Crafting and Consuming an American Sonoran Desert: Global Visions, Regional Nature and National Meaning

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CRAFTING AND CONSUMING AN AMERICAN SONORAN DESERT: GLOBAL

VISIONS, REGIONAL NATURE AND NATIONAL MEANING

Marcus Alexander Burtner

______

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2012 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Marcus A. Burtner entitled “Crafting and Consuming an American Sonoran Desert: Global Visions, Regional Nature, and National Meaning.” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

______Date: 1/7/13 Katherine Morrissey

______Date: 1/7/13 Douglas Weiner

______Date: 1/7/13 Jeremy Vetter

______Date: 1/7/13 Jack C. Mutchler

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: 1/7/13 Dissertation Director: Katherine Morrissey

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED Marcus A. Burtner

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I arrived in the Sonoran Desert through the generosity of many people whom I now acknowledge. First, my birth family, Judy, Les, Matthew, Garrett, and Jesse continually inspire me toward new goals. They all provide motivating examples through their extraordinary lives. They are part of a wider ring of my amazing family who shape my expectations and provide support and love. Second, I want to thank my academic family. Many people helped my along the way. I had a great senior thesis advisor in the late Reese Kelly at Fort Lewis College. The Faculty and students of Northern Arizona College welcomed me back into academia after nearly a decade of knocking about North America. Professors Michael Amundson, Susan Deeds, Cynthia Kosso, Eric Meeks, George Lubick, Scott Reese, and Margaret Morley created a productive and provocative environment that I will always treasure. David Neshiem, Jon Olivera, Beth Moser, and a host of other peers helped make Flagstaff an exciting home and intellectual hotbed. I owe a special debt to Mike Amundson who bravely oversaw a thesis on Alaskan salmon by asking “how would you explain this idea if we were talking about bison?” He also introduced me to Katherine Morrissey who is the real reason I found myself studying the desert in Tucson. Katherine oversaw my introduction to the Sonoran Desert with a National Park Service project on Saguaro National Park. She keeps opening doors and inviting me to succeed and I thank her for all these opportunities and support. She is a great mentor and has been the motor of my PhD program. She shaped much that is good in this document and in my practice of history. I also wish to thank my professors and peers, Kevin Gosner, Doug Weiner, Jeremy Vetter, Roger Nichols, Michael Schaller, Ben Irvin, J. C. Mutchler, Neil Prendergast, Risha Druckman, Sigma Colon, Ian Draves, Amy Grey, Mary Kovel, James Lockhart, Megan Prins, Tyler Ralston, Vikas Rathee, Robbie Scott, Robbin Zenger and many others who wove history and fun into a Tucson life. A special thanks to Gina Wasson and Vicky Parker for all their help and support. Finally, thanks to Barbara Burtner who also dared to move to the Sonoran Desert, re-invent her life, and create our family.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………….7 ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………9 INTRODUCTION: CONSUMING AND PRODUCING SONORAN DESERT NATURE………………………………………………………………………………...10 Historiography…………………………………………………………………...12 Sonoran Desert…………………………………………………………………..24 Description of the Work…………………………………………………………27 CHAPTER 1: METAPHORS OF PLACE UNDER THE CACTUS FLAG……………33 Southern Deserts: American Encounters with the Lower Sonoran……………...33 Overwriting a Region: From Pimeriá Alta to U.S. Southern Desert…………….38 Cacti as Global Commodities……………………………………………………44 Acting out a Geography of American Conquest………………………………...46 Remapping the Known World…………………………………………………...52 Focusing the Imperial Gaze with the Language of Natural Science……………..59 Placing Cacti in their Regional Context………………………………………….63 The Global Vision: Displacing Cacti into Exotic Lands………………………...68 CHAPTER 2: A COLONIAL SENSE OF TIME, SONORAN DESERT ANTIQUITY……………………………………………………72 The Human Metrics of Civilization……………………………………………...73 Histories Brought to Bear on Antiquities………………………………………..75 Human Origins and Historical Musings…………………………………………76 Crafting the Sonoran Desert’s Ethnographic Present…………………………....93 Sonoran Desert Encounters and Colonial Analogies…………………………….96 The Emerging Sonoran Desert Archive………………………………………...104 CHAPTER 3: FRIENDLY AND FAMILIAR NATURE: ESTABLISHING THE CONNECTIONS AND COLLECTIONS OF AN AMERICAN SONORAN DESERT, 1880-1910…………………………………………………………………..109 An American place in the desert……………………………………………….109 Sonoran Desert Nature in National Histories…………………………………..113 Collecting cacti and selling meaning…………………………………………...118 Saturation studies: Federal scientists remap the Sonoran Desert………………122 Local centers for constructing the Region……………………………………...136 The Desert Botanical Lab………………………………………………………143 Translating Nineteenth-Century Paper Deserts into Desert Science…………...145 A homeland through desert research…………………………………………...153 CHAPTER 4: CRAFTING AND CONSUMING THE SONORAN DESERT………155 North American Deserts: The Research Agenda………………………………160 Tumamoc Hill Labscape……………………………………………………….161 Desert Basins…………………………………………………………………...169 Papagueria………………………………………………………………………180 Crafting and Consuming the Sonoran Desert…………………………………..186 From Labscapes to Regional Description………………………………………187 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS – CONTINUED

CHAPTER 5: DOMESTICATING SONORAN DESERT NATURE: CONSUMING CACTI AND PLANTING PROXY LANDSCAPES………………....189 Consuming Desert Nature as Identity…………………………………………..189 Sonoran Desert Proxy: Saguaro National Monument…………………………..191 Cactus Gardens: Metaphors of Place…………………………………………...192 The Garden of Papago-Saguaro National Monument-Proxy Landscape……….198 The Gardens of Saguaro National Monument-Proxy Landscapes……………..201 Cactus Forests ………………………………………………………………....208 Ecology and Islands in the Desert Sea…………………………………………213 Mountains as Desert Islands………………………………………………….. 215 Coalitions for Conservation……………………………………………………219 Managing the meaning of cacti…………………………………………………238 An American Sonoran Desert…………………………………………………..246 CONCLUSION: THE WORLD IN MINIATURE: SONORAN DESERT GLOBAL CONNECTIONS……………………………………………………………248 The world rhythm of desert hearts……………………………………………...251 Desert Lab Roots and Global Visions…………………………………………..258 Mapping World Cacti…………………………………………………………..263 Desert agriculture……………………………………………………………….268 The Joseph Wood Krutch Garden and the mysterious wandering boojum trees:A lesson in commemoration and commodification……………...272 APPENDIX A: FIGURES AND MAPS……………………………………………….279 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………297

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: A contemporary vision of the Sonoran Desert. Courtesy Arizona Sonora Desert Museum……………………………………………..279

Figure 2: Image of Apache and Saguaro, William Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance,1848……………………………………………...280

Figure 3: Pimeriá Alta, detail from Daniel Lizzar, 1833. Courtesy University of Texas, Arlington……………………………………………….281

Figure 4: Daniel Lizars, Mexico and Guatamala, depicting New Spain on the eve of Mexican Independence. Courtesy UT Arlington………………………...281

Figure 5: Detail from Alexander Von Humboldt's A Map of New Spain, 1810. Courtesy Special Collections Division, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries…..282

Figure 6: Emory's pre-expedition map intentionally blank. Courtesy University of Texas Arlington……………………………………………….282

Figure 7: Luxuriant Plants from Emory's Notes, 1848………………………………...283

Figure 8: John Russell Bartlett's Casas Grandes, UA Press, rights Pending, 1852……284

Figure 9: Gila River Watershed, Kmusser, Wikimedia Commons, 2007……………..284

Figure 10: Ad in The West American Scientist, Volume 1, No. 1 (Dec. 1884)……….285

Figure 11: Homer Shantz, A variation on Toumey's garden at the University of Arizona circa 1930. Courtesy UAiR……………………………………285

Figure 12: A hothouse cactus collection in Central Park, no date, courtesy Library of Congress………………………………………………...286

Figure 13: Frontpiece to Shreve and Wiggins, Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert. Courtesy Stanford University Press…………………………..287

Figure 14: Godfrey Sykes Map in MacDougal and Sykes, “Desert Basins,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, December 1907)…288

Figure 15: MacDougal demonstrating water harvesting from a barrel cactus. Courtesy Library of Congress…………………………………………………………289

LIST OF FIGURES-CONTINUED

Figure 16: Joseph Christmas Ives' 1857 map gives a good impression of the Colorado River at the time…………………………………………………………..…289

Figure 17: Homer Shantz in University Cactus Garden, 1930. Courtesy UAiR……....290

Figure 18: William Hornaday, Camp-fires on Desert and Lava, 1908……………...... 290

Figure 19: Sketching and Agave shottii, UA cactus garden. UAiR…………………...291

Figure 20. “Powell’s Cactus Garden,” WACC………………………………….……..291

Figure 21: Tucson Mountain Park, WACC…………………………………….……...292

Figure 22: Phoenix Garden Club, 1933. Courtesy UAiR…………………….………..292

Figure 23: Forrest Shreve vegetation zones from Vegetation of a Desert Mountain Range, 1915…………………………………..….....293

Figure 24: Removing Sagauro-1 MS1255 Folder 489a AHS…………………..……...293

Figure 25: Removing Saguaros-2, MS1255, Folder 489a, AHS………………..……...294

Figure 26: Removing Saguaros-3, MS1255, Folder 489a, AHS………………..……...294

Figure 27: Marvin Frost (Camera) MS1255, Folder 489a, AHS……………..………...295 . Figure 28: Godfrey Sykes map of Algeria from William Cannon, Botanical Features of the Algerian Sahara, 1913……………………………..……….295

Figure 29: Cardon and Boojum, Homer Shantz, 1932, Courtesy UAiR……………….296

ABSTRACT

From the 1840s to 1950s, interpretations of nature played a central role in the defining and enculturating the Sonoran Desert into the American nation. Written works and physical nature like plants became an archive for cultural interpretations of the region.

Scientific descriptions of nature became stories of place as they were consumed. Proxy landscapes like national monuments became the spaces for demonstrating these stories.

Throughout the period of this study, a constant give and take between regional nature and global arid lands shaped the national interpretations used to describe regional nature within the American nation-state. This work follows the production and consumption of meaning and the definition of a desert region. 10

INTRODUCTION: CONSUMING AND PRODUCING SONORAN DESERT NATURE

Natural history is also cultural history. It encodes cultural values upon the land and provides a way of knowing about a landscape through a particular set of referents: natural features, animals, plants, ecosystems. This dissertation looks at how interpreting a particular natural region—the Sonoran Desert—helped shape it as a cultural region within the United States. The boundaries of the natural region known today as the

Sonoran Desert show in geographical outline a history of how scientific work and cultural values can construct meaning for a region through the explanation and organization of nature.

Where is the Sonoran Desert? How did it come into being? The region demarcated in figure 1 (See appendix A for all figures) is an area defined through natural characteristics. Its boundary represents edges based in a combination of topography, elevation, plant communities, and climate. However, its boundaries represent more than plants, animals, climate, and geology—the stuff of natural regions. They represent a process of storytelling about nature that made natural history the cultural material central for describing a sense of place. The 19th-century and early 20th-century fieldwork of explorers, expeditionaries, and scientists made the boundaries visible. Visitation and celebration by tourists, civic leaders, and ordinary people in the early 20th-century

Southwest also made boundaries visible because these consumers made the story of the boundaries meaningful. 11

The nature of the region—particularly its flora—provided the basis for conveying scientific definitions into popular explanations of place. Thus a contemporary map of the

Sonoran Desert, like figure 1, represents a discourse binding nature and culture; past and present together. This discourse is an American story as the title asserts. It is American in the sense that the natural history of the Sonoran Desert, a bi-national desert, became crucial cultural material for middle-class Americans concerned with understanding the desert region as a homeland. They took regional nature and tied it to national meaning in an effort to assert cultural ownership over the region. The discourse pictured is, therefore, displaying national meanings that privilege certain class, ethnic, and cultural values above others. Scientists, explorers and cultural entrepreneurs (opinion makers/public intellectuals) crafted Sonoran Desert nature into a body of knowledge (an archive) that was useful for tourism boosters, middle class civic leaders, conservationists, and nationalists, when they re-narrated the land as cultural space. These acts of production and acts of consumption used nature as material referents for national narratives. They pointed to nature as confirmation of a sense of place.

The process of this cultural exchange made the Sonoran Desert into an American place at the same time that it outlined its bi-national extent. That this cultural ascription took place within a diverse borderland meant that this American sense of place carried components of colonialism. The process of crafting and consuming the Sonoran Desert is colonial in its historical arc. It began when the U.S. colonized the region; it took root in the land and popular culture during the making of an American sense of regional place; it 12

became a tool for Americans to understand other global arid lands settler societies: South

Africa, Australia, North Africa.

Historiography

The story below provides one version of continuity between mid-nineteenth

century colonial expansion and mid-twentieth century American geo-politics in the

Sonoran Desert. Historian Cynthia Radding’s profound Wandering Peoples is a good way

to think about how cultures generate themselves within the Sonoran Desert.

Appropriately to her work and time frame, the U.S. rates only three mentions. It is simply

not a player.1 The cultural connections Radding provides remind us that the Sonoran

Desert region could be parsed in other ways. Most works on the Sonoran Desert focus

themselves through either the lens of the borderland or through the region of the

Southwest. Geographer Donald Meinig’s self-described “crude panorama” of the

Southwest as a region serves us well in understanding what the southwest as region looks like through these views. It is a region defined through cultural contacts among Hispanic, indigenous, and eventually U.S.-affiliated peoples. This highly productive approach continues with excellent work by many historians including Eric Meeks who looks at how people assert citizenship in the Arizona borderlands.2 This dissertation leans heavily

1 Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 2 Donald Meinig’s classic Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600-1970 (New York: Oxford, 1971); Eric Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 13

upon these works but does not rework the ground of the many borderland or southwest

studies available.3

At question in this work are a series of interlocking issues drawn from cultural

history, history of science, and environmental history. Perhaps first among them is the

question of the role nature plays in making social meaning. Environmental historians

frequently point out how descriptions of nature contained cultural fears and hopes.

Classically, Roderick Nash traced the changing meaning of wilderness within the

American tradition. At each stopping off point in his analysis, the meaning of wilderness

could range from the antithesis of humanity as with the Puritans, to an expression of

divine beauty with transcendentalist thinkers from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir, of

perhaps even a demonstration of the highest values of an enlightened people, as with the

creation of legal wilderness in the 1960s.4 Closer to this topic, work on the cultural

interpretations of deserts—whether they are outside American culture or within—comes

from historians like Patricia Limerick and William de Buys, and anthropologists like

Gary Paul Nabham.5 Central to this question of social meaning is the idea that nature is a crucial element in cultural discussions about a landscape.6 This work asserts that it is.

3 See Oscar Martinez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994). 4 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 5 Patricia Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with the America Deserts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); Gary Paul Nabhan, Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (Washington: Counterpoint, 1997); William du Buys, Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low Down California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 6 See Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: 14

Nature is an important component in establishing a sense of regional identity because aspects of nature—here plants and their ecological relationships—become important referents within stories of place. They become especially important if they conceal the centrality of competing regional descriptions based in other cultural experiences: native and Hispanic, in this example.7

Meaning requires relationships between people and while natural referents provided a way to make material ideas about culture, the question remained how nature carried meaning. This project therefore engages in a theoretical debate rooted in sociology of science and history of science about authority and the links between scientific work and popular consumption. Specifically, it follows Bruno Latour’s description of how practice (scientific practice) can call upon natural allies to legitimate truth claims.8 In the nineteenth thirties, scientists with a long history of studying desert flora were able to translate their knowledge into general descriptions of plant

‘homelands.’9 They could use the plants as demonstrations of a general discussion of natural place. Loaded with this much meaning, plants became keys to understand something more profound about regional nature.

Far Western Landscapes and National Culture 1820-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 7 The term referent in its literal meaning means: “the thing or idea that a symbol, word, or phrase denotes or refers to,” Encarta. 8 See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 9 For example Forrest Shreve, The Cactus and Its Home (Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Co., 1931) and J. J. Thornber and Frances Bonker, The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family (New York: Macmillan, 1932). 15

The popularization, or cultural meaning of this knowledge, is an equally

contentious site of debate for historians of science and cultural historians alike. Science,

as popular culture, had a rich nineteenth century history that flowed into the twentieth

century.10 Ways to see how scientific meanings moved beyond scientific producers include celebrations of ‘fieldwork’ as adventure stories, the creation of societies like garden clubs or conservation groups, support for protection of natural areas, and popular journals articles and books encoding scientific findings for lay readers.11

In the Sonoran Desert after the nineteenth thirties, one could point to saguaro

cacti, and assume that they represented both an ecological story and carried cultural

weight. This was not unlike places where certain animals provided people with a sense of

place in other regions.12 Nature in the form of animals like salmon or bison, of giant trees

in endless forests, could summon up images of the regions they represented: the North

Pacific Coast (Pacific North West) and the Great Plains respectively.13 These components

of nature could, quite literally, determine a sense of belonging because they often formed

core natural resources for the productive work of exploitation: livelihoods and lifestyles

10 For a discussion of these issues see Katherine Pandora’s overview “Popular Science in National and Transnational Perspective: Suggestions from the American Context,” Isis 100 (2009): 346-58. 11 For a recent monograph on this subject see Kevin C. Armitage, The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America’s Conservation Ethic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 12 Richard White has produced a number of works about nature and place: The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) and Land Use, Environment and Social Change: the Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992) both deal with these issues. Andrew Isenberg focuses on bison: The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13 Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams; Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington, 1995). 16

grew from bison, fish and forest. Nature, exploited and explained, was the material stuff of human life. They also worked symbolically. Ornamental plants worked in a different fashion: they demonstrated a landscape of leisure as often as work.14

Depicted, consumed, and interpreted, these bits of nature provided focal points for describing the region. Cacti, desert basins, desert mountains, cactus gardens, cactus forests, and Papaqueria, became what Rob Shields calls “place-images,” or “core representations” that could stand in for “a place or space.” They were a mixed bunch but had one commonality in that they represented themselves and acted as metonyms for other cultural meaning.15 Place images for the Sonoran Desert region were, like place itself, a composite among narrative, material culture, and nature: with the nature providing a type of physical proof for the narratives and stories tying the region’s nature into broader meanings.

