Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

impressions. In the same year the expedition returned, General Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the plains on a more southerly course, through what was to become Kansas and Colorado. There he saw “tracts of many leagues . . . where not a speck of vegetable matter existed” and dismissed the whole country as an arid waste. “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” wrote Pike. Major Stephen Long, who followed Pike a decade later, had a similar impression. Long referred to the whole territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains as the Great American Desert—a phrase and an image that held for almost half a century.