Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The greatest irony of Coronado’s adventure was that he must have passed within a few miles of the gold and silver lodes at Tombstone and Tubac, Arizona. A few of his party, on a side excursion, discovered the Grand Canyon, but they were unimpressed by its beauty, and guessed the width of the Colorado River far below them at eight feet or so. The Rio Grande, which would later sustain the only appreciable Spanish settlements outside of California, didn’t impress them, either. When he returned to Guadalajara, Coronado was put on trial for inept leadership, which, though an utterly unfounded charge, was enough to discourage would-be successors who might have discovered the precious metals that would have induced Spain to lay a far stronger claim on the New World. His expedition also lost a few horses, which found their way into the hands of the native Americans. The two dominant tribes of the Southwest, the Apache and Comanche, soon evolved into the best horsemen who ever lived, and their ferocity toward excursionists made them formidable adversaries of the Spaniards who tried to settle the region later. The Spanish did make a more than desultory try at establishing a civilization in California, which was more to their liking than the remainder of the West. (And, in fact, the huge California land grants doled out by the king established a pattern of giant fiefdoms that persists there to this day.) But they never found gold in California, so the territory didn’t seem worth a fi...