The production of these images had diverse roots. Colonial encounters from nineteenth-century exploration focused anthropological, historical, and scientific narratives into archetypical plants like the saguaro or cholla cacti. Some of the meaning arose through the acts of exploration themselves. Descriptions of plants in the Sonoran

Desert called upon descriptions of physical action for meaning. The geography of the

Sonoran Desert Region thus took shape within a narrative of colonial place. The term

“place” is generally used to define something autochthonous with the sense that it

14 Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 15 I found this through Krist A. Thompson’s An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 5: Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991). 17

contains something authentic to a specific location. Defined in this way, it is a useful idea

in counterbalance to forces that are trans-regional: capital, markets, colonizing cultures, frontiers. Place is the antidote to the placelessness—or weightlessness of modernity. This usage of place nearly always preferences one form of cultural expression over another.

Yet, is it not possible to seek the meaning of nature even within these weightless times?

A sense of place is supposed to represent understanding or insight into local realities and so this work uses place in a different sense. The ‘real’ is not so important. Yes, exquisite examples exist of scientific descriptions of nature. But equally important to making meaning was analogous thinking. Descriptions with enough cultural truth they could bear the weight of regional narrative. These stories of place located people in the land just as surely as stories we might think of as more constrained to local definitions, cultural connections, or local nature. The older definition of place misses the contemporary reality of connectivity, interdependence, and the easy flow between the ‘real,’ and the ‘hyper- real’ that mark modern life. What Jean Baudrillard called “the real without origin or reality.”16 In the recursive process of producing and consuming the region, many currencies paid the fare, both autochthonous and analogous. If the hyper-real of material

culture—scientific descriptions, images, histories, maps—often displaced autochthonous

with analogous, the sense of place was never wholly loose of the material reality of the

desert which acted as a backdrop and proof of the stories it was forced to bear. So this

dissertation is less concerned with the accuracy of scientific descriptions than with the

cultural utility they held.

16 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. 18

Environmental historians also worry upon the bone of how societies produce conservation. Although somewhat different than extracting livelihoods from the land, conservation was equally laden with cultural meaning. Conservation took root in the mid- nineteenth century when its meaning transformed from a set of aesthetic attitudes into action based in vocal concern over national resource scarcity. The change led to national policy—forest reserves and national parks. A good place to start is to think about that shift is George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 Man and Nature. Environmental historians have traced a lineage from his alarm over human destruction of nature through the rise of conservation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The concern for efficient use of natural resources saw landscape stewardship in explicitly national terms. Samuel P.

Hays’ classic Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency set the stage for a number of works that looked at how conservation was a form of nationalist development.17 Nature became a site for demonstrating nationalism in several ways. They included Gifford

Pinchot’s conservation mantra of natural resources—the best use, for the most people, for the longest time.18 We might also think about the way nature became the material for interpreting relationships between the individual and the nation as in environmental historian Neil Maher’s work on the CCC or Sarah Phillips’ This Land, The Nation.

Working in nature, also demonstrated by the work of Richard White, provided the experiences that physically knit individuals to the nation. Policy communities took

17 Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 18 Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001); Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, Commemorative Edition (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998. 19

conservation from planning to practice. Nature was thus the medium through which

individuals and states interacted.19

At its heart, the idea that nature is a vehicle for conveying meaning is not such a

hard sell if we view nature as totemic—not just for indigenous people but for all people.

It can act as a reservoir of meaning with which we can evoke the real, know ourselves, and place ourselves in the world.20 However, tracing the movement of meaning between

producer and consumer is anything but simple. One of the central problems is language

itself. New cultural historians now embrace a post-structuralist view of language where

word and meaning slip upon the uneven ground of social power. Language deploys

power and creates conflict.21 Nature makes some of these linguistic struggles visible

because it provides physicality to words but it does not solve the question of transmission

of meaning.

Conservation had a territoriality as well—it worked in site-specific locations.

Thus ideas about nature took form through particular places where meaning could be

staged and engaged, especially parks. Writing on the role of parks is rich and varied.

Parks, lands set aside for specific public use, became important tools of cultural

discipline during the middle of the nineteenth century. The creation of national parks in

19 White, Organic Machine; Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Sarah Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 20 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 21 Victoria E. Bronnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd edition (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993). 20

the late nineteenth century expanded this cultural role as part of the colonial re-making of the American West: heroic natural landscapes celebrating the frontier. The Antiquities

Act expanded the category of these spaces to include cultural sites and then, sites designed around particular plants and animals. Park spaces were contested ground with ethnic, class and national meanings.22 This work makes extensive use of the scholarship

on national parks. These landscapes were the staging ground for these exchanges of

meaning.

Historians of the American West, and Environmental historians alike, struggle

with the shape and meaning of regions. Is the West a place or process, goes the old

argument: a combination of both the answer comes back.23 The material conditions

(nature) and the historical contexts produce the cultural meaning of the region.

Environmental history only partially solves the problem of working through place and

process. Regional formation, a cultural endeavor could also take natural form. The map in

figure 1 (Appendix D), a contemporary vision of the Sonoran Desert, is the end product

22 For national parks see Richard Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 23 For the rejection of frontier history (process) see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W.W. Norton and Company, 1987). For the role of nations in restructuring borderlands see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814-841; For environmental history see Dan Flores, “Place: An Argument for Bioregional History,” Environmental History Review 18, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 1-18.. 21

of a scientific interpretation of the land that had profound importance for the making of

an American sense of place in the desert borderlands of southern Arizona and California.

The scientific descriptions and practice that measure out the edges of this region wrote a

culturally meaningful region onto the land.

The Sonoran Desert is also trans-border, an aspect that should raise eyebrows given this work’s title. Why the focus on the ‘American-ness’ of a desert that is more than half Mexican?

Partially, the answer is that while nationalism gave the Sonoran Desert some of its meaning, the pressures that shape the outlines are broader than the international border between Mexico and the U.S. Some of the answer also comes from the goals of this project. First, I am curious about the relationship between the sense of the Sonoran Desert as a natural region and the real world experience of living in that region. There exists a disconnection between the whole and life in one corner: parts could represent the whole.

Second, I wondered how nature played the role in forming cultural identification with the place. The answer is that local nature—deserts—took on much broader comparative meaning. Third, the resources I followed largely came from people actively asserting their American-ness by describing their environment through nature. Fourth, I began to sense that there was a story here with a different shape than the borderlands. Southern

Arizona was similar to other arid colonial lands and its history tied it nearly as closely to far off lands as to those lands across the border.

This dissertation focuses on how a selection of Americans produced and

consumed Sonoran Desert nature as a way to affirm their sense of American identity. 22

They drew upon a global base of knowledge to interpret a regional nature and developed national meanings. We can question the shaping of environmental histories along the lines of nation building projects. Do they shy away from the nation and stick closely to a smaller natural region? Do they too often conform, as Richard White suggests, to nationalist narratives while excluding the nature beyond the border.24 Both questions demand answers. The Sonoran Desert as a region spans an international border but, I argue below, takes much of its meaning from cultural metaphors drawn from the transnational scope of global environments. Rather than a bi-national desert, the region grew from a global colonial context. The Sonoran Desert of this dissertation is at once part of the Southwest and a site within a transnational exotic landscape.

One currency in the making of the Sonoran Desert was natural history. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a concerted institutional effort to see the Sonoran

Desert Region holistically. Scientists at the Carnegie Desert Lab and University of

Arizona in Tucson worked to define the Sonoran Desert in its bi-national entirety. Their work drew upon a nineteenth-century legacy but added levels of detail and a fullness of research that proved convincing in establishing the Sonoran Desert as a natural fact.

However, at the same time, these researchers were arguing that local experiments and local descriptions could explain larger problems and areas. They thus placed the specific within the general.

24 Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 976-986. White asks why the nation is the largest lens through which environmental historians peer. 23

When people consumed these definitions they often used a combination of ideology and the physical nature. Meanings flowed beyond natural bounds as explanations of deserts generally, and conversely, shrunk to fit national agendas: at once global and sited in natural reserves like Saguaro National Monument (1933). The natural boundary lines of the Sonoran Desert are not arbitrary; they grew out of a research agenda undertaken to define and differentiate the nature of the region from a broader arid landscape. They are, however, negotiable because the meaning the Sonoran Desert arose from within broader cultural regions and diffused beyond these natural spaces.

By the middle of the twentieth century, one name stands above others as probably the foremost proponent of an integrated and large Sonoran Desert. Forrest Shreve worked in Tucson from 1909 to 1950 building a deep understanding of the desert. His contemporary Herman A. Spoehr wrote: “Shreve dedicated virtually his entire scientific career to the study of the botanical features of the arid regions of North America.”25

Shreve’s biographer, Janice Bowers, titled her work “A Sense of Place,” in reference to

Shreve’s overwhelming commitment to living his research agenda in the desert.26 It is he

(and those with whom he collaborated) who give us the basis for our contemporary botanical definition of the Sonoran Desert.27

25 Forrest Shreve and Ira L. Wiggins, Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), Foreword by Herman. A. Spoehr, 3. 26 Janice Bowers, A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). 27 Shreve and Wiggins, Vegetation and Flora. 24

Sonoran Desert

In Shreve’s delimitation, more of the Sonoran Desert is outside than within U.S. national boundaries. Obviously, the desert takes its name from the Mexican state of

Sonora (48 thousand square miles). It also stretches along the Gulf of California’s west coastline in the States Baja California and Baja California Sur (24 thousand square miles). Southern Arizona (40 thousand square miles) and the southeast corner of

California (6 thousand square miles) make up the balance.28 Largely following Shreve’s

outline, Mark Dimmitt of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum describes the Sonoran

Desert as covering roughly 100,000 square miles. It has six subdivisions extending across

the Colorado River to Indio and El Centro, and follows the shoreline along the Gulf of

California to Guaymas Sonora on the east and down to La Paz, in Baja California Sur.29

Of its sub-regions, two were most central to the crafting of America’s Sonoran Desert.

First was Tucson’s Arizona Upland, a densely vegetated region spanning the states of

Arizona and Sonora. The second was the Lower Colorado Valley that surrounds the

Colorado River in California, Arizona, Baja, and Sonora, and follows the Gulf of

California Coast south. The other sub-regions became part of Shreve’s effort to delimit the Sonoran Desert in its entirety. They include the Vizcaíno and Magdalena regions on

28 William McGinnies, Discovering the Desert: Legacy of the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 44. 29 Mark A. Dimmitt, “Biomes & Communities of the Sonoran Desert Region,” in Steven J. Phillips and Patricia Wentworth Comus, A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13-15. 25

the Baja Peninsula, the Central Gulf Coast along both shores of the Gulf of California,

and the Plains and Foothills Regions in Sonora.30

Most of the desert drains into the Gulf of California making it a hydrological

whole. Its edges are topographical barriers like the San Jacinto and Cuyamaca mountains

of California, the rising land of Arizona’s Mogollon Rim and, in Sonora, the Sierra

Madre Occidental. The Sonoran Desert fades into the Mojave Desert near Needles,

California, amid the grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert east of Tucson, and the hills of

Rosario in Baja California.

Flora unifies Shreve’s definition. It was flora that set the desert off aesthetically

from other deserts encountered by representatives of the U.S. in the nineteenth century

and, for over one hundred years, colored the descriptive work of thousands of scientists.

During nearly that entire time, these descriptions seeped into regional and national

culture through the consumption of the desert as a landscape, lifestyle, and idea.

This broad definition, Sonoran Desert, masks a greater diversity of natural

environments. Seven subdivisions stretch the boundaries of this similarity.31 Two play an overwhelming role in this story. The Lower Colorado Valley division includes the desert basins of southern California, the Colorado River from Needles south, the Gila River downstream of Phoenix and the basin and range country east towards Sonoyta. Within

30 This is following McGinnies, Discovering the Desert, 43-79. In more contemporary explanations the Sonoran Hills sub-region is gone, but the rest remain, Dimmitt, “Biomes,” 15. 31 For Shreve and Wiggins, Vegetation Sonoran Desert, they were Lower Colorado Valley, Arizona Upland, Plains of Sonora, Foothills of Sonora, Central Gulf Coast Vizcaíno Region, Magdelena Region, 6. 26

this division lie natural environments as diverse as the Colorado Delta, the Salton Basin,

the Algodones Dunes, and low, cactus-covered mountain ranges.

The Arizona Upland division is, in some ways, the heart of this story because it

has been the location of much of the research agenda. It includes the Bill Williams River,

the Salt River, the San Pedro River and the Santa Cruz River near Tucson and the higher

elevations around the Sonora’s Altar River. Daniel T. MacDougal of the Carnegie Desert

Lab thought Tucson the center of region for both natural reasons—its flora, mountains,

and riparian area—and cultural reasons—ease of train travel to Sonora, the Pacific Coast,

and the eastern U.S. The mountains play an important role in the Sonoran Desert Region.

Although desert plants may extend to four or five thousand feet along their flanks,

placing the summits ‘outside’ the desert proper, these peaks are reservoirs of ecological

diversity. They send water out into the lower deserts; they are also important components

in the human history of occupation in the landscape. Thus the Sonoran Desert is

something more than a desert: it is a natural region.

William McGinnies, a long time arid lands researcher with the University of

Arizona, called the Arizona Uplands “perhaps the most interesting of all desert areas in

the world.”32 In a reflective and perceptive 1970s moment, he noted that Arizona’s portion of the Sonoran Desert was the best known since it was the most intensively studied.33 This honest reflection, gained in no small part through his own effort to

understand the Sonoran Desert, points to the power of research agendas: they illuminate

and provide the material necessary to tell a convincing story of place.

32 McGinnies, Discovering the Desert, 56. 33 McGinnies, Deserts of the World, 6-7. 27

Description of the Work

These acts of description bring us back to the question of region. The Sonoran

Desert was discovered scientifically as McGinnies and many others can attest. But, it was also created: crafted out of the production and consumption of ideas about nature. Like the United States, the crafting of the Sonoran Desert was never only local or national, it was tied to global colonial trends and grew within a global mental geography with local roots. The development of an ‘American sense of place’ in North America’s Sonoran

Desert required of cultural entrepreneurs that they weave into the desert landscape stories gathered from across the world and from distant times. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 follow how American interpretations of the Sonoran Desert drew upon a Humboldtian geography to initiate the process of explaining the land.34 Initial experiences led scientist- explorers to combine biological, archeological and historical accounts from the tropics and Old World deserts, with imperial histories celebrating U.S. progress in an effort to narrative the land. To their eyes, the sands of the Algodones Dunes of the Colorado

Desert evoked Saharan ergs; the river, the Nile. Archeological sites like Casa Grande recalled Mississippi mound-building societies’ earthworks, the jungle entangled Mayan ruins, and the historical descriptions of Aztec cities in the Valley of Mexico. Linking the

34 There is an ongoing historiography debate over Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Aaron Sachs, “The Ultimate Other: Post Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature.” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (December 2003): 111-135; Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006); Laura Walls, The Passage to Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Nicolaas A Rupke, Humboldt: A Meta- biography of Humbodlt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Malcolm Nicholson, “Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian Science” History of Science 25. 28

Sonoran Desert to the ‘known’ world created an archive of ‘paper deserts’ that recorded the colonial moment when the U.S. was assuming control of the landscape.

Paper deserts are the representations of nature scientists gathered through their

practice. The products delivered—reports, images, travelogues—had the authority of

science precisely because of the process of gathering information took place within the

context of colonial conquest. Combining ‘paper deserts’ with ‘acts of discovery’ created

a nineteenth-century baseline for U.S. cultural occupation of the landscape. This first pass at explanation embedded colonialism within the description of place by codifying the desert as an exotic component of the American Southwest as known through the process of discovery.35 The products (regional descriptions and travelogues) of these transits

became the baseline material for re-describing the region within the American nation.

Inhabiting this desert required that the exotic become domestic. Chapters 3 and 4

follow how individuals and institutions created the framework for seeing the Sonoran

Desert whole despite its bi-national geography and highly variable terrain. In this effort

Tucson became the brokerage house of the desert. The Desert Laboratory grounds

35 The term “paper deserts” is a direct reference to Ursula Klein’s idea of “paper tools” in the practice of chemistry. Like a periodic table, the stories, ethnographic studies, and survey’s became models representing certain goals rather than a comprehensive representation of the Sonoran Desert itself. Ursula Klein, Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). The knowledge produced from these valuable texts created an “archive” along the terms used by Edward Said in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Ursula Klein, “Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures,” Studies in History and the Philosophy of Science 32, no 2 (2001): 265-302. 29

became the desert in miniature, a lab through which to demonstrate a landscape—the

Sonoran Desert.36

Chapter 5 examines the rise of proxy landscapes, such as Saguaro National

Monument, that became physical places to demonstrate the desert. They could stand in

for the whole and thus could Americanize the desert. Chapter 5 recaptures a theme

brought forward from Chapters 3 and 4, by looking at the domestication of Sonoran

Desert nature. Consuming desert nature in these proxy landscapes set the Sonoran Desert

within U.S. national terms. As Americans made sense of desert nature, they consumed

the desert as park space, as landscaping, and as part of a regional identity.

The conclusion returns to the global, following Sonoran Desert arid-lands

agriculture between Arizona and global arid lands as U.S. experiences in their own desert

increasingly drew them into contact with other imperial deserts. From Robert H. Forbes

of the Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station and University of Arizona to the Arid

Lands Studies of the 1950s, experience in the Sonoran Desert became a valuable tool in

connecting with other lands. In a nearly complete turn from the 1840s, 1950s agricultural

experts could use their domestic landscape to read foreign lands. The experience tied the

Sonoran Desert back into a series of colonial landscapes highly reminiscent of those

encountered in the nineteenth-century Sonoran Desert.

There are many ways that America has had a global vision even while making

exceptionalist claims to a ‘category of one.’37 Puritans thought of themselves as an

36 See Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 30

example to the Christian World, explicitly believing that in making a model society they

might show a watching world the path to a godly life. In their dealings with both New

World natives and Old World contemporaries, early American Republicans alike thought

that American civilization was so inherently superior that its attributes spoke for

themselves. Recalling that U.S. trade aspirations were global, illustrates that American

Empire, such as it is, has a global outlook. National culture—the consumption and

reproduction of metaphors, images, ideologies, and material society—also had a global

tint.

Scientific exploration was part of the process of expansion of European and

American imperialism. Historians of the ties between science and empire frequently point

to the concerted British efforts made to merge the two. From exploration and description,

to harvest and appropriation, scientists played a role in gathering powerful tools for

dominance over new areas. From voyages like those of James Cook with Joseph Banks or

that of Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker, to the collection and propagation of a global

botanical harvest at Britian’s botanical gardens, we have clear examples of how scientists

could provide the natural material and intellectual labor necessary for imperial projects.38

37 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): 21-40, calls exceptionalism a type of difference “a desire not merely for difference but for a particularity beyond all other nations’ particularities: a yearning for proof of its own uniqueness so deep that it tied every other nation’s history in fetters” (21). 38 Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanical Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979); John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: 31

Science in the service of American imperialism is equally well documented. Most

famously, historian William Goetzmann placed the scientist-soldiers of the

Topographical Engineers at the center of the process of U.S. colonial possession of the

American West. Not only did they produce a vast description of the land, but members of the surveys produced reports, photographic images, paintings, and museum collections.39

Taken together, these paper deserts became the material necessary to make familiar a

strange land.

This story then follows how American explorers and military expeditionaries

encountered a strange land. They drew upon a global vision of science and empire to

place it within the bounds of the nation-state. They found evidence for a human past against which they could pose questions about arid lands as the site of struggle between civilization and nature—the western question. They began to inscribe a cultural region through their expeditions—providing the material for a natural description that was also a

cultural description. On the other side of the incorporation of Arizona into the American

nation, the scientific interpretations of the Sonoran Desert became part of a cultural

exchange where place images—primarily plants—the production of two colonial

landscapes: arid lands agriculture and conservation spaces.

Yale University Press, 2000); Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge eds., Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800-1970 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Neil Safier, “Global Knowledge on the Move,” Kohler, “Labscapes: Naturalizing the Lab;” Kohler, Landscapes, Labscapes. 39 William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West, Francis Parkman Prize Edition (New York: History Book Club, 2006); see John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998) for unification of American space. 32

CHAPTER 1: METAPHORS OF PLACE UNDER THE CACTUS FLAG

“What are our views on the physical environment, natural and man-made? How do we perceive, structure, and evaluate it...What are the links between environment and World View?” Yi-Fu Tuan, 197440

“Leaving the gate of Jaffa, we rode eastward between delightful gardens of fig, citron, orange, pomegranate and palm…The road was lined with hedges of giant cactus, now in blossom.” Bayard Taylor, 185541

“We had just entered a small canon, or pass, through the hills to the prairies beyond. Rocks bare and sterile towered far above us on either side. The only vegetation visible was an occasional cactus, twenty or thirty feet in height, and three or four feet in circumference, fluted with the regularity of a Corinthian column, and covered with beautiful variegated blossoms.” Samuel Cozzens, 187442

“A Nation claims new lands twice. First, in military terms, it must hold them against the interests of rivals. Later, the ties of ownership deepen; the nation begins to claim its land by right of occupation and understanding, believing that it knows, better than its rivals, how to use and settle the new land, how to capture and multiply its riches.” William deBuys, 199943

Southern Deserts: American Encounters with the Lower Sonoran

The saguaro cactus towers above the lance wielding rider (fig. 2, Appendix 1).

The horse, rearing back, has its neck bent, reined in. While the horse’s head turns down,

the Apache man’s gaze follows his spear tip upwards to the mighty cactus. Scattered

about man, horse, and saguaro are prickly pear. An agave flowers from a rock escarpment

40 Yi Fu-Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 1. 41 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen (New York: G. P. Putnam & Co., 1855), 48. 42 Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, The Marvellous Country (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1874), 53. 43 William deBuys and Joan Myers, Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-Down California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 50. 34

and faintly, in the distance, rugged mountains rise jagged into a sky streaked by thin

clouds.44 This illustration detailed Lt. William Hensley Emory’s 1848 report on the U.S.

military expedition from Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, to San Diego. His account, a record of the U.S. military’s successful invasion of Northern Mexico, is also a rich text for understanding elite American antebellum colonial interpretations of the sub-tropical desert region stretching from the Rio Grande to the California Coast. A region we might call the Lower Sonoran after C. H. Merriam, or, from the perspective of mid-nineteenth century American nationalism, the southern deserts.45

Man and cactus reveal useful insight into understanding American thinking about this desert region’s natural and human qualities in the initial moment of explanation.

First, the land was indigenous space. Whether or not, usually not, military officers like

Emory were willing to recognize native claims to land, in the 1840s, they held no illusions that the lands of Northern Mexico held native peoples intent on asserting their claims.46 This Hispanic-indigenous cultural presence necessitude American

44 See Figure 2, Appendix D. 45 C. H. Merriam, Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United States, USDA bulletin no. 10 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1898), 36. 46 It was precisely the recognition of this indigenous space that required Americans to image the land as a natural wilderness either in the sense of empty nature or as a place without civilization. For a quick discussion of the Pristine Myth see William Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (September 1992): 369-385; for a full length book on wilderness see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. For the 1990s era re- examination of wilderness as an idea see the compilation edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). For case studies in how wilderness was a tool of American colonialism see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Theodore Catton, 35

expeditionaries re-occupy the land to claim it.47 They did so through the use of natural

and civilizing histories. Among the many ways they tried to re-inscribe the land in the

1840s through 1860s, was the effort to describe the region through nature, rather than culture. Second, the flora marked the region as part of a southern, sub-tropical environment in the full richness of those words. Southern, in the sense of a racially-

charged landscape, southern in the sense of tropical agricultural opportunities, southern in

its exotic inflections, and southern in the sense of belonging to the Spanish Empire, the

Isthmus of America, and the Americas south of temperate climes.48 The valley of the

Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 47 William deBuys and Joan Myers, Salt Dreams, 50 48 American colonialism has often proceeded through private acts of occupation, negotiation, or violence, as well as through action by the state. Filibustering—private assaults on foreign lands—were common on the peripheries of the American state. In the 1830s, American filibusters attacked Ontario, Private interests wrested Texas from Mexico in 1836 after unsuccessful efforts in 1811, 1819, and 1826, and settlers and state governments, with the blessing and backing of Andrew Jackson, removed most American Indians from the old southwest. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 519, 660, 662; Randolph Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Paul Lack, “Slavery and the Texas Revolution,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (1985): 181-202. Historian Robert May reminds us that filibustering is distinct from sanctioned military action. Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). However, the ideology of filibustering, that the world would be better for American conquest, was common enough in both official and unofficial thinking. Manifest destiny, named just a few short years after Indian removal, postulated a vacant land; filibustering revealed prior claims. Both served private, sectional, and national interests to different degrees. Between 1814 and 1846, the American military was busy seizing Indian lands and these acquisitions fostered two streams of nationalist sentiment: A union image of a continental American empire, and a southern dream for a slave-based Caribbean empire. As tensions increased over slavery in the decades before the Civil War, many southern imperialists looked west and south dreaming of building a Caribbean system of slave states to block domination by the American Northeast. Robert E. May, The Southern 36

Gila’s flora provided a visual connection to the subtropical lands of Mexico. In particular,

the saguaro cactus linked this desert to South America, to Mexico, and to a world of

interpretation based in Spanish imperialism, indigenous civilization, and tropical

landscapes. Mexico was the center of cactus and the saguaro recalled this fact with its

gigantic presence. Third, the ‘surprise’ evidenced by the reined-back horse and rising

gaze and lance, seems to suggest two important assumptions Emory’s contemporaries

held about these desert lands. On the one hand, the illustrator could be conveying that the

Apache were not of the place, that they were illegitimate in some sense. Most of Emory’s

contemporaries believed their nation held a usufruct justification to the land: building

American civilization served the destiny of man. In this view, Apache land use was

illegitimate. Another possibility is that the cactus could instill a sense of the region’s

nature as marvelous, exotic and requiring interpretation: a view Emory’s fellow U.S.

military personnel frequently expressed.

While the ideological geography of manifest destiny compelled a story of

sameness by seeing westward expansion as inevitable, desert nature challenged

generalities with specificity and difference. It made material and visible the problem of

difference and the personnel sent into the desert between 1846 and 1860 had to work to

bridge the difference between the ‘natural’ environments of the American nation state

and the natural landscape of the desert. They used ideas to re-imagine the region in ways

Dream of a Caribbean Empire 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Robert E. May, The Union, The Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995). 37

that tied the physical landscape to an American national geography. First, they used

nature to create the outlines of a natural region that utilized Humboldtian geography

rather than the Spanish cultural designation Pimería Alta. This region would eventually

become the Sonoran Desert. To make this happen, they used implicit and explicit

analogies that tied the region to global nature. Scientific descriptions of the desert,

especially aesthetically obvious flora, provided the natural reality upon which the

comparisons rested. The descriptions rested upon a discourse of enlightenment science

(and national identification) could become culturally meaningful. Second, exploration

mapped a colonial geography of discovery that filled the land with stories relating natural

history to scientific discovery and national goals. Third, they synthesized old knowledge

into their new explanatory framework. Fourth, expeditionaries used physical plants as

‘place images’ to closely associate the landscape of these colonial encounters with the

scientific project. Finally, they produced “paper deserts”—a set of written works,

histories, natural collections, and lived experience—that helped embed an American

sense of place into the region.

Paper deserts included texts describing the European experiences in the Old

World’s deserts, explorers’ accounts of new and old world deserts, and the new products

of American exploration in the North American West. These materials gained cultural currency through the acts of discovery involved. Through exploration these paper tools

took on the legitimacy of colonial science in describing the region’s nature.49 The paper

49 Albert Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Matt Edgeworth, Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archeological Practice (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2003). 38

deserts produced in reports, in travelogues, and through museum collections provided a cache of place images that when consumed became a way to overwrite other cultural interpretations. With the land rewritten, Emory’s image takes on a final meaning. The cactus towering over the rider is a nice way to illustrate the process. The cactus dwarfs the man like natural history could replace indigenous history as an explanatory tool for the region. This chapter describes a process of cultural inscription and cultural erasure that involved place and plants.

Overwriting a Region: From Pimeriá Alta to U.S. Southern Desert

Lt. Philip St. George Cooke described his 1846 U.S. expedition to scout a wagon road from New Mexico to San Diego as “conquests as much of Nature’s most inhospitable wastes, as of those primitive and isolated communities.” What he meant was that terrain and climate, rather than human resistance, proved the greatest obstacle. He also meant that the landscape posed a psychic challenge: it was strange looking.50 The

U.S. conquest of Mexico’s colonial north brought Americans into contact with unfamiliar desert landscapes. South of the Colorado Plateau, from the Rio Grande Valley to the

Pacific coast, the “lower Austral zone” or “Lower Sonoran Faunal Area,” exhibited distinctive plants, animals, and cultures.51 The aesthetics of the land, “the view of nature,” in Alexander Von Humboldt’s phrase, was distinctly different from North

50 Philip St. George Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico and California: An Historical and Personal Narrative (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), iiv. 51 C. Hart Merriam’s categories in his 1898 Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United States, USDA bulletin no. 10 (1898). 39

America’s other arid reaches.52 Americans trappers, expeditionaries and military men were familiar with the arid grasslands of the Great Plains but the landscape now encountered contained a burst of flora clearly distinct from these regions. Producing a working knowledge of the landscape meant conquering both the physical difficulties as well as absorbing the land into meaningful narratives about the region’s nature.

Cooke wrote his words in 1878, twenty-two years after the event. By then,

American readers were more familiar with the region’s nature but for Cooke to recall seeing the land as the defining aspect of the conquest was, in many ways, a result of the past several decades. Between 1846 and 1860, explorer-conquerors like Cooke published their findings and in that act, provided the material for communicating a new region to the American public. Often, that region drew upon nature for its descriptions. In choosing nature over people, authors like Cooke were practicing a path of cultural appropriation based in natural history and enlightenment science.

The region Cooke entered already had a name visible on maps and known to

European and American societies (fig. 3, appendix a). New Spain designated it the

Pimeria Alta. It was a region based on the northern homelands of Piman speaking people and Spanish colonial effort to incorporate them into empire. Seeing the region as primarily a human place made sense for Spanish goals and it continues to provide a valuable and insightful viewpoint. The cultural blend of people in the region is an engine for insight into history in the region. It is a worthy designation that provides a window into the region. Pimería Alta’s boundaries were fairly clear. Influential anthropologist

52 Alexander Von Humboldt, Views of Nature or Contemplation on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850). 40

Edward Spicer describes its territorial extent as running south to north between Cucurpe

on the San Miguel River (Sonora) to the Gila River (Arizona). The San Pedro River

(Arizona) formed its eastern edge and the Colorado River its western border. At the end

of the seventeenth century, some 30,000 people lived within these physical boundaries.53

The designation Pima recognized a similarity in language rather than a unified

political group. The Spanish conceived of these people in four categories: the Pima in the

southeast, the Soba to their west, the Sobaipuris to the east and northeast, and the Papago

to the north and northwest.54 A more contemporary division would split the O’odham

(people) into the Akimel O’odham (river people) on the Gila, the Hia-Ced O’odham

(sand people) in the arid reaches by the Gulf of California, the Tohono O’odham (desert people) in the basin and range desert along the present international boundary, and the

Sobaipuris along the San Pedro River.55 The Pimeriá Alta represented a region defined by

native homelands and Spanish (and Mexican) imperial goals. These goals included

proselytizing, connecting California overland with the rest of New Spain, and providing a

defensive line between Spanish settlements and native peoples of the Colorado Plateau

and Great Plains.56

When the U.S. asserted claim to the land this regional definition held limited

meaning. Seen from the northeast, the landscape was a sub-region of the West and part of

53 Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 118- 19 54 Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 118-19. 55 Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 13-14. 56 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), Chapter 8 “Indian Raiders and Reorganization of Frontier Defenses;” Spicer, Cycles of Conquest. 41

a region that included Texas and California. It was a southern desert frontier.57 This

ecological landscape constituted a new environment for American observers: a stretch of

southern deserts dominated by cacti, low forests, sand reaches, bunch-grass plains, and sharp mountain ranges. The flora was alien and aesthetically prominent. Although prickly pear (Opuntia) grows throughout the United States, beyond the American West they are seldom dominant botanical features of the landscape. Yet, in the deserts between the Rio

Grande and California’s southern mountains, they were everywhere. The botanist Charles

Christopher Parry, accompanying the 1854 boundary survey (Gadsden Purchase boundary) called the desert along the Gila River “a very distinct botanical district.”

Distinct even from the desert lands of Texas and southern New Mexico. The plants provided the aesthetic markers to delimit an edge of a biogeographical region.58

Nature was a paradox: magisterially complex and amazingly simple. Its diversity

spread the world before scientists in an infinitude of specificity yet it could be ordered,

arranged, and reduced to systemic thinking. Giving order to the world through scientific

categories made it comforting because it became speakable: it gained a common

language.59 This approach to making the world ‘speak’ through natural history was part

of the process of remapping a natural region over the Pimería Alta. American scientist-

sojourners drew on a vision of the world captured by Alexander von Humboldt. It was a

57 There was no national effort to incorporate native peoples into the American body politic. The region would instead become defined through two ‘types’ of nature: Human histories (naturalized through the ideology of racism) and landscape aesthetics. 58 C.C. Parry, “Introduction,” to Botany of the Boundary in William Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1858), 13. 59 This is the basis of Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 42

world seen from above but experienced on the ground. Humboldt was a prodigious actor

in making sense of the world. In his view, the physical appearance of nature provided a

window into placing it within a systematic context. In 1799 Humboldt began a career of

adventure and publication that made him a household name in European and Euro-

American societies for fifty years. Historian Mary Louise Pratt argues that he “sought to

reinvent popular imaginings of America,” by focusing on unifying themes and global

(cosmic) nature. One good example of this was Humboldt’s description of “Steppes and

Deserts” in Views of Nature. In this work, he tied the llanos of South America to world

nature by comparing them with Northern European heaths, African plains, and Asian

steppes. To explain one place, Humboldt drew upon “planetary” analogy.60

Humboldt was also seeking to overwrite the world with a skein of new meanings.

“It [is] erroneous to believe,” he wrote, “that countries, because they have been already

visited, are therefore known. A penetrating and capacious mind finds every where new

materials for observation.”61 Humboldt’s vision of speaking nature anew provides an avenue into understanding how scientific knowledge can remake the meaning of lands

through stories. The military scientists entering the Sonoran Desert in the mid-nineteenth

century deployed this planetary consciousness to explain the landscape. Acts of discovery

60 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2010), 117; Alexander von Humboldt, Views of Nature or Contemplation on the Sublime Phenomenon of Creation, trans. E.C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850). 61 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799-1804, translated Helen Maria Williams (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1815), iv. 43

can also be acts of creation. They drew upon a Humboldtian geography in their practice

of scientific gathering, and through importing comparisons from outside the region.

The plants of the southern deserts marked the region as distinct from other U.S.

territory and tied to southern American landscapes. Cacti, yucca, and agave were the

botanical markers of Latin America; the world of Cortez, as many nineteenth-century

Americans writers and readers often perceived it. Scientists were not the only people to see this connection. In 1823 Englishman George Crabb told his readers that cactus were succulent plants “all natives of the continent of South America.”62 Crabb, who published popular encyclopedias with broad readership, was mistaken but summarized a sense that cacti defined a landscape within the tropics and points south.63 Likewise, in her 1838

Familiar Lectures on Botany designed to educate teachers to prep for teaching botany,

Almira H. Lincoln told American readers that prickly pears occurred in the United States

(perhaps speaking especially of the western territories) yet made a point highlighting the

Mexican origin of cochineal dye industry and noted that towering plants of the Cereus

genus were known from Peru. In her supporting appendices, Lincoln presented Cereus

peruvianus (Peruvian Torch Cactus or Echinopsis peruviana), Cactus opuntal ( Indian

Fig or Opuntia ficus-indica) and Cactus melocactus (melocactus or melon cactus) alongside symbolic plants of the tropical European colonial world: Caribbean Royal

62 George Crabb, Universal Technological Dictionary or Familiar Explanation of the Terms used in all Arts and Sciences… (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1823). 63 For a comprehensive and historically relevant study of cactus see the multivolume work by Nathaniel Lord Britton and Joseph Nelson Rose, The Cactaceae: Descriptions and Illustrations of Plants of the Cactus Family (New York: Dover Publications, 1963). 44

Palm, banana plant, and the Canary Island Dragon Tree.64 She thus linked cactus to this greater geography of semi-tropical and tropical colonial landscapes. As late as 1848, the prolific American writer Robert Sears, whose work on natural history was found in libraries and classrooms, informed his readers that “The Cactus or melon-thistle is a

genus of…succulents [that are] natives of the driest parts of tropical countries,” and that

“attracted the notice of travelers in South America, where they are chiefly found.”65

These representative works demonstrate that cacti tied the region into a colonial world

with hemispheric and historical roots drawing on the earliest phases of European

colonialism in the Americas.

