Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people of the plains states, still shell-shocked by the great white winter, began to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust. The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have arrived half a century early. When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 homesteading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imperfections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather. How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one year and expired fr...