Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In 1803, the United States of America consisted of sixteen states along the Atlantic Seaboard, three-quarters of whose area was still untrammeled wilderness, and a vast unmapped tract across the Appalachian Mountains—which would metamorphose, more quickly than anyone might have expected, into the likes of Cleveland and Detroit. In that same year, the new First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, sat in Paris wrestling with a question: what to conquer? France had recently acquired a million square miles of terrain in North America from Spain—Spain having gotten it originally from France—and the prospect of a huge colonial empire in the New World was tempting. On the other hand, here was Europe—settled, tamed, productive—waiting for civilized dominion by the French. For what would history remember him better—the conquest of Russia or the conquest of buffalo? The new President of the United States was Thomas Jefferson, an ardent Francophile, but, above all, a practical man. Jefferson knew better than anyone that a French presence in the New World could only be considered a threat. Jefferson was also exceedingly clever, and he was not above a little ruse. “The day that France takes possession of Louisiana,” he wrote in a message to his ministers in Paris, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Having said that, Jefferson, through the offices of a Franco-American gunpowder manufacturer named du Pont de Nemours, then inaugurated a hallowed presidential trad...