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The Garden-Desert Continuum Competing Views of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century

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The Garden-Desert Continuum Competing Views of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 1985 The Garden-Desert Continuum Competing Views Of The Great Plains In The Nineteenth Century John L. Allen University of Connecticut Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Allen, John L., "The Garden-Desert Continuum Competing Views Of The Great Plains In The Nineteenth Century" (1985). Great Plains Quarterly. 1831. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1831 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. THE GARDEN .. DESERT CONTINUUM COMPETING VIEWS OF THE GREAT PLAINS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY JOHN L. ALLEN In the central portion of the great American Listen as one may, there is no shadow of a continent there lies an arid and repulsive sound in all that mighty wilderness; nothing desert which, for many a long year, served as but silence-complete and heart subduing a barrier against the advance of civilization. silence. From the Cordillera to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Colorado in the south, is a region of desolation and silence . enormous plains With these words, a nineteenth-century which, in winter, are white with snow and, British author-who might better have stuck in summer, are gray with the saline alkali with the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories that dust. They all preserve the common charac­ made him famous-illustrated a conception of teristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and the American Great Plains that was, according misery . ... In this stretch of country there is to the conventional historical interpretation of no sign of life, nor of anything appertaining American images of the interior, the dominant to life. There is no bird in the steel-blue view of that region during the first sixty years heaven, no movement upon the dull gray of the 1800s. American historians and geog­ earth-above all, there is absolute silence. raphers have argued that the myth of the Great American Desert dominated the pre­ Civil War view of the Great Plains and that it proved itself to be very hard to eradicate from John L. Allen's major publications in historical American maps and minds. 1 It was this con­ geography and the environment include Passage ception of the plains as desert, according to the through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the traditional interpretation, that caused the Image of the American Northwest (1975). He is American folk migration westward to leap professor of geography at the University of Con­ over the region during its drive to the Pacific in necticut. the 1840s and 1850s. Haunted by visions of broiling sands and blinding sun, Americans [GPQ 5 (Fall 1985): 207-220.] hastened across the plains between the Mis- 207 208 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 1985 souri River and the Rocky Mountains to the people. more attractive regions of Oregon and Califor­ This conventional understanding of Amer­ nia. The Great Plains were a barrier to be ican attitudes toward the Great Plains in the crossed with all possible speed during the nineteenth century is neither completely inval­ migrations, and the settlement of the great id nor necessarily incorrect; but it is too western agricultural region was delayed several simplistic to be fully satisfying. The contention decades by the Desert image. that the majority of Americans held to a But this predominant view of the plains as Desert conception of the Great Plains before Desert did not last forever-or so goes the the Civil War and then to a Garden concept conventional wisdom. During the years follow­ afterward stems from an epistemology based ing the Civil War, the Desert image was upon induction, where error results from the replaced by a counter-myth, a rival fancy: a failure to follow proper inductive procedures view of the plains as Garden of the World. and from overgeneralization based upon too few facts.4 To claim the universal acceptance, It is a museum of wonder and value .... Its at any given time, of stereotyped images of the surface was covered with fields of grain, Great Plains is to ignore-as the holders of whose market proceeds would more than those myths themselves ignored-the presence pay for the land; and near the center was a of a considerable array of data to the contrary. spring and a grove which encircled a happy Proponents of the conventional interpretation home filled with many tokens of prosperity have argued the existence of nearly universal and the merry music of children. Half myths of Garden and Desert on the basis of concealed from view were barns, pens, the geographical lore available to the literate coops, granary, shed for wagons, plows and American public during the pre- and post­ machinery, all in good order, while farther Civil War periods. The failure of this argument away and central in a grass plat shaded by lies in a basic misunderstanding of geograph­ two friendly elms was a white school house. ical images or in a misunderstanding of how In the distance it looked like a pearl in an geographical information or impressions are emerald setting. Z acquired, transmitted, modified, and retained within the minds of a people. An image cannot After the war, as Americans moved into be defined only on the basis of the geograph­ the Great Plains, up the valleys of the Platte ical information available. It is not enough, for and Kansas and Missouri rivers, they began to example, to say that because travel accounts rebel against the slanderous terminology of the mentioned desert conditions and some geo­ Great American Desert proponents of the graphies and school textbooks of the period period before 1860. Followers of the traditional between 1830 and 1860 printed "Great Ameri­ interpretation have eloquently recounted how can Desert" in the blank spaces west of the the plains settlers replaced the myth of the Mississippi River that the majority of Ameri­ Desert with the myth of the Garden.) From cans during those years thought of the plains earliest colonial times, Europeans and Euro­ as a desert. Nor is it enough to say that because peans-become-Americans had seen the land of the Union Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and North­ the Atlantic seaboard settlements as a New ern Pacific railroads, along w!th the western World Garden, long kept virgin to redress the land speclilators and newspapers, flooded the overcultivation of the Old World. It was easy country with literature describing the Great to extend this myth beyond the Mississippi Plains as Garden of the World that the Garden and to view the plains, like the seaboard of view became dominant in the years following earlier times, as a land of promise, an Eden of the Civil War. vacant and fertile land held back by the The popular view of the environment or of Creator until it was needed by his chosen regions cannot be treated this simplistically. THE GARDEN-DESERT CONTINUUM 209 To begin, the Great Plains themselves do not pers and periodicals; the informal lore includes constitute a unified or homogeneous region: in private correspondence and folk literature. terms of geographic reality, some areas are While not all the available literature has been more gardenlike while others are more desert­ investigated, a representative sample of each like. But more important is what the mind type for each of the three time periods has does to that geographic reality. The mind is been utilized. These samples have been se­ like a mirror that reflects what it perceives; the lected so as to include materials published and nature and appearance of the reflected image is available in different geographical areas and determined by the conditions of the mirror­ settings (such as the Northeast, the Southeast, whether it is cracked, warped, spotted, or the Middle West, the frontier, urban areas, otherwise modified by both collective and and rural areas). Each sample group was personal experience. All images-and this is subjected to content analysis for key words particularly true of regional images or patterns and phrases carrying connotations of either of belief about the nature and content of a Garden or Desert elements. For example, definable area-are distorted and discolored by words such as "desert," "barren," "sterile," and the quality of the minds in which they have "arid" were judged to be indicative of a Desert been lodged. 5 It is for this reason that William image of the plains, while words such as Goetzmann has spoken of explorers as being "fertile," "pleasant," "salubrious," "pasture," "programmed" by the times and conditions in "meadow," and "savanna" were assumed to which they operated.6 And it is for this reason carry Garden connotations. On the basis of also that we cannot speak accurately of "an the content analysis, judgments were made as image" of the Great Plains in the nineteenth to the probability of the image held by a century. Rather, we must speak of images; particular group in a specific region during a during the nineteenth century there was no particular time period being oriented toward single, universally accepted view of the plains. either the Garden or Desert poles of the Rather, at any given time during the 1800s, continuum of opinion. In addition, lengthier there were a number of images, arranged on a descriptions that seemed typical of the images continuum of opinion with the Great Ameri­ (again, on the basis of the content analysis) can Desert and the Garden of the World have been selected and are cited as examples.; occupying polar positions.
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