Cacti as Global Commodities

The process of displacing cactus lands to the edges of the U.S.’s continent of

manifest destiny centered these cacti within a more global geography of colonialism and

commercial exploitation.66 This colonial point of view is visible in writing about cactus

in the 1830s and 40s often focused on the cochineal scale used to make carmine dye.67

Originally an important luxury and tributary good in the Valley of Mexico and later a

European import from southern Mexico, cochineal grows on Opuntia (prickly pear). It

64 Almira H. Lincoln, Familiar Lectures on Botany, Practical, Elementary, and Physiological 7th edition (New York: F. J. Huntington & Co., 1838), 59, 167, 217, Appendix, plate 1. 65 Robert Sears continues: “being tenacious of life, [cacti] were easily transported to Euroep and to the United States, where some of them have been long cultivated in hothouses.” in The Wonders of the World in Nature, Art, and Mind (New York: Edward Walker, 1848), 296. 66 For a discussion of the American West within world systems see William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 67 For example, M. Frederick Holl, “A List of Plants Observed in the Island of Madera,” in William Jackson Turner, The London Journal of Botany 1 (1834). 45

became a global commodity traded in European exchanges and spread into plantation

agriculture in the Caribbean and upon the Atlantic’s Fortunate Islands.68 Cochineal

required cactus and thus plants and dye held associations from the most storied colonial

landscapes of the time: the Canary and Madera Islands (Fortunate Isles), the Caribbean

Islands, and the treasure lands of Spanish America. In his 1842 Plantæ Utiliores, M. A.

Burnett presented the cochineal insect as distinctly of the Spanish empire. The 1845

Universal Dictionary of Knowledge (London) was, like many other publications, quick to

link the scale insect with cactus and to Mexico.69 The Cochineal trade tied Mexico to

colonial markets. Likewise, for many readers, the trade tied cactus to Europe’s American

colonial landscapes. In this chain of associations, cacti conveyed meaning that made it at

once a world product and distanced it from U.S. national geography. Commercial

Cochineal grew on one type of cactus—prickly pear. It was a familiar, though

unremarkable, sight in many states in the U.S. In the Sonoran Desert, the explosion of cactus form and size created an aesthetic tipping point where columnar cacti like the saguaro or arborescent forms of cholla like chain-fruit (Opuntia fulgida, see fig. 7,

Appendix A), became the place-images of an exterior land. Encountering cacti told explorer-scientists and their readership that the region was at the edges of the U.S. national space. However, understanding these cacti as commodities or as natural

68 R. A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Trans. Am. Phil. Soc., New Series, 67, no. 5 (1977): 1-84; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 41-44; Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). 69 M. A. Burnett, Plantæ Utiliores, or Illustrations of Useful Plants, employed in the Arts and Medicine Vol. 1 (London, 1842); Edward Smedley, et. al., eds., Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge, Vol. 16 (London, 1845), 776. 46

components of a visible and definable natural region made the land more familiar. If

exotic, it was not outside the language of science. Furthermore, the process of discovery

placed these plants within a familiar sense of place: the frontier.

Acting out a Geography of American Conquest

American expeditions into the region built the southern deserts into a geography

of conquest tied back to the American nation by filling the land with pathways. They

created actual trails across the region and they made intellectual pathways for readers to

follow. Both types of path served national goals to connection.70 U.S. federal expeditions

had specifically national goals. Initially, they sought to displace Mexican authority at

Santa Fe and in California.71 Subsequent expeditions sought to create a space for the

American nation by providing the physical and intellectual connections—roadways and

knowledge—necessary for cultural occupation. The knowledge produced fed an avid

readership interested in the region because of the war and westward expansion. That

readership consumed the paper deserts as an authoritative archive of place and thus

absorbed the land into the nation.72

The American expeditions of 1846-57 entered the Sonoran Desert from different

angles and their paths crisscrossed the region. In 1846 William Emory, accompanying

70 As Albert Furtwanger noted of Lewis and Clark and William Goetzmann argued for U.S. scientific and survey missions in general, the goals of an expedition inflected qualities to the process of discovery. Albert Furtwanger, Acts of Discovery; William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire. 71 Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 72 Robert W. Johannsen argues that readers followed the war with Mexico as part of a more general interest in global exploration and colonial action, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chapter 6, “Travelers in a Foreign Land.” 47

Stephen W. Kearny’s Army of the West column traveled west, southwest downstream

along the Gila River to Yuma then across the Colorado Desert to San Diego. The Gila is

the main southern tributary of the Colorado. It gathers water from southern Arizona and

the mountains of the Arizona-New Mexico border and flows into its desert confluence

with the Colorado River at Yuma (fig. 9, Appendix A). It was an obvious path across the

land because it maintained surface water for most of its length. It was also the main axis

line of agricultural habitation in the region.73 Emory’s goal was to assure U.S. claims to

California and New Mexico. He sought a quick path to California. Yet the story of his path also illuminated the lands along the river.

Another column under the leadership of Phillip St. George Cooke (the Mormon

Battalion) diverged from Kearny’s command south of Santa Fe along the Rio Grande.

Like Emory, Cooke had to grapple directly with the nature of the basin and range country

he crossed but he faced the additional challenge of finding a permanent route—a

replicable line—across the region. Cooke looped southward away from the mountainous

beginnings of the Gila to avoid rough country. He led his column around mountain

ranges and followed basins in a long arc first south, then west and northwest. His path

joined the Gila Trail, a Spanish and indigenous trail in Sonora, then diverged again to

73 The flows of Sonoran Desert rivers often sink beneath the surface. This reality was true in the nineteenth century even before ground water draw down in the twentieth. For works on desert water and Sonoran Desert rivers under pressure see Robert Webb, Raymond Turner, and Stanley Leake, Ribbons of Green: Change in Riparian Vegetation in the Southwestern United States (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007); William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Charles Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977). 48

travel northwest (downstream) along the San Pedro River then crossed over a pass

between the Rincon and Whetstone mountains to Tucson (see fig. 10, Appendix A). The

town was the most northerly outpost of Mexican nation in the desert.74 Cooke was

building a road and he needed easy grades so he tracked the valleys. Between Tucson and

the Gila River, travelers had a jornada (a waterless crossing). If a traveler followed the

Santa Cruz River they would quickly run out of water north and west of the Tucson

Mountains when it dropped beneath its sandy bed. A standard path diverged from the river bed and cut by Picacho Peak on route to the Gila River at the major settlements of the Pima Villages. From there, the Gila formed the obvious passage west to the Colorado

River then across the Colorado Desert to the Coastal mountains and San Diego. Cooke’s path became a standard route, modified later with the Tucson cut-off, that tied the Rio

Grande to San Diego.75

After conclusion of the war, the U.S. began searching for additional routes for

connecting the region to the nation. In 1851, Capitan Lorenzo Sitgreaves had the task of

exploring the possibilities of navigating the region’s rivers. He dropped south into the

desert down the Little Colorado River, skirting the lower reaches of the Grand Canyon to

avoid the canyon and paralleled the Colorado to Yuma. The Colorado flows out of the

74 Relevant histories of Tucson include: C. L. Sonnichsen, Tucson: The Life and Times of an American City (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Michael F. Logan, Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Michael F. Logan, The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); James E. Officer, Hispanic Arizona: 1536-1856 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987). 75 Philip St. George Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico and California: An Historical and Personal Narrative (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878); Philip St. George Cooke, Scenes and Adventures in the Army or Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1857). 49

Rocky Mountains and cuts a meandering groove through the plateau. The Colorado

funnels water from the high country of northern Arizona and New Mexico into the lower

desert of Sonoran. In the desert it flows around mountain ranges before entering a broad

floodplain south of Yuma. Near its terminus in the Gulf of California, it fans into a delta

of braided, confusing, seasonal and tidal channels. The U.S. Department of War had a

distinct interest in navigation on the Colorado and its tributaries. They wanted to supply

the fort at Yuma and viewed the river as a way to resupply and exert power in the desert.

Like Cooke, Sitgreaves had the mission of connecting the region to the nation. Like other

explorers, Sitgreaves found the rivers discontinuous, often small, and filled with surprises like the falls on the Little Colorado. It was also a crowded land and he kept meeting and seeing people, and the evidence of habitation. It was also a land where one could become

‘bewildered’ and wander without good guidance. Sitgreaves filled the land with stories: the mundane daily hunt for sustenance and water, encounters with other people, and a continual flow of descriptions of nature. He followed the Bill Williams River to the

Colorado and then south to Yuma and the well-known hardships of the Colorado

Desert.76

Like Sitgreaves, Balduin Möllhausen, accompanying Emile Whipple’s 1853

railroad survey, entered the desert along the Bill Williams River then traveled

downstream the Colorado. Möllhausen was a European protégé of Humboldt who

travelled to the American West first with Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm of Württenberg in

1850. He signed on with Whipple as a topographer and draftsman in 1853 and then

76 Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves, Report of an Expedition down the Zuni and Colorado Rivers (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, Public Printer, 1853), 8, 13. 50

returned to Berlin where he became Humboldt’s long term house guest and protégé.

Möllhausen returned to the Sonoran Desert in 1857 on Joseph Christmas Ives up-river

voyage of the Colorado River. Möllhausen’s experiences in all these settings painted a

broad picture of the region’s nature. He was able to draw upon the Duke’s stories, his

own experiences, and his other reading to craft a broad vision of the region that he passed

on through a major work published in 1858.77

Scientists were also entering the desert from the Pacific. In 1853, Geologist

William Phipps Blake accompanied Williamson and Parke eastward as they sought a break in the Sierra Nevada that would allow rail travel to Yuma. The discovery of San

Gorgonio Pass—a smooth route splitting the San Bernardino and San Jacinto

Mountains—was a revelation and crucial tie between the settlements of California and

the desert interior. The desire for connections drove Joseph Christmas Ives in the

successful effort to steam up the Colorado River to Black Canyon. Ives was on a mission designed to assert U.S. power toward Colorado River peoples and the expansionist

Mormon state.78

Like the railway and navigation surveys, the boundary surveys demarcated space

for national interests while travelling the heart of the Sonoran Desert from both east and

west. The intellectual and political appointee John Russell Bartlett’s 1850 boundary

77 Balduin Möllhausen, Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coasts of the Pacific with a United States Government Expedition, 2 vols. (London: 1858). 78 David Weber, The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); David Weber, The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); James Officer, Hispanic Arizona 1536-1856 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987); Richard Batman, James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984). 51

survey left the Copper Mines of New Mexico and proceeded into Sonora retracing

Cooke’s road. After the Gadsden purchase, Lieutenant Nathanial Michler crisscrossed the

Lower Sonoran Desert from Los Nogales to Yuma and back again in 1854. Emory also

returned in 1854 to mark the boundary. These expeditions produced a body of knowledge

and geography of discovery: they recorded and ordered nature with reference to certain

national objectives: primarily boundaries and transportation routes.

All of these expeditions produced published works. Thousands of pages of

description of geology, plants, animals, local peoples, and camp life filled in the region.

Important natural features like the major rivers—the Colorado, the Gila, the Salt, the

Yampa, the San Pedro, the Santa Cruz—received attention because they were corridors of travel, the site of most inhabitation and necessary sources of water. The surveys’

objectives also led them away from the rivers to mark dryer lands like the San Gorgonio

Pass or the desert of the international border. The lands they described grew into an

integrated whole: a space bounded by the Rio Grande on the east, the California

mountains on the west, the international border on the south, and the edge of the

Colorado Plateau—the Mogollon Rim—on the north.

Descriptions were part of a burgeoning regional archive that also involved

harvested material nature. Plants, animals, and artifacts returned with the descriptions,

allowing study and display in the east. This material provided a counterpoint to the

written texts. Finally, the very process of expeditions, quite apart from their success at

describing nature or creating a national space, became part of the archive. The stories of

expeditionaries also became material for emplacing U.S. national culture on the land. 52

They tied the regional archive to a greater geography and history of American expansion

and comparative colonial encounters.79

Remapping the Known World

The land they entered was hardly terra incognito for Euro-American literary society. Spain had been exploring and reporting on these landscapes for centuries. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries began a long relationship with the peoples of the

Sonoran Desert and Americans were privy to some of these accounts.80 Where direct

information failed, analogous supposition provided the material from works about exotic

places.81 American trappers and traders had also been peering into the region from its edges and once they reached Santa Fe in the 1820s, they began pushing further in.82

Well-known travelers included father and son trappers Sylvestre and James Ohio Pattie

who worked the Gila River in 1824. James returned with Michel Robideau in 1826 and

with his father in 1828. During these three trips, they trapped the San Pedro, trapped and

travelled the Gila to its confluence with the Colorado, crossed to the Pacific over the

Colorado Desert and travelled up the Colorado River.83 James Ohio Pattie published his

79 See Eric J. Leed, Shores of Discovery: How Expeditionaries have Constructed the World (New York: Basic Books, 1995) for a discussion of this process in a different context. 80 For the Spanish colonial encounter in the Sonoran Desert see Radding, Wandering Peoples, 20-46. 81 Dennis Reinhartz, “Herman Moll, Geographer: An Early Eighteenth-Century European View of the American Southwest,” in Dennis Reinhartz and Charles C. Colley, The Mapping of the American Southwest (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1987), 18; Further, Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (New York: Dover Publications, 1980). 82 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 64-79. 83 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 73-77. 53

narrative in 1831.84 Other less publicized travels included Jedediah Smith’s crossing of

the Mohave Desert in 1827 and the New Mexican Richard Campbell’s round trip from

Santa Fe to California following the Gila to its confluence with the Colorado and then

over the Colorado Desert.85 In 1829, Ewing Young and Kit Carson travelled along the

Gila to California. Young trapped the Gila again in 1832. In 1831-32 David E. Jackson

drove a herd of mules from Santa Fe to California via Tucson.86 In 1833, John Foster

arrived in Los Angeles guided overland from Guaymas by a native.87 Much of the information about these trips remained obscure to the public in the 1840s, but through the experience of trapper-guides, it provided important knowledge for the Army of the West

during the Mexican American War and infused the regional archive in subsequent

decades.88

Like trappers’ experiential knowledge, multi-generational information also

infused maps of the region. London-based geographers like Herman Moll produced maps

illustrating the land through second-hand accounts about local human groups and

accumulated information from many explorers. Thus the lands of the Sonoran Desert had

human designations. Apacharia (the homeland of the Apache) and Pimeria (the homeland

of the Pima) were common as were variations of Tigues and Chichimeca, more mythical

84 James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, Timothy Flint, ed. (Cincinnati: John H. Woods, 1831). 85 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 75; Alice B. Maloney, “The Richard Campbell Party of 1827,” California Historical Society Quarterly 18, no. 4 (December 1939): 347- 354. 86 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 76 citing Le Roy and Ann Hafen, Old Spanish Trail, Santa Fe to Los Angeles (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1954), 175-76. 87 Hubert Bancroft, History of California, Vol. 3, 389. 88 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 77. 54

notations revealing Spanish misgivings about the potential location of dangerous (to

Spanish goals) native groups.89 The river systems of the Sonoran Desert appeared

frequently on maps and their existence was perhaps the most reliable physical feature.

Most importantly, the relationship between the Colorado and Gila Rivers, and the

Colorado and Gulf of California, as well as the San Pedro River’s confluence with the

Gila all showed up as established features in major maps by the nineteenth century.90 In

1846, Americans had access to a range of maps with this information.

Older works also contained valuable information. If they could access it,

Girolamo Ruscelli’s 1565 Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova showed the Colorado River

flowing into the Gulf of California. Knowledge of the three branches of the Colorado

River system—Gila, Green, and Colorado—show up in Abraham Ortelius’s 1570

Americae sive Novi Orbis.91 Early maps like these were more likely encountered

indirectly through their secondary use but they recorded the earliest European contact.

European information on the Gulf of California and Colorado River mouth began in 1539

when Francisco De Ulloa reached the head of the “Vermilion Sea” (Gulf of California).

Ulloa’s report entered English and then American literature in 1600 through the work of

Richard Hakluyt’s report on the head of the Gulf of California:

the Captaine and Pilote went up to the shippes top, and sawe all the lande full of sand in a great round compasse, and joining it selfe with the other shore, and it

89 Reinhartz and Colley, Mapping the American Southwest, plate 2, 26, 31. 90 Judith A. Tyner, “Images of the Southwest in Nineteenth-Century American Atlases,” in Reinhartz and Colley, Mapping the American Southwest, Fielding Lucas’s 1823 General Atlas, 66 and Sidney Morse’s 1823 “Map of the United States,” 68, Henry Tanner’s 1836 “Map of North America,” 71. 91 Richard V. Francaviglia, Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin: A Cartographic History (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005), maps on 16, 18, 19. 55

was so low, that whereas wee were a league from the same wee could not well discerne it, and it seemed that there was an inlet of the mouthes of certain lakes, whereby the Sea went in and out. Although uncertain that they faced a river mouth, they knew it was a possibility. Less

than a year later (August 26, 1540), Hernando de Alarcón began ascending the river he

described as “a very mighty river, which ran with so great a fury of a stream that we

could hardly sail against it.” Despite the danger, he took boats upstream an estimated 85

leagues (a league could equal between 2.6 and 3.6 miles). An overland party under

Melchior Díaz walked overland to the Colorado River. These initial explorations, coupled with continual Jesuit gathering of information filled in map spaces.92

In a 1795 atlas that had broad readership, William Winterbotham applied this

knowledge to provide excellent detail of the head the Gulf and included notable Spanish

sites like San Xavier Mission (near Tucson) and other Jesuit missions in the area.

Alexander Von Humboldt’s 1810 Map of the Kingdom of New Spain is a treasure trove of

information (see figure 5, appendix A). It shows the Gila River, Baboquivari Mountains,

Tucson and San Xavier de Bac, Tubac, and Tumacacori, and many other Spanish centers.

Splashed loosely around the map are Native American names. T. J. Franham’s Map of the

California showed the Gulf of California, coastal range, Rio Colorado, and Gila River system. Accurate detail was of mixed provenance: for example, splashed across the Great

Basin was the title Paiuches Desert, while the headwaters of the Gila held “Apaches

92 See Godfrey Sykes, The Colorado Delta (Baltimore: Lord Baltimore Press, 1937), 2-3; For Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, Vol. 9 (Glasgow: Robert Maclehose & Co. LTD, 1904), 214-15; Albert B. Elsasser, “Explorations of Hernando Alarcón in the Lower Colorado River Region, 1540,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 1, no. 1 (1979), 11. 56

Indians” rather than mountains.93 Other maps showed equal amounts of speculation and

useful information but all of them showed the region as a place filled with natural

features and human communities. They clearly marked the region as part of the Spanish

world. It was a known world, not blank space.

