl or a hawk sits
outlined in black against the sky; otherwise there is nothing anywhere
to break the long, smooth line of the horizon.
It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty
of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and
have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get
down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. "Few in these
hot, dim, frictiony times," says John Muir, "are quite sane or free;
choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much
good and making so much money--or so little--they are no longer good
themselves." But here in the desert there yet remain places of wildness
and solitude and quiet; there is room here to turn without rubbing
elbows, places where one may yet find refreshment.