Historical knowledge of Sonora was equally a combination of accurate

description, expectations, and misinformation. Americans inherited a well-established

tradition of condemning Spanish rule in the Americas. And, as historian David Weber

argues, even after independence movements swept away Spanish control, the Spanish

past lived on in American histories.94 The most important reference work about Mexico was by Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero. Written in Italy after the Jesuit expulsion from

New Spain, La Historia Antigua de México drew upon Aztec codices and other historical

material to make a vivid and well-informed work. Clavigero wanted to educate

Europeans about Mexican history and he succeeded. His work provided authoritative material for generations. Humboldt’s works built upon Clavigero. His Political Essay on

New Spain (1811) provided information about the region. He wrote about the proximity of the headwaters of the Gila River with the Rio del Norte (Rio Grande) noting that “the

crest of this central branch of the Sierra Madre…divides the waters between the Pacific

and Atlantic Ocean.” This bit of information contains a world of knowledge about the

93 Tyner, “Images of the Southwest, 73. 94 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 335-337. 57

topography of the continent. He also broached the topic of whether the Gila was the

original land of the Aztec.95

Humboldt was hardly alone in reproducing and updating Spanish colonial

knowledge for nineteenth-century readers. Richard Henry Bonneycastle of the British

Royal Navy provided sketchy descriptions of the Pimeria Alta in 1818. He reported the

rivers, the general geography, and the role of the Pima and Apache in determining

Spanish power yet painted a remarkably ill- informed picture.96 Certainly by the 1820s

there was a sense that Mexico was well known to English language readers. R. W. H.

Hardy told readers he felt “presumptuous” to describe his travel through Mexico (1825 to

1828) since so many people were writing about the country. This sense of writing the

known world did not stop him however, and Hardy provided a travelogue and mapped

the lower Colorado River.97 Joshua Conder drew heavily upon Humboldt to tell 1830 travelers about Spanish expeditions in the Sonoran Desert and to relate the political history of the land surrounding the Gila and Colorado Rivers.98 Texas succession and

American interest in the Southwest called forth American English-language histories of

95 Alexander Von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain Vol. 1, translated John Black (New York: I. Riley, 1811), 49, 99. 96 Richard Henry Bonneycastle, Spanish America; Or a Descriptive, Historical, and Geographical Account of the Dominions of Spain, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 86-88. 97 Lt. R. W. H. Hardy, Travels in the Interior of Mexico (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), iii, 212; Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Project Gutenburg Ebook of the Romance of the Colorado River, producers Diane Bean and David Widger, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4316/4316-h/4316-h.htm#link2H_TOC (retrieved 11/30/12). 98 Joshua Conder, The Modern Traveller: A Popular Description…Of the Various Countries of the Globe, Vol. 7, Mexico and Guatimala Vol. 2 (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1830), 61-67. 58

Mexico that included the work of John Milton Niles (1837), William Hickling Prescott

(1843), and Samuel Gregory (1847).99 Information piled up forming a baseline archive

for America’s campaigns in the 1840s.

By the time the U.S. invaded, Americans had a generalized knowledge of the region. William Emory’s own pre-exploration map, compiled in Washington, D.C.,

intentionally left out a great deal of earlier information but recorded the river system

faithfully (see fig. 6, appendix A).100 Besides his own “blank map,” he had a map by

Samuel Augustus Mitchell, itself based upon earlier cartographical works by Henry

Tanner and others. Although perhaps unreliable in some senses, and failing to account for

the basin and range mountains of the desert, these maps provided a plan of action because

they contained the visible major geographical features and a body of latent knowledge

hidden from view. Thus, American Army officers had a great deal of cartographic

information before they started out. 101 They also had a sense of the area’s human

geography. Looking from without, they could see the region through a Humboldtian

geography that drew upon several hundred years of European colonialism and the literary

products of these conquests: geographies, histories, and anthropologies.

99 John Milton Niles and L. T. Pease, South America and Mexico with a Complete View of Texas Vol. 1 (Hartford: H. Huntington June 1937), 61; William Hickling Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico, 3 Volumes (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1922); Samuel Gregory, Gregory’s History of Mexico (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 71-2; 100 William H. Emory, Map of Texas and the Countries Adjacent (Washington, D.C.: War Department, 1844), courtesy digital collections University of Texas Arlington Library. 101 William Goetzmann records that William Emory took Samuel Augustus Mitchell’s map with him. Mitchell used aspects of Henry Tanner’s earlier maps and thus recorded the river systems and Indigenous groups, Army Exploration in the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), 130. 59

Focusing the Imperial Gaze with the Language of Natural Science

The ability to see the land from without, with an imperial gaze, provided the explorer-scientist-imperialists of the Mexican American War and Border Surveys with a comparing narrative and point of view. For example, even when the land seemed alien, the sense of mission allowed Emory to see the place through the goals of his nation and the practice of science.102 Yet the exotic nature required description. At one moment along the Gila, Emory wrote: “strolling over the hills alone, in pursuit of seed and geological specimens my thoughts went back to the States,” and when I turned from my momentary aberrations, I was struck most forcibly with the fact that not one object in the whole view, animal, vegetable or mineral, had any thing in common with the products of any State in the Union, with the single exception of the cotton wood…In one view could be seen clustered, the Larrea Mexicana [creosote bush], varieties of cacti, green wood acacia [palo verde], chamiza [rabbitbrush], prosopis odorata [screw bean mesquite], and a new variety of sedge, and then large open spaces of bare gravel. The only animals seen were lizards, scorpions, and tarantulas.103 As Emory plunged deeper into the Sonoran Desert, natural dissimilitude grew. The rock formations required metonyms of far off places and mythic times—castles and ancient time—and the plants occupied greater attention. Saguaro cacti “and every other variety of cactus flourished in great luxuriance. The pitahaya [saguaro], tall, erect, and columnar in its appearance, grew in every crevice from the base to the top of the mountains.”

Following the Gila continually presented lush landscapes. Willows so thick they blocked process, flights of birds, fish. Prints accompanying the report show the rugged mountains and lush foliage of the river and basin and range. Up close, the plants seem to elicit thoughts of tropical thickets rather than western vistas. In one vision (fig. 6, Appendix

102 Emory, Military Reconnaissance, 76. 103 Emory, Military Reconnaissance, 77. 60

A), a Chain Fruit Cholla (Opuntia fulgida) presses tightly against the straight stem of a saguaro, itself growing through the limbs of a palo verde (Cercidium floridum), while beneath a species of prickly pear and a barrel cactus, crowd the image. The closed in view heightened the sense of exoticism.

The diverse landscapes of the Sonoran Desert challenged simple description.

Emory mixed the exotic with the familiar. The mountainous terrain of the Mimbres seemed a ‘natural’ stronghold for Apache power but crossing the Sonoran Desert led through other landscapes as well. It was a world of scattered oases and clear flowing water. Along the Gila River, Emory encountered Pima agricultural communities working a rich and recognizable irrigation landscape. These ribbons of agriculture produced order and prosperity.104 In contrast, once across the Colorado River, the Colorado Desert, and the lower Sonoran along the Gadsden Boundary, presented a psychic challenge requiring a number of obvious and some less obvious explanatory narratives. From the confluence with the Colorado River, across the dry basins of the Colorado Desert, the intense wastes of the land left American travelers aghast. Travel writer Bayard Taylor spoke for many when he told readers that California argonauts along the Gila Trail described the desert west of the Colorado River as “scorching and sterile—a country of burning salt plains and shifting hills of sand, whose only signs of human visitation are the bones of animals and men scattered along the trails.”105

104 Emory, Notes, 98. 105 Bayard Taylor, Eldorado or Adventures in the Path of Empire, Eighteenth Edition, (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1859), 47. 61

Metaphors from far off lands provided a way to think clearly about some of these

landscapes. Exotic travelogues were quite common and compelling literature in

antebellum America. American John Lloyd Stephens told readers of his 1837 recount of

traveling in Egypt, Arabia, and the Holy Land, that the world of the 1830s was itself an

open book hardly needing interpretation since “universal peace and extended commercial

relations, the introduction of steamboats, and increased facilities of travelling, have

brought comparatively close together the most distant parts of the world.”106 Stephens

liked to mix political commentary and historical longing into his writing in order to

present the decadence of Egypt and remind readers about its fabled past and Europe’

bright present. Nature seldom appears. However, when it does, it comes packed with

historical judgment.107

Within this general setting, specific natural features like cacti conveyed a sense of

the exotic and clearly linked these lands with tropical and subtropical America. The

written and visual descriptions of cacti litter the writing upon the region. Taylor described

them as fruit in California and Mazatlan, as plants associated with desert wastes, and as

hedges lining village streets and fields.108 Upon encountering saguaro cacti near the

decaying mission of Cocospera, Sonora, botanist George Thurber told readers:

“Description can convey no adequate idea of this singular vegetation, at once so grand

106 John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), iii; Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 119-20. 107 “It was not until now, riding in the suburbs [of Cairo] upon burning sands and under a burning sun, that I felt myself really in the land of Egypt,” Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, 16-17. 108 Taylor, Eldorado, 125, 329, 350, 384-86, 405, 423, 438-39. 62

and dreary.”109 Subsequent writers could hardly help sharing Thurber’s response to these giants. The diversity of plants commanded Philip Cooke’s attention as he moved west.

He noted “a giant mescal thirty feet high…, cacti, from a little pink ball at your feet, to the size of trees,” and ocotillos that Cooke called devil rod.110 He called botany

“ennobling” and a great benefit in his travels as the strange plants fell into familiar descriptive slots.111 Like other correspondents, Cooke expressed amazement at the

Saguaro. These columnar cacti looked like “Corinthian” columns and the “branches,

gracefully curved…like the branches of a candelabrum.112 Saguaro cacti became a staple

of descriptions of Arizona’s desert. Samuel Woodworth Cozzens illustrated a ‘Cereus

grandes’ with a mounted man while describing the plants in a setting of “brilliant green” prickly pear and maguey [Agave Americana] set against “the clear blue sky” of a

“Marvelous Country.” Möllhausen posed natives beneath them. Emory sent his

descriptions and samples to botanist George Engelmann as exemplary of the desert flora

of the Gila River.113

The imperial vision of the land—exotic yet attainable—inflected the paper deserts

these expeditionaries took out with them. Scientific data filled their reports. In his 1848

report, Emory included a botanical appendix by botanist John Torrey who was botanist

for the State of New York, mentor to Asa Gray, and was working on a flora of the United

109 Asa Gray, “Plantae Novae Thurberianae: The Characters of Some New Genera and Species of Plants in a Collection Made by George Thurber, Esq., of the Late Mexican Boundary Commission, Chiefly in New Mexico and Sonora,” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, New Series, vol. 5, no. 2 (1855), 302. 110 Cooke, Conquest of New Mexico, 139. 111 Cooke, Scenes and Adventures, 234. 112 Cooke, Conquest of New Mexico, 148. 113 Cozzens, Marvelous Country, 233. 63

States. Torrey catalogued Emory’s collection into scientific shape. Saint Louis-based

George Englemann, the nation’s most formidable expert on cacti, provided a detailed

description of the cacti. Another appendix contained tables of meteorological data,

weather, time, and position.114 This raw material of observation went out to experts like

Torrey and Englemann where it became part of a natural history archive describing the

region. Placing the land through nature, especially flora, took work but the process made

nature an important component of redefining the region.

Placing Cacti in their Regional Context

Explorations gathered plants back to centers of interpretation where experts could

judge their value and set them in context. Detailed knowledge of the Cactaceae of the

American Southwest trickled in through the relationship between George Englemann of

Saint Louis and his friends and correspondents Josiah Gregg and Adolph Wizlizenus.

Gregg, ever busy crisscrossing the southern prairies and traveling the Camino Real

between Santa Fe and other portions of northern Mexico, sent Engelmann plants, plant

clippings, and pressings. Letters and specimens arrived through travelers, merchants, and

trusted officials: “I sent you, by the party of Gen. Butler, a ‘batch’ of plants…I now send

you another lot by Dr. Zabriskie.” Gregg wrote in 1847.115 Wizlizenus, one time medical

partner with Engelmann, was also hauling plants out of Mexico for his friend. In 1846

114 Lt. William Hensley Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (Washington, D.C.: 1848). 115 Josiah Gregg, Scenes and Incidents in the Western Prairies: During Eight Expeditions, and Including a Residence of Nearly Nine Years in Northern Mexico, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1856); Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1954); Letter from Gregg to Engelmann, March 25, 1847, in John Thomas Lee, Josiah Gregg and Dr. George Engelmann (Worchester: American Antiquarian Society, 1932), 16. 64

and 1847, he botanized into Mexico and was caught up in the American-Mexican War.

Despite this entanglement, Engelmann reported that Wizlizenus “brought home with him

more than twenty species” of cacti. The provenance of these species made apparent the

links between cacti and Hispanic America.116

Others were also busy sending Engelmann cacti. William Emory collected seeds

and described cacti along the Gila River. These included Echinocactus Wislizeni ( also known as Ferocactus Wislizenii and named by Engelmann for his friend), Cereus greggii

(called the night blooming cereus), many opuntia, and the saguaro. Engelmann’s

description of the last also demonstrates the ties between these new U.S. cacti and the rest

of the Americas. Engelmann wrote: “A gigantic cactus was observed along the Gila River

[that is] most probably is a true Cereus. I Judge so from the seed, which fortunately has

been preserved…If it is a constant fact that the cotyledons of the seeds of the genus

Pilocereus are thick and globose and straight, the plant in question cannot belong to that

genus, which comprises the most gigantic of the Cactus tribe. The large Cereus, C.

Peruvianus, is vastly different from our plant, which I would propose to name Cereus giganteus.”117 Cereus means torch and was first applied to a New World plant in 1623.

Its origin was something of a mystery. Linnaeus recorded the name in 1753 and placed it

in Jamaica and Peru. In the 20th century, Nathanial Lord Britton and Joseph Nelson Rose

116 Adolph Wislizenus, Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico Connected with Colonel Doniphan’s Expedition in 1846 and 1847 (Albuquerque: Calvin Horn Publisher, Inc., 1969). 117 George Engelmann, Cacteae of Emory’s Reconnoissance and Botany of Dr. A. Wislizenus’s Expedition, in The Botanical Works of the Late George Engelmann, William Trelease and Asa Grey, eds. (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1887), 113. 65

argued against these locations. Subsequent listings placed a plant of this name on coastal southeast South America.118 Engelmann’s reference clearly tied the saguaro geographically, if not scientifically, to these storied plants. Prickly Pear exist in most U.S. states, however, the variety and size of the cacti in the southern deserts drew the eye south. Between 1846 and 1857, Engelmann was able to collate information gathered by a series of botanists and natural scientists traveling through the region. Major contributors included: Charles Christopher Parry, George Thurber and Charles Wright who collected with the boundary surveys, Jacob Bigelow, and esteemed physician and botanist from

Harvard and President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences accompanied Whipple and worked the boundary, and John Lawrence LeConte, an entomologist who worked across the West and along the Gila River.

Cactus was not the only flora that made the region distinctive. Agaves like the

Agave Americana, members of the Fouquiera genius like the common ocotillo

(Fouquiera splendens), and yuccas like the Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia) and the

Soaptree Yucca (Yucca elata), creosote and a host of other plants tied the region together and set it off aesthetically.119 However, saguaro was the most obvious unifying botanical marker of this desert. The Emory-Englemann connection helped underscore the prominence of the Cereus giganteus. The Gila River cactus represented a far northern species of the great cacti that graced central and South America.120 Unlike the general cultural name, this cactus had a specific place: southeastern California in his description.

118 Nathaniel Lord Britton and Joseph Nelson Rose, The Cactaceae, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1920), 11. 119 Engelmann, Cactacea of Emory’s Reconnoissance, 109, 55-57. 120 Engelmann, Cactacea of Emory’s Reconnoissance, 113. 66

Emory recorded it between 2000 and 4000 feet along the Gila and in 1852, Englemann was able to more fully describe the C. giganteus as the “giant of the Gila country.” In

1850 LeConte described the plant along the Gila. It grew along the banks to within thirty miles of the confluence with the Colorado. In the following years, Botanist Charles C.

Parry made a close examination of the “suwarrow” and recorded second-hand information as well. He personally experienced the plant in rocky ground from Tucson overland to the middle Gila and learned it existed in central Sonora all the way to the coast. Englemann postulated [incorrectly] that C. giganteus was the same cacti described in Baja California by Humboldt in his 1811 Political Essay on the Kingdom of New

Spain.121 That cactus was most likely the cardon (Pachycereus pringlei named for the prolific collector Cyrus Guernsey Pringle). With the benefit of reading Miguel Venegas’s

1758 A Natural and Civil History of California, Engelmann was able to assert the importance of the cactus fruit in native economies. Venegas wrote: among the plants and shrubs…in California, the principle is the pitahaya, a kind of beech, the fruit of which forms the great harvest of the poor inhabitants here. This tree is not known in Europe, and differs from all other trees in the world, its branches are fluted and rise vertically from the stem, so as to form a very beautiful top. They are without leaves, the fruit growing to the boughs. The fruit is like a horse chestnut, and full of prickles: but the pulp resembles that of a fig, only more soft and luscious. In some it is white, in some red, and in others yellow, but always of an exquisite taste.122

121 Engelmann, Cactacea of Emory’s Reconnaissance, 113; George Engelmann, “Notes on the Cereus Giganteus of Southeastern California” in The Botanical Works of the Late George Engelmann, ed. William Trelease and Asa Grey (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1887), 122-23; Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Vol. 2 (London: 1811), 328. 122 Miguel Venegas, A Natural and Civil History of California (London: 1759). 67

The giant cactus thus marked the region as part of a biological region skirting the

shores of the Gulf of California northward around the Gila and terminating somewhere

near the Colorado River on the west and Tucson on the east. A distinct region, it was also

tied closely to Mexico.123 The cacti of Northern Sonora (Southeastern California, the Gila

Country) had convenient metaphorical niches. They were trees like beeches according to

Venegas. James Ohio Pattie called them, “A species of tree, which I had never seen

before... The top is cone shaped, and almost without foliage. The bark resembles that of

the prickly pear; and the body is covered with thorns.”124 Whatever the comparison, these

plants provided a growing number of specific connections marking the American

landscape of Northern Mexico and the Southwest of the U.S.

Plant names celebrated a community of discovers and the stories of their

discovery. In this case, these discoveries occurred amid a nation building effort to

displace Mexican national power and limit indigenous power. Thus Cereus Greggii

recalled Josiah Gregg, Opuntia engelmannii George Engelmann, Ferocactus emoryi

William Emory, Stenocereus thurberi (organ pipe cactus) George Thurber, and Agave

parryi C. C. Parry celebrate botanical fieldwork but also recall the making of this

knowledge. The plants, named, recall the process of the naming. However, the colonial

implication of these acts of creation also led outside the region into a colonial space that

was not tied to a specific place.

123 George Engelmann, “Further Notes on Cereus Giganteus of Southeastern California with a Short Account of Another Allied Species in Sonora,” Collected Works, 125. 124 James Ohio Pattie, Personal Narrative, 104. 68

The Global Vision: Displacing Cacti into Exotic Lands

For botanists and lay traveler alike, cacti exemplified exotic lands with

associations distinctly foreign to American national environments. These associations

grew from obvious and more obscure sources. First, cacti were botanical features of the

American Southwest and the Americas south of the U.S. Second, and more dislocating,

the history of Europe’s relationship with cacti was both long and complex. Although

Cactaceae are new world plants, their global diffusion and etymology obscured their

origins. Opuntia ficus-indica, the ‘Indian fig,’ probably accompanied Columbus’s on his

return trip from the Caribbean in 1493. It became an important forage crop, went native

and spread around the Mediterranean. Linnaeus chose to call the plant Cactus opuntia in

1753. Linnaeus knew of the prickly pear (Opuntia vulgaris) because it flowed into the old

world from the new as a commodity in the Columbian exchange.125 Cactus is derivative of the Greek kaktos, a word describing a prickly thistle and would therefore seem to indicate that cacti existed in the Mediterranean world long before the Columbian

Exchange brought it back: it did not. Columbus probably brought prickly pear to Europe upon his return voyage in 1493. They became part of European maritime stores to prevent scurvy. In the following centuries, Europeans spread them throughout the world.126 Opuntia also had an ancient root. Both words masked the American origin of

125 Engelmann, “Synopsis of the Cactaceae of the Territory of the United States and Adjacent Regions,” Collected Works, 127; Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972). 126 M. Patrick Griffith, “The Origins of an Important Cactus Crop, Opuntia ficus-indica (Cactaceae): New Molecular Evidence,” American Journal of Botany 91, no. 11 (November 2004), 1915; Griffith notes the following: the “widespread propagation (intended and unintended) throughout the Mediterranean obscured the geographic origins 69

the species: Its acclimatization to the old world sealed the association. As the plant

spread, many Europeans lost track of its natural history and instead viewed it as a global

plant. By the nineteenth century, prickly pear cacti were familiar components of a global

colonial agriculture.127

The presence of cacti in the old world reinforced both the exoticism and

familiarity of Sonoran Desert landscapes. Like other writers from the nineteenth century,

Bayard Taylor naturalized these old world cacti through literature. “Leaving the gate of

Jaffa,” he wrote, “we rode eastward between delightful gardens of fig, citron, orange, pomegranate and palm…The road was lined with hedges of giant cactus, now in

blossom.” In remarking upon the cacti of Jaffa Taylor was summoning up a biblical

world using an anachronistic plant 128 He was also utilizing language that drew upon the

combination of imagery from his travelogue to Mexico five years earlier and the general

sense of the American presence in the cactus lands of the sub-tropical southwest was

exotic.129 This recursive practice worked the other way as well. Cacti in the Sonoran

Desert attached the place to broader stories about the most fabled of European desert

lands—the Holy Land.

They also, more accurately, evoked close associations with Mexico and South

America. European scientists and American naturalists like Wislizenus, Emory, Gregg,

of this species; many early European botanists regarded this cactus to be native, as reflected in Cactus opunitia L. This Mediterranean naturalization may now be conceived as complete, as the Israelis of the mid-20th century often adopted the (believed- indigenous) sabras as a symbol of their struggle (and humanity) in adverse desert conditions,” 1916. 127 M. Patrick Griffith, “The Origins,” 1915-21. 128 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen (New York: G. P. Putnam & Co., 1855), 48. 129 Taylor, Eldorado, 125, 329, 350, 384-86, 405, 423, 438-39. 70

Thurber, and others collected observations and specimens and the image of cacti as

distinctly new world emerged. Yet even as cacti became botanical markers distinctive to

the Americas, Americans began to distance themselves from South America. The notion

of a continental empire required a continent and the line of demarcation became

cultural/linguistic.130 Seeing the plants and the land through imperial eyes had a distinct

advantage for antebellum American expeditionaries. They could interpret regional nature

as both exotic and within the discourse of civilization. The exotic setting provided a

theater of action for scientific discovery and the varnish of heroism. Humboldtian science

provided a unifying and conquering narrative that placed these discoveries squarely

within domestic (as opposed to exotic) space. This process of inside-outside is visible in

the role plants played in shaping a sense of the region. “Every observing traveler must have noticed how closely the peculiarities of the scenery of a country depend upon its vegetable productions,” Charles C. Parry wrote in his 1858 report to Congress. No region, he continued, was so clearly defined by its plants and so distinct from other arid

landscapes familiar to U.S. expeditionaries as the southern deserts.131 Cactus both placed

130 Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 119-20; Bender writes: “A territory including what is today the Southwest of the United States and the North of Mexico had for centuries been a single region; in 1848 it became two…Even more interesting, atlases published in the United States during the 1850s introduced the then novel concept of the Americas as two continents, not one. The unity of the Western Hemisphere, which Europeans and Latin Americans recognized until at least World War II, was apparently unwelcome to the race-conscious U.S. citizens whose nationalism was heightened after the war with Mexico; See Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 131 “Thus one who has ever traversed the desert table lands of the Upper Rio Grande will not fail to unite in his recollection of these tracts of dull foliage of the Creosote bush, the 71

and displaced the land; they made the land at once distinctive and tied it to colonial landscapes. They provided a sense of place. The acts of putting them into scientific systems of knowledge also tied them to the colonial encounters of U.S. expeditions into the region. The naturalists wrote themselves into the land along with the natural history.

They tied plants to space and provided an avenue for understanding the region independent and parallel to its older cultural inscriptions. When people were used to measure the land, they became material for describing time, not space. They became the stuff of history not geography. In focusing the region through natural history, these expeditionaries found a material for a new region.

long thorny wands of the Fouquieria, the palm-like Yucca, and the crimson-flowered and spine-armed Cereus. Still less can any one, who has seen the giant cactus of the Gila in its perfection, ever forget the wild and singular features of the country in which it grows.” Charles Christopher Parry, “Introduction,” to Botany of the Boundary in William Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1858), 10. 72

CHAPTER 2: A COLONIAL SENSE OF TIME, SONORAN DESERT ANTIQUITY

“Nature has done her utmost to favor a condition of things which has enabled a savage and uncivilized tribe, armed with the bow and lance, to hold as tributary powers three fertile and once flourishing states, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango, peopled by a Christian race, countrymen of the immortal Cortez. These states were at one time flourishing, but such has been the devastation and alarm spread by these children of the mountains, that they are now losing population, commerce and manufactures, at a rate, which, if not soon arrested, must leave them uninhabited.” William Hensley Emory, 1846132

“Another mile brought us to the building of which we are in search, rising above a forest of mesquite. For two or three miles before reaching it, I had noticed quantities of broken pottery, as well as the traces of ancient acequias or irrigating canals, along the bottom land.” John Russell Bartlett, 1852133

The Sonoran Desert encountered by American expeditions was full of people. Its human past and ethnographic present provided a way for new observers to integrate U.S. history with regional identity. Ruins marked a complex past; living communities a thriving present. Rather than connecting these people to a current tradition like the

Spanish Piméria Alta, U.S. expeditionaries focused on links between ancient ruins and an ethnographic present indelibly marked as forever in the past. The human landscape of the region became a tool for describing the region’s prehistory. Expeditionaries marked time through archeological ruins, colonial ethnographic representations, and critiques of

132 William Hemsley Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (Washington: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, Printers, 1848), 76. 133 John Russell Bartlett describing Casa Grande, Personal Narrative of Exploration and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854), 271. 73

indigenous and Mexican (and by extension, Spanish) society. People like William

Hensley Emory, John Russell Bartlett, Balduin Möllhausen, and Raphael Pumpelly used

this sense of time to set the region within world history and within the context of U.S.

history. They operated as primary producers of knowledge that tied archeology and

ethnography into intellectual and policy-making networks. They formed a policy

community uniting scientists, like-minded intellectuals, publishers, and policy makers

who could interpret the region into the nation.

The Human Metrics of Civilization

In the background of these histories was a sense of time as captured by the

metrics of human bodies and material culture. Bodies were a gauge of the discourse of

civilization. Historian Gail Bederman argues the discourse of civilization had three strong themes: “race, gender, and millennial assumptions about human evolutionary progress.”

All focused on the human body. Encounters with ‘primitive’ people in imperial settings provided the material for demonstrating Anglo-Saxon superiority through political or cultural domination. It also provided the material for a discourse on human evolution and social development. As a Foucaultian discourse, civilization defined both the terms of the discussion and exercised social power through the organization and deployment of facts.

Thus civilization was an idea based in progressive history couched in Social Darwinian terms that were racial and therefore temporal.134 Racial assumptions had a material

aspect. For antebellum expeditionaries, racial and cultural assumptions were ‘seen’ in

134 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 23, 25; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 74

material culture. Monumental architecture signified advancement; grass huts signified

debasement. Progress was literally visible in material culture.135

Even in the 1840s, this sense of time as progressive and people as hierarchical had

a firm foothold in intellectual advocates of Manifest destiny. In dispossessing Mexico,

these advocates asserted a right to domination based in part on racial conceptualizations

of Mexicans and indigenous people. American imperial advocates like William Gilpin

saw the struggle within the context of the march of world civilization.136 Racist

apologists for American empire feared the region’s mestizo population within the U.S. but could console themselves with the idea that the Sonoran Desert offered clear rail passage to the Pacific and mineral wealth for the treasury: a colonial, rather than a national landscape.137 Conquest of Northern Mexico stoked the imagination of an

emerging southern nationalism with fantasizes of a slave-based “Caribbean Empire” that

135 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 136 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 3, Transcontinental America, 1850-1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.— Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), xv; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 36-43; William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 38-9; William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (J. P. Lippincott & Co, 1878). 137 See Eric T. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) for how racial fears acted to contain American expansion. See Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) for a discussion of how Jim Crow worked to ease fears about sustaining Anglo-Saxon civilization in domestic and foreign colonial environments. 75

could produce tropical commodities with slave labor.138 This imperialist impulse

conceived of a slave-empire circling the Caribbean.139 Other Americans were more

ambivalent about these imperial acquisitions. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote:

“the United States will conquer Mexico but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic,

which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”140 Racism lay at the heart of

either argument about whether America should expand its dominance and tutelage of

brown-skinned people, or should skirt the tropics and protect America’s imagined racial

purity.141 These racist ideologies became embedded in U.S. assimilation of the landscape

and entangled in the descriptions of the Sonoran Desert.

Histories Brought to Bear on Antiquities

Many of the expeditionaries saw archeological remains as a useful source that

might reveal something profound about the region. The ruins and ruminating on them

provided a way to stage people in the land and the discovery of an American pre-history

was a motive force in the mental world of people like William Emory. “To-day we passed one of the long-sought ruins,” Emory wrote, revealing his expectations and prior knowledge based in reading Clavigero and Humboldt, and in the written works of the

American Philosophical Society. “I examined it minutely,” he continued, “and the only

138 Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), “The Awaiting Paradise.” 139 Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 59. 140 Quoted in George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176. 141 See Love, Race over Empire for racism as a break upon American expansion. Love’s argument does not ring true if, as southern expansionists wanted, America could have a permanent slave society. 76

evidences of handicraft remaining were immense quantities of broken pottery, extending for two miles along the river. There were a great many stones, rounded by attrition of the water, scattered about; and, if they had not occasionally been disposed in lines forming rectangles with each other, the supposition would be that they had been deposited there by natural causes.”142 Signs of human inhabitation thickly cover the Gila River vicinity because it has long been densely inhabited.143 In the 1840s and 1850s, a string of Pima communities lined the Gila River east of its confluence with the Salt and Santa Cruz

Rivers (fig. 10, Appendix A). Coco-Maricopa communities followed the Colorado. The presence of people and the relics of peoples past made the region cultural rather than wilderness. This was a distinction with some importance because Americans would have to appropriate this human history to claim the land. They did so through archeological theories and focusing on the ethnographic present: a sense that native peoples had a timeless primitivism.144

Human Origins and Historical Musings

The intimate relationship between western expansion and ethnography was part of the process of establishing the intellectual terms of Americanization: defining the people of the past provided grounds for understanding them in a world historical context placing

142 Emory, Notes, 64, 65; for the meaning of antiquity for American literati see Bruce Trigger, A History of Archeological Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 143 Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish, eds., The Hohokam Millennium (Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008); Patricia L. Crown and W. James Judge, eds., Chaco & Hohokam: Prehistoric Regional Systems in the American Southwest (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1991). 144 For a good discussion of the way this worked when centered in the four-corners region see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996). 77

America (Euro-American civilization) at the end point of history.145 Rather than a

wilderness in a state of nature, the region was an antique land, filled with ruins, geology,

and history seemingly scattered about like the potsherds along the Gila. Organizing the

past into stories that claimed ownership, while accounting for this obvious past was one

of the roles of history. The indigenous past was especially puzzling and intriguing to the

U.S. expeditionaries interpreting the region.146 For example, educated American society

had readily equipped Emory to ask questions about the relationship between culture,

landscape, and civilization.147 Archeological evidence demonstrated that people had lived and irrigated the land. The Pima continued to have rich fields that impressed him. The

Pima presence, like the absence represented by the ruins, intrigued Emory. Were these ancient relics from the epoch of Aztec migration as told in historical accounts by Fray

Marcos de Niza or Clavigero? Emory was unsure: “the Indians here do not know the name Aztec…[yet] a mythical (timeless) Montezuma pervaded history before the Spanish arrived “so they speak of every event preceding the Spanish conquest as of the days of

145 The classic expression of European efforts to de-historicize Native Americas is Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Numerous other works will get you to this idea in profound ways. For the conquest of New York and the erasure of indigenous signs of ownership see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). For the process of cultural re-inscription in the Rio Grande Valley see Charles H. Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 146 I found this idea through Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Travelers Tale (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992). Placing history in the land transforms the sense of place and allows landscapes to bear a richer burden of meaning. 147 Bruce Trigger, Archeological Thought; Nancy Thomas, Gerry D. Scott III, Bruce Trigger, The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995). 78

Montezuma. The name, at this moment, is as familiar to every Indian, Puebla, Apache, and Navajoe as that of our Savior or Washington is to us.”148 Emory didn’t find this story convincing. Emory knew from the Jesuit Miguel Venegas’s 1758 History of California that the Jesuit Jacob Sedelmayer recorded large contemporary communities of Pima in the mid-eighteenth century. He did not know where along the river these people lived.

However, this observation seemed to demonstrate that local people could have lived in larger urban centers in the recent past. The Pima Villages were proof of this possibility.

Besides the direct evidence provided by the Pima Villages, Emory found convincing Albert Gallatin’s theory that these ruins were more closely related to contemporary people in the region. Gallatin, the President of American Ethnological

Society, disagreed with Clavigero’s theory that the Rio Gila was the ancestral homeland of the Aztec. For Gallatin, the theory failed because of the dissimilarity of the language and culture. Instead, Gallatin saw the process reversed. Crops like maize and technology like architecture flowed from Mexico (this meant the valley of Mexico) to the people who built Casa Grande.149 Emory carried this active debate intot he field with him. Clavigero,

Venegas, Gallatin, and a host of other writers provided him with an outlook—a prepared

148 Emory, Notes, 65. 149 Albert Gallatin, “Notes on the Semi-Civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan and Central America,” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, vol. 1 (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1845), 128, 202-03. 79

mind—to see the ruins critically.150 These ruminations about Indigenous origins and histories were part of a broader historical narrative contained in colonial encounters.151

From contact, the question of American Indian origins fascinated Euro-

Americans. The existence of unexpected people raised two intellectual problems: the questions of commensurability and origin. Were these people fully human and if so, how had they populated these unrecorded lands? In nineteenth-century America, a qualified yes answered the first question. With few exceptions, Euro-America theorists said all people were human. There was, however, a caveat to the story. These same theorists placed people within a hierarchical and historical framework of development of political ecology and historical development. From this viewpoint, Native Americans were human but at a different stage of development.152 By the 1840s, this racial hierarchy, based in questions over natural rights and the role of the market, was assuming renewed scientific gloss people like phrenologist Samuel George Morton sought to quantify human

150 If the ruins were more recent, perhaps depopulation resulted from attacks by the Apache who guarded these lands from their mountain fortresses. Emory, Notes, 76. 151 Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York: Cambridge, 1994). 152 David R Wilcox and Don D. Fowler, “The Beginnings of Anthropological Archeology in the North American Southwest: From Thomas Jefferson to the Pecos Conference,” Journal of the Southwest 44, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 123; For the role of reading civilization through technology see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1843); Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Shepard Kretch, The Ecological Indian (New York: Norton, 2000). 80

hierarchy through new techniques.153 The U.S. national building process of eighteen forties and eighteen fifties had major cultural underpinnings and Emory, in a small way, used them to guide the way he saw and presented the region.

The origins question was more confounding. During the early national period,

Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and Lewis Cass among others founded institution homes for studying American antiquities and Ethnography. The American Philosophical

Society (1743), American Antiquarian Society (1812), and American Ethnological

Society (1842) provided institutional homes and places to create a publishing community, exchange ideas, and work through theories. In the example of the American Ethnological

Society, Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett founded the society to trace the origins question by mapping Indian languages and ethnographies.154 The motivation for this

project was rife with expressions of power. Jefferson and others were more than simply

academically interested in Native American culture. Native American groups had a

primary, often central, place in U.S. foreign and domestic policy and in national

identity.155 Scientific institutional homes helped create policy communities that entangled

153 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981); Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 154 Emory and Bartlett both brought Gallatin along in their heads and lived his research in the boundary survey. 155 For an specific example look at James Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); For a general foreign policy see Herring, From Colony to Superpower; For a view of U.S. and British wars from Indian Country see Gregory Evans Dodd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982); Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press 81

policy and research in a publishing setting. Ideas and policies flowed out for

consumption.156 Aware of the relationships between Latin and the Romance languages, they worked to link peoples linguistically so as to scientifically describe the genealogy of

American settlement. Philology—comparative linguistics—was a powerful lens for

seeing the world. It took living languages and compared their differences to speculate on

relationships of time. Gallatin used this work to dismiss a flow of culture from the Gila to

the Valley of Mexico. And both Gallatin and others used language to try and see

connections between the monumental architecture of the Trans-Mississippi and the

Valley of Mexico.

Ideas about native people in the southern deserts entered U.S. society through

specialized publications and a healthy popular press.157Americans had access to Spanish translations of Mexican codices dealing with Meso-American peoples as well. William

Robertson’s History of America (1777) and Francisco Javier Clavigero’s History of

Mexico (1787) traced American ancestry to Asia (Central America/New Spain), Europe,

(Eastern North America), and Africa (South America), and created an elaborate explanation of the origins of the Aztec. Alexander von Humboldt adapted Clavigero’s

of Kansas, 2004); Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 156 For institutional homes see Curtis Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981); See Sarah Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) for a discussion of policy communities for conservation. Something similar is at play in the relationships among scientific explorers, policy makers, and scientific institutions. 157 William Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833-1865 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1999). 82

ideas in his early nineteenth century works and Josiah Gregg explicitly referenced

Clavigero’s interpretation that the Aztec originated from north of the Gulf of

California.158

Popular press provided a burst of publications about Mexico in the 1830s and

1840s. Encyclopedias included the Clavigero-Humboldt Aztec migration epic for more general readers. Novels and historical accounts also provided a unified sense of knowing the region.159 The topic appeared in the North American Review (1844) and Josiah

Conder’s 1830 The Modern Traveler. The historian William Prescott’s provided a

popular book length account in his 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico.160 In short,

the story was part of the publishing world.

From any of these sources, Emory might have understood that Aztlan, the

ancestral homeland of the Aztecs, was linked to the Mexican Central Valley through the

Gila River. Clavigero wrote that during the migration from Aztlan to the Mexican Valley,

the “Aztecas or Mexicans…stopped for some time [on the Gila]; for at present there are

still remains to be seen of the great edifices built by them in the borders of that river.” In

particular, he pointed to Casas Grandes [Casa Grande] as evidence of their residence.161

158 Gregg, Commerce, 196; Emory had Gregg’s work in his baggage, William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West: 1803-1863 (Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 1991). 159 Some examples include: James Bell, A System of Geography (Glasgow: Archibald Fullarton and Co., 1831); The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London, 1835); Joseph Holt Ingraham, Montezuma, the Serf; or, The Revolt of the Mexitili (Boston: H. L. Williams, 1845). 160 William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1843); Josiah Conder, The Modern Traveller, vol 25 (London: 1830). 161 Wilcox and Fowler, “Beginnings,” 132. 83

Likewise, Humboldt made the landscape of the Gila the jumping off point for the

“warlike nations who successively inundated the country of Anahuac.”162

Emory looked closely for signs of this heroic history. “In vain did we search,” he

wrote, “for some remnant which would enable us to connect the inhabitants of these long

deserted buildings with other races.” What he saw were vast quantities of pottery and

evidence of irrigation. Perhaps, even ceramic pipes to convey water. Evidence, he argued,

of a “busy, hard-working, people.” But were they Aztec? Emory, alert to potential telling details from William Prescott’s history of the Aztec, found obsidian and agate scattered among the ruins. These recalled the materials used for Aztec human sacrifice.

Through Miguel Venegas’ 1759 history he was aware, however, that the Jesuit Jacob

Sedelmayer encountered thousands of Pima and Maricopa living near the confluence of the Colorado and Gila. Emory therefore felt it likely the ruins were of more recent origin.163

Emory was part of an intellectual community bursting with revolutionary studies

about antiquities: American and otherwise. One of the community’s hubs was John

Russell Bartlett. He was deeply immersed in the literati circles of New York’s scientific

scene. He ran a bookstore and publishing house in the Astor Hotel and understood exotic

travel through the coffee house talk and friendship of Albert Gallatin, John Lloyd

Stephens and Ephraim George Squire. Bartlett committed himself to extending

“knowledge of those nations, whose history and place in the great family of man is

162 Wilcox and Fowler, “Beginnings,” 132. 163 Emory, Notes, 68; Miguel Venegas, A Natural And Civil History of California (London: 1759). 84

imperfectly known.”164 He was a motive force in tying research to opinion makers

through his publication of the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society. In

1848, Bartlett was a confidant and friend to the aging scholar Albert Gallatin who had a

lifetime of serving the U.S. as Secretary of Treasury, diplomat, and government official.

Gallatin also had a deep interest in Native American languages and published

philological works in the 1840s and 1850s.165 He and Bartlett founded the American

Ethnological Society which became a kind of trading house for tying research and

expeditions to the political class.166

The network created by the American Ethnological Society included people who

had well publicized works on the Holy Land and South America, as well as members

focused more intensively on the U.S. frontier. Perhaps foremost among the membership was diplomat and traveler John Lloyd Stevens. His 1841 Incidents of Travel in Central

America recounted 1839 adventures in the region. Among many experiences, he and

Frederick Catherwood mapped the Mayan ruin of Copan and in subsequent visits

uncovered, recorded, and publicized forty-four major sites. Catherwood’s drawings and

Steven’s account produced an electrifying work for other society members and the

public. Both men had previously been successful marketing their interest in Holy Land

antiquities into consumer products: Stevens through his 1837 account of travel in Egypt,

the city of Petra (Jordan), and Jerusalem and Catherwood through his creation and

164 John Russell Bartlett, The Progress of Ethnology and Geography (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1848), 3. 165 Nicholas Dungan, Gallatin: America’s Swiss Founding Father (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 166 Henry J. Rutz, The Politics of Time (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1992). 85

display of a Panorama of Jerusalem.167 As historian R. Tripp Evans shows, both men had similar objectives when they headed for the Yucatan. Catherwood sought material for a new Panorama. His New York City “View of Jerusalem” was a major source of income and Copan promised material for a new attraction. Stephens had more imperialist goals.

He imaged buying the property and removing the artifacts to New York City. He actually succeeded in buying Copan from its local property owner for fifty dollars. But to pull off the deal, he used his power as a U.S. diplomat, claiming an authority he did not have.

Stephens desire to own and control the artifacts led him into continued efforts at acquisition including theft. In the flow of these efforts—discovery, presentation, assertion of U.S. authority, purchase, and theft—the clear links between antiquities and national power are clear. The discovery of antiquities was a process laden with questions of power and control and Stephens believed the U.S. had a right to control and display these artifacts. Display meant a great deal. Placing the artifacts on display provided material for

167 John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841); Bartlett was partially responsible for setting Stevens and Catherwood off on their trip. David Drew, The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 55; John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837); A discussion of the way images from the Holy Land entered America can be found in Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 167; Fabio Bourbon, The Lost Cities of the Mayas: the Life, Art, and Discoveries of Frederick Catherwood (New York: Abbeville Press, 2000); A panorama was a popular way to visually represent a place or event in epic form. Catherwood had a building for his massive painting; R. Tripp Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) notes that Catherwood’s London Panorama was 10,000 square feet, 52. 86

making national meaning.168Collection and display provided a reciprocal relationship where material collections became the objects upon which theories relied.

John Russell Bartlett lived in a world filled with efforts to collect and display signs of the human past.169 He and his peers were busy working out American

anthropology.170 A major antiquities project in 1840s U.S. was the mapping and

interpretation of anthropogenic earthen mounds in the Mississippi River drainage. This

work was reaching a synthetic point in 1848 whe Ephraim. G. Squire and Edwin Davis

published their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The work reflected decades

of collecting on the Mound Builders and their monumental architecture but Squier and

Davis produced a descriptive work with unprecedented geographical scope. 171 Ancient

Monuments provided an archeological overview of what had been obvious to American

observers for a long time: these river systems had a long human history of monumental

architecture. “These remains are spread over a vast extent of country,” wrote the authors.

They included thousands of individual sites that amounted to a huge network of

168 Evans shows the integration between Stephens artifact collecting and nationalist intentions in quotes demonstrating a sense of entitlement to ownership based in ideas of foreign policy (the Monroe Doctrine) and belief that staging artifacts in museums made them meaningful, Romancing the Maya, 54-56. 169 One starting point for this collection was Napoleon’s 1798 expedition in Egypt. The mission created a wealth of archeological materials and led to the field of Egyptology. Its works pushed European intellectuals into a headlong pursuit of Egypt’s ancient culture. Charles Coulston Gillispie, “Scientific Aspects of the French Egyptian Expedition 1798- 1801,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 4 (December 1989): 447-474; Chalres C. Gillispie and Michel Dewachter, eds., Monuments of Egypt, the Complete Archaeological Plates from “La Description de l’Egypte” (2nd printing; two volumes boxed, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). 170 Wilcox and Fowler, “The Beginnings of Anthropology,” 134-35. 171 William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 261. 87

communities.172 When Bartlett set out to survey the border, he was wondering about

these ruins with the context of studies into the mound builders in the Mississippi and

Ohio Valleys and the civilization of Mexico.173

When Bartlett undertook his trip to the Mexican boundary he carried a deep knowledge of these studies with him. He was after explanations of the place through uncovering the history of the people. The ruins of the Sonoran Desert made these connections. They provided an archeological story of regional, national and universal significance. Bartlett found the past he was looking for along the Gila, Verde, and Salt rivers. “There is no doubt that this valley [the Salt River],” he wrote,” as well as that of the Verde and Gila Rivers, were once filled with a dense population, far enough advanced in civilization to build houses of several stores in height, surrounded with regular

172 “They are found on the sources of the Alleghany, in the western part of the State of New-York, on the east; and extend thence westwardly along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and through Michigan and Wisconsin, to Iowa and the Nebraska territory, on the west…Lewis and Clark saw them on the Missouri river, one thousand miles above its junction with the Mississippi; and they have been observed on the Kansas and Platte, and on other remote western rivers. They are found all over the intermediate country, and spread over the valley of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. They line the shores of the Gulf of Texas to Florida, and extend, in diminished numbers, into South Carolina. They occur in great numbers in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. They are found, in less numbers, in the western portions of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the North and South Carolina; as also in Michigan, Iowa, and in the Mexican territory beyond the Rio Grande del Norte…They are of frequent occurrence upon the river Gila, in California, and also upon the tributaries of the Colorado of the West.” Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1973), 2-3; David R. Wilcox and Don D. Fowler, “The Beginnings of Anthropological Archeology.” 173Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 274. 88

outworks, and to irrigate their lands by canals extending miles in length.”174 Potsherds,

mounds, tumuli, and canals littered the landscape. Casa Grande seemed especially

important. In 1852 the site consisted of three main buildings. The largest was three stories

high. Evidence of many more structures and the debris of civilization indicated a large

community. Bartlett was particularly aware of the craftsmanship of the pottery because

he wanted to find a trajectory of civilization. “The pottery is red, white, lead-color, and black,” he wrote. “The figures are usually geometrical and formed with taste…Much of this pottery is painted on the inside, a peculiarity which does not belong to the modern pottery.” The pottery seemed to prove a discontinuity between past and present and perhaps point to connections with societies further south. Yet, Bartell was not convinced by this evidence.175

In addition to the analogous studies provided by Squire, Davis, Stephens and

Catherwood, and Gallatin’s linguistic theories, Bartlett was prepared with Spanish and

English language historical accounts of the ruins and anthropological theory. He relied on

the writings of Venegas, Clavigero, and Humboldt. He also had possession of Father

Pedro Font’s Journal and a number of other sources discussing the Jesuit history in the

region. Font’s description (reproduced by Bartlett) was commonly cited by scholars.

Humboldt utilized the description in his 1811 Political Essay on New Spain, as did Henry

Rowe Schoolcraft in his (1853) History, Condition, and Prospect of the Indian Tribes and

Albert Gallatin in his 1848 “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of New Mexico and the

174 John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 247-48. 175 Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 272-79. 89

Great Colorado of the West.”176 These works provided Bartlett with expectations and a way to narrate his journey and stage his work for readers. He collected notes on indigenous language and artifacts in what he felt was a race against time before Native peoples vanished. This work he hoped “will be esteemed by the learned.”177

The search for historical evidence about the ruins drew stories of Spanish colonial endeavors into the present. Journeys distant in time became rough guides in the present and brought the land to life as a research topic. These efforts were not without some merit because the world was changing fast in the borderlands. The transformation of native societies from both internal and external pressures produced dramatic changes between the mid-16th century and mid-19th century.178 Older sources could capture truths lost to later generations. Albert Gallatin’s 1843 article “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of

New Mexico and the Great Colorado of the West,” makes the point well. In recounting the 1540 travels of Melchoir Diaz, Gallatin goes to great length to see the people and country. Fernando Alarcon found the Colorado River delta “thickly inhabited.” The

176 Humboldt, Political Essay on New Spain; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, History, Condition, and Prospect of the Indian Tribes (Philadelphia: Lippencott, Granbo, & Co., 1853); Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 278-81. 177 Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 1, vi. 178 Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 90

country east of the river and down to the Sonoran River was filled with cultural groups practicing agriculture. The landscape was also intriguing:

Throughout the whole distance, and as far as the desert of Civola, thorny trees prevailed; and the Indian huts were made of dry rush. The principle natural fruits were a species of figs called Tunas, and the Mezquite, which appears to be a species of honey-locust (Gleditsia). The fruit consists of a glutinous substance and a flattened bean pod, which were ground into flour by several of the Indian tribes: and this they baked in large loaves that might be preserved a whole year.

“It appears,” continued Gallatin, “that throughout the whole country the Indian population was at that time numerous; and that, although intermixed with more barbarous tribes, there was an almost uninterrupted continuity of agricultural nations.” Casa Grande, located between mountains and “the desert of Civola,” was relic and reminder of this populous past.179 Like others, Baldwin Möllhausen, a protégé of Alexander Von

Humboldt, described the lands as a ‘capricious’ world of arid unpopulated wastes and bustling river communities filled with people, agriculture, and life. For the German, these were exotic lands with exotic people, and part of the grand frontier of the American

West.180 Möllhausen questioned the ruins along his march. “The ruins you pass [west of the Rio Grande] as so numerous,” he wrote, “that you are continually led to speculate upon the past history of these countries” and placed blame for their present state: “How richly cultivated must once have been these desolate regions, now only occasionally traversed by bands of Apache and Navahoe Indians intent on plunder.”181 Möllhausen

179 Albert Gallatin, “On the Ancient Semi-Civilization of New Mexico and the Great Colorado of the West,” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 2 (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1843): liii-xcvii, quotes from lxviii, lxix. 180 Balduin Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 214, 230. 181 Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 77. 91

engaged in the debate over the relationship between Aztecs and the Gila River: a debate

about civilization.

To nineteenth-century historians and archeologists, the re-discovery of Mayan cities, and revived interest in Aztec civilization, were a revelation. At Copan, confronted with an elaborately carved stella, John Lloyd Stephens was confident to challenge the received wisdom of historians who discounted the grandeur of pre-Columbian

Civilizations. “The sight of this unexpected monument put at rest at once and forever,” wrote Stevens, “all uncertainty in regard to the character of American antiquities, and gave us the assurance…that the people who once occupied the Continent of America were not savages.”182 For Stephens and Möllhausen, the American ruins provided an

irresistible mystery. Stevens ‘knew the history’ of Egyptian ruins but the American cities

were an enigma.183 Möllhausen was also fascinated by the possibilities of linking the

ruins along the Gila River system with Mexican and Meso-American civilization. He

disagreed with Emory and Bartlett that the Pueblo were the descendants of the makers of

Casa Grande and instead presented a story linking the ruins with Aztec civilization.184

His report included Bartlett’s descriptions of Casa Grande and the ruins along the Gila

into his narrative. He also included excerpts from reports by Emory and J. W. Albert.185

The mystery of the ruins provided a human history linking the landscape of the Sonoran

Desert to major questions about American civilization.

182 Stevens and Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 102. 183 Stevens and Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 104. 184 Mollhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 78-9. 185 Mollhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 133-41. 92

For Emory and Bartlett, the Sonoran Desert seemed in some way attached to the great archeological finds in Mexico or the Mississippi Valley. Even if the ruins were not the roots of Aztec expansion, they hinted at a hidden history of a grand past. They also fit within a vision of antiquities as something through which to understand the past. That understanding had value in legitimating science and society. The material collections of artifacts, sketches, and writing provided documents for dispersal to wider audiences who could participate in defining the past. The ruins also placed the region firmly within a broad colonial landscape where treasure hunting, history, and nationalism mingled.

Alexander von Humboldt provided Möllhausen a preface for his Diary because he believed it equivalent in interest to works by Leopold von Buch about his expedition to

Norway and Lapland, Sir Robert Schomburgh’s surveying trip to the Amazon, and Prince

Waldemar on the East Indies and Tibet. Möllhausen’s epic fit with these more scientific exploits because he put together a vast transit of the North American continent. “When a traveller’s descriptions,” Humboldt wrote, “are the result of accurate and conscientious observation, and especially when they concern the condition of natives standing at various grade of uncivilised life, they must always interest the student of humanity.”186

The description of Indigenous people was like the charting of jungle rivers. They both

mapped the world within Humboldt’s grand vision and within civilization’s world time.

Indigenous people were important to see this time, because, according the Humboldt:

“the physical and moral condition of…natives…is interesting…with reference to

186 Balduin Möllhausen, Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coasts of the Pacific with a United States Government Expedition, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1858), xii. 93

generalisations concerning the sometimes progressive and sometimes stationary character

of civilisation.”187

Crafting the Sonoran Desert’s Ethnographic Present

Seeing links between the primitive past and the ethnographic present also

provided expeditionaries a sense of time as these purposeful and sojourning travelers

passed through native homelands. All desert crossings encompassed portions of the

nineteenth century human geography of the Sonoran Desert: river societies. Along the

Colorado River from north to south lived the Mojave, Chemehuevi, Yuma, and Coco-

Maricopa. Downstream from the junction between the Bill Williams and Colorado

Rivers, Balduin Möllhausen couldn’t miss the humanization of the land: “The valley of

this river must be thickly peopled, for on both shores,” he wrote, “as far as we could see,

appeared these signs of human habitation.”188 Along the Gila, Coco-Maricopa and Pima

(Akimel O’Odham) lived in rich agricultural villages. Their agricultural lands were

crucial stopping off points for the expeditionaries and were the center of agricultural

inhabitation in the region. Like others, William Emory provided a vivid description of the

Pima Villages area as densely inhabited and cultured. At their first sight of the villages,

Emory wrote, “we were at once impressed with the beauty, order, and disposition of the

arrangements for irrigating and draining the land.”189 Bartlett was expansive in his comprehension and description of how completely the Pima and Coco-Maricopa inhabited the Gila River. Arriving during the heat of late June, Bartlett and his company

187 Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 1, xiii. 188 Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 253. 189 Emory, Notes, 83-84, 86. 94

found the Gila River dry downstream from the villages. According to his informants, it

had “been turned off by the Indians to irrigate their lands.” 190 The fields were extensive

and well maintained and Bartlett’s party met with an abundance of crops grown on a vast

network of canals. The impression Bartlett conveyed was one of settled and productive

agricultural oasis lining the river bottomlands with interspersed villages:

The villages consist of groups of from twenty to fifty habitations, surrounded by gardens and cultivated fields, intersected in every direction by acequias, which lead the water from the Gila…Their cultivated fields are generally fenced with crooked stakes, wattled with brush.191

Away from the Gila fields and villages, the Hia-Ced O’Odham and Tohono O’Odham

(Papago) lived in small desert communities and in the Spanish villages of the Santa Cruz

River. Mexican and indigenous populations lived in Tucson, San Xavier del Bac, Tubac,

Fronteras, and other villages and Rancherias south of the Gila River. The Nṉēē (Apache) occupied the mountainous basin and range lands northwest, north, and east of Tucson.192

The rich human geography of the region gave Bartlett and others lots of material for

observation and explanation.

For Möllhausen describing native peoples within the “ethnographic present”

provided a tool for understanding their past.193 Camped among the Mojave People along

the Colorado River he imagined himself witnessing people in a state of nature. “On

190 Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 215. 191 Bartlett, Personal Narrative, Vol. 2, 233. 192 Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 13-15. 193 See Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians and Leah Dilworth, ed., Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (London: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Roger Sanjek, “The Ethnographic Present,” Man 26, no. 4 (December 1991): 609-628; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 95

seeing how happy and contented there people were in the primitive state,” he wrote, “one

might have wished that civilisation, with its many errors and sufferings, should never find

its way into the valley of the Colorado.”194 This sense that history as a motive force of

change had to arrive with Whipple’s command provided a way to set the Mojave, and

other indigenous people, with a Euro-American historical framework. Anthropologist

Roger Sanjek frames the approach Möllhausen adopted in this fashion: “anthropological writings and thought award place and time differently to the industrialized West—Here, and Now—and to the Rest—There, and Then.”195 For Möllhausen, the Mojave existed in the there and then. They needed to be static and authentic to receive description. They also needed their primitivism to make them good candidates for civilization. His lament at the arrival of civilization continued: “one might regret that a race so physically and morally gifted should be strangers to the blessings of civilised life.”196 Möllhausen could use the Mojave to ask and answer questions about the region while placing them within an inevitable sense of time.

The natural landscape also provided Möllhausen with a way to talk about the clash between civilization and barbarism since he felt cactus, and the giant cactus in particular, were synonymous with wild lands. “The wildest and most inhospitable regions appear to be the peculiar home of this plant,” he wrote.197 The Cereus giganteus or

Petahaya was a widely used food source with edible fruit ripe in May or June and their presence evoked in Möllhausen a sense of being among wild places and wild men. When

194 Balduin Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 95-97, 257. 195 Roger Sanjek is paraphrasing Johannes Fabian, “The Ethnographic Present,” 614. 196 Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 257. 197 Mollhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 218-19. 96

presenting the cacti, he chose to sketch several plants with five Indians in a line. The

sketch included the life cycle of the plant with young, mature, and decaying cacti in view.

One is head-height; a multi-armed giant looms nearby, and further in the distance stands the ribbed skeleton of another. To reiterate the link between wild people and wild lands,

Möllhausen drew Native Americans walking in single-file beneath the plants. One man holds a cactus fruit gathering pole. In this choice of representation he made explicit the ethnographic meaning of the plant and tied these people to this “wildest” of plants.198

For the ethnographically-minded like Möllhausen or Bartlett who were thinking

about the arc of the human past, the archeological remains and ethnographic present were

profound evidence of the nature of people and the qualities of the land. People and

landscapes were constantly re-enforcing images of the exotic. Yet, by placing these

people, and by default, the land, into a progressive historical narrative, land and people

became familiar. The people became the ethnographic other on display for analysis and

the ruins a source for artifacts. In these ways, indigenous histories and people entered into

the emerging regional narrative. They became understandable through colonial

encounters and colonial analogies.

Sonoran Desert Encounters and Colonial Analogies

These connections are made visible by focusing on Philip St. George Cooke’s

effort to map a wagon road from Santa Fe to San Diego. Cooke was no stranger to the

borderlands of the Southwest. Early deployments had him patrolling along the Santa Fe

Trail in 1829. It had opened to regular commerce between St. Louis and Santa Fe only

198 Möllhausen, Diary, Vol. 2, 218-233, quote 233. 97

after the Mexican Revolution in 1822. He provided continued service in the borderlands

on and off until the Mexican War.199 Cooke was a West Point-trained professional soldier

who presented himself as a force for law and order in the border wars along the Arkansas

by fighting both the paramilitary Army of Texas and Comanche in earlier years200 His

exclamation upon setting out from Fort Leavenworth to the Sonoran Desert, “New

deserts to conquer!” was therefore not without basis in fact. He had acted as conqueror

before. He well understood the kind of social environment he faced. The potential for

poorly linked communities, irregular war, and vast distances between supply points were

familiar parts of his experience.201

Recalling these early experiences in the plains in his memoirs, Cooke could stage the Sonoran Desert campaign within these broader frontier narratives. The distances travelled he likened to crossing an ocean: “Prairies are much alike in their main characteristics; though in the region which we now approached,” he wrote, “their immense extent made them, compared to those of the Western States, as the broad expanse of ocean.”202 Washing up in places like the trading outpost of Bent’s Fort or

Tucson was therefore akin to landing on exotic shores. Bent’s Fort was “the land of

Scythian Comanches, the audacious Cheyennes, here were many races and colors,--a

confusion of tongues, of rank and condition, and of cross purposes.”203 Tucson Cooke

199 Ralph P. Bieber, Exploring Southwestern Trails: 1846-1854 (Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1938), 19. 200 Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 5. 201 Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 8. 202 Cooke, Scenes and Adventures, 44. 203 The Bents founded their trading post at Big Timbers, a cotton wood grove along the Arkansas River downstream of the Purgatoire River, because it was in an imperial and 98

summarized in one word: “Pueblo.” 204 The Fort was both exotic outpost and an

appropriate stopping point on the road to Santa Fe. It tied American expansion into the

southern Great Plains to the southern desert. Americans mustered at the fort in 1846 and

then pushed on into New Mexico.

Cooke’s path took him swinging south along the Rio Grande and then cutting

through Northern Mexico to Tucson and overland to the Gila River and its confluence

with the Colorado. South of Albuquerque, along the Jornada del Muerto, Cooke’s path

and the corridors of Spanish imperialism merged. Using Spanish lines of connection

recreated these colonial routes even while America sought to replace Mexican control.

Cooke kept mingling the sense of wilderness with his knowledge of the political

geography of the land. Turning west from the Rio Grande, amid clouds and cold

November wind, Cooke looked upon “lofty mountains, distant and isolated” rising “here

and there from the great smooth plain.” “Such is the characteristic, I am told, of

Mexico.”205 Yet, “the country begins to look outlandish,” he wrote, and “the flickering fires tonight reveal around strange plants and bushes; the Spanish bayonets look like colossal statues with their cap of luxuriant leaves, and other nameless bushes we have

cultural borderland. It had been an important winter grazing refuge for the Comanche since the 1720s and the site allowed Comanche to act as trade brokers between New Mexico and the plains. The Bents moved into the site as Cheyenne and Arapahos pushed into Comancheria in the 1830s.Philip St. George Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 8; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37, 164-65. 204 Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 150. 205 Bieber, Exploring Southwestern Trails, 100. 99

seldom seen before. We have got among wild animals.”206 Wild animals lived in wilderness; the antithesis of civilization.207

Trying to make a wagon road created special logistical problems and provided a certain narrative arc to the journey. Making passage required open ground and this often proved elusive. Along the San Pedro, Cooke noted that they had to cut through 12 miles of mesquite. Yet, the wagon road was a mission of civilization: making safe passage would knit the lands to America. Like the subsequent railroad surveys its design was integration of the pacific coast with the U.S.208 If the details of the land were not exactly clear, Cooke was certainly not operating in an information vacuum. His guides Pauline

Weaver, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, and Antoine Leroux all knew the general geography of the Sonoran Desert. What they did not know personally, they knew as lore from other trappers.209 American trappers had personal experiences dating from at least the 1820s and of course, drew much of their knowledge from regional residents with longer memories.210

Cooke and others were entering a landscape they saw as in flux between a present of barbarism and a civilized future. It was a colonial land because there was an ongoing struggle to define the future. “Be assured,” Cooke wrote Sonora’s Governor Don Manuel

Gandara, “that I did not come as an enemy of the people you represent.” Mexico, he

206 Bieber, Exploring Southwestern Trails, 93. 207 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. 208 See Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire. 209 Bieber, Exploring Southwestern Trails, 70, 74, 85. 210 James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, ed. Ruben Gold Thwaites, vol. 13, Early Western Travels: 1748-1846 (Cleveland OH: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1905). 100

continued, had failed Sonora by not protecting it from “savages.” This political reality,

Cooke argued, made the U.S. and Sonora natural allies in the struggle for progress and

civilization.211 Cooke was describing the land from within his experiences at frontier

warfare. The battle was of several fronts. At the national level, the U.S. was wresting land

from Mexico. However, throughout and beneath this struggle lay the reality that

indigenous people were also engaged in national struggles. To the east, Comanche held a

vast effective trans-border empire with patronage and vassal relations with other

indigenous groups.212 Likewise, the Apache were engaged in a multi-front trading and

raiding struggle with Mexico, the Comanche, and other groups. The agricultural people

along the Sonoran Desert rivers were living out equally independent lives. Cooke

understood this dynamic landscape through a relatively simple cultural lens. He quoted

Emory to describe the Apache as “savage and uncivilized” and living in a state of war.213

Like the plains of Texas or other frontier landscapes, the Sonoran Desert was contested ground. A common thread linked these landscapes as part of greater colonial world of landscapes.

These analogous landscapes were much on the mind of William Phipps Blake

while searching for a railway pass through the Sierra Nevada. Blake, geologist to Robert

S. Williamson and John G. Parke, called San Gorbonio Pass, “a true gateway” to “the

interior wilderness” of the desert. Eastward, lay the “trackless waste of nearly level land,”

an ancient lakebed, and a place Blake named the “Colorado Desert” since it represented

211 Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 152-53. 212 Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire. 213 Cooke, The Conquest of New Mexico, 242. 101

low, ephemeral lake beds, now dry but once filled by the river.214 Blake described the

Colorado Desert as an area “where extreme characteristic desert conditions prevail…such conditions as are found in the Sahara of Africa.215

Blake had two ways of knowing the area immediately. As a geologist, he saw himself standing upon a vast interior lake periodically filled when the Colorado burst its banks and diverted into the low ground. Thus his knowledge of geologic processes filled the landscape with a geologic sense of deep time. His use of the Sahara as reference also made the landscape familiar as a literary and scientific locus at once exotic and part of a familiar colonial process of adventuring in arid lands. The Sahara had been the site of

French colonial science at the turn of the century. It provided a point of reference for thinking about all other desert lands. The Colorado Desert was part of the most arid reaches of the Sonoran Desert. It was a place where analogies with Saharan sand wastes could summon up exotic images. Thinking about all arid lands through use of the Sahara recalled the merger of science and conquest in the desert.216

214 William Phipps Blake, “The Cahuilla Basin and Desert of the Colorado,” in Daniel Trembly MacDougal, The Salton Sea: A Study of the Geography, the Geology, the Floristics, and the Ecology of a Desert Basin, (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1914), 1, 6. 215 Blake, “The Cahuilla Basin,” 6. 216 Blake was part of a survey party in search of railway passes. The conquest of California and New Mexico, and the purchase of the Gadsden strip had been a classic “European” affair like the revolution or the War of 1812. These railways were going to run right over the top of Native Americans who were assumed as subjects. See Edward W. Said’s classic Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), “Orientalism’s Scope”; For the classic argument of how Europeans’ consumed empire see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd Ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008); For the science of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign see Gillispie, “Scientific Aspects,”: 447-474. 102

The Sahara was an exotic site in European and American cultural fantasies. Like

Blake, Bartlett pointed specifically to Humboldt’s 1807 Views of Nature to think about how the playas of New Mexico created mirages. “All objects appear to float in the air…Palm-trees, cattle, and camels sometimes appear inverted in the horizon,” Bartlett wrote. “In the French [Napoleon’s] expedition to Egypt, this optical illusion often nearly drove the faint and parched soldiers to distraction.”217 Still coming out in new editions in the 1850s, Views prepared Bartlett to think broadly about the meaning of deserts in human history.218 Borrowing from fifty year old experiences half a world away allowed

Bartlett to convey the continuities between American efforts in the Sonoran Desert and the French vision of conquest in North Africa.

Re-enacting Humboldt’s literary account was a recursive process that fluctuated between archival and experiential knowledge.219 Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt produced important scientific publications that prefigured America’s efforts with the

Topographical Engineers. Topics included papers on Ancient and contemporary Egypt including work on desert geology and mirages.220 The combined efforts of the errand were also about demarking political territory.

References became reality in the 1850s, when Edward Fitzgerald Beale used camels to survey a road from Fort Smith Arkansas to the Colorado River’s Fort Defiance. He

217 Bartlett, Personal Narrative 247. 218 Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 44; Alexander Von Humboldt, Views of Nature, 3. 219 The idea that we prefigure the world we encounter is hardly novel. However, the cycle between receiving and generating knowledge is central to the idea or an orientalist discourse. Generating authoritative knowledge that can then explain and contain is fundamental to acting with authority. 220 Gillispie,”Scientific Aspects,” 450-51. 103

claimed that the idea of using these “ships of the desert” occurred to him as he traversed

Death Valley with Kit Carson. In his baggage he had Abbé Huc’s Travels in Tartary,

Thibet and China during the years 1844-5-6.221 Huc placed camels at the center of his

travels: they had interesting and gentle dispositions, provided safety and entertainment,

and were tolerant of cold, heat, and drought. The only terrain camel’s feared to tread was

“wet marshy ground.” In short, they were ideal desert creatures.222 Beale’s biographer

Steven Bonsal claimed that this depiction convinced the surveyor that camels would cut

the North American desert’s terrors in half. The idea of camels in North America received ridicule but Beale attained support from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and sourced his camels from Tunis. They proved incredibly hardy and fulfilled Beale expectations.223 Camels were an obvious choice for arid land travel because they are

desert animals. When Beale made his acquisition, the British were busy using them in

prosecuting their wars in Afghanistan.224 In Australia, camels became standard travel

equipment beginning in the 1860s. Between 1870 and 1920 some 20,000 camels and

2000 Muslim cameleers arrived in Australia. They created a network of trade routes

across the interior the continent.225 While camels came ‘west,’ Blake and Raphael

Pumpelly went east out of Arizona and California to Japan and China and eventually to

221 Steven Bonsal, Edward Fitzgerald Beale: A Pioneer in the Path of Empire 1822-1903 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 199. 222 Evariste Régis Huc, trans. William Hazlitt, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China During the Years 1844-5-6 Vol. 1, 2nd Edition (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1900), quote 229. 223 Bonsal, Beale, 199. 224 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 225 Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Land 1860s-1930s (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010), 37. 104

Abbé Huc’s deserts. For Möllhausen coming from Europe, Emory and Cooke from their recent postings in Texas, Bartlett from New York City, the Sonoran Desert was one front in a global colonial landscape of discovery, description, and conquest.226 The experiences and knowledge these expeditionaries took out of the region created an emerging archive of a colonial region made of distinctive nature and people but interpreted through

Humboldtian geography and civilization’s time.

The Emerging Sonoran Desert Archive

The Mexican American War and the resulting realignment of the political geography of the Sonoran Desert drew Americans into encounters with the major features of the region. These encounters with the landscape formed part of a broader colonial pageant with many acts of imperial imagination and state-building in a contested borderland. These efforts at explanation and description began to domesticate this exotic landscape. Familiarity opened room to create a region based on natural features, human inhabitants, and expectations about the future.

In 1860, Raphael Pumpelly rode a stage from Missouri to Tucson to run silver mines in the Santa Rita Mountains.227 Pumpelly was a European trained geologist fresh from his degree at the Freiburg University.228 He crossed into Arizona in fatigued delirium, awakening in a barroom to a pistol shot. His disorientation was juxtaposed to a kind of generalized knowledge of the land and a story about its potential. He knew the lay

226 Raphael Pumpelly, Across America and Asia: Notes of a Five Years Journey Around the World and of Residence in Arizona, Japan, and China (New York: Leypoldt & Holt, 1870), 67. 227 Raphael Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 17. 228 Margaret Derby Champlin, Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994). 105

of the land. The Rio Grande on the east, the Mogollon Rim and Colorado Plateau to the north, and the basins of the Colorado Rivers on the west bracketed these desert lands against Sonora. He knew that the Colorado and Gulf of California constituted a single geological depression; that mountain ridges trending north and northwest ran in parallel across the region. Between were plains: “Thus the whole country is a great plain, out of which rise the many outlying sierras of the Rocky range, as islands from the sea.”229 The

land rose as one travelled east from the Colorado, mountaintops reached 10,000 feet and

valleys 6,000. The land held evidence of volcanism, although many ranges were granitic

and the valleys deeply filled with sand and gravel. Like the land itself, rainfall increased

from west to east. The lands adjacent to the Gulf of California were extremely arid while

the Santa Rita Mountains much better watered. The result was that a “traveler may ride

hundreds of miles [near the coast] without seeing other plants than dry and thorny cacti.”

Away from the coast, palo verdes, mesquites, saguaros created low forests filled with

cacti and wood plants. Eventually, the traveler encountered “a denser growth of mesquite

and palo-verde, out of which rises a perfect forest of the gigantic columns of the saguaras

[sic].”230 The only ‘proper’ river cutting the region was the Gila. The Santa Cruz, San

Pedro, and other regional rivers displayed a discontinuity of surface flow but they also supported cottonwoods, “bean-bearing mesquite,” and ash that “shade the beds of streams in the neighborhood of hidden running water.” On the hillsides surrounding the rivers

229 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 8. 230 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 9-10. 106

acacias and dwarf oaks graced grasslands that struck Pumpelly as orchard-like. Finally, oaks and cedars gave way to pine forests on the mountains.231

Personally, Pumpelly witnessed some of these landscapes. He travelled in

Papagueria west of the Baboquiveri Mountains. He travelled the Santa Cruz River. He

worked the mines in the Santa Rita Mountains. He also knew the landscape as a legacy of

the collected work of the previous decade. His vision of the land came from the paper

deserts of his predecessors. Information rapidly summarized in academic and popular

writing. Pumpelly’s description drew heavily upon Sylvester Mowry’s article in volume

one of the Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society.232 Besides

advocating a genocidal war against the Apache, and calling for seizure of a port on the

Gulf of California to facilitate mining, Mowry presented a ‘civic description’ of the

Sonoran Desert as a place of American potential.233 Highlights included the evocation of

easy wealth: empty ranch houses, easily accessed silver, fertile agricultural river lands,

and exceptional grazing lands. The Apache and Mexican border stood between

Americans and these opportunities. Mowry worked hard to sell the place:

The climate of Arizona, except on the Lower Gila and the Colorado, is delicious; never extremely hot, with cool summer nights, it offers great attractions to those who desire more genial skies than those of the North. Snow never lays in the winter, seldom falls; frost…The season for cultivating is long…The rainy season in Arizona is from June to September...234

231 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 10. 232 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 34; Sylvester Mowry, “Arizona and Sonora,” Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society 1 (March 1959): 65-75. 233 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 30, uses this term to describe a statistical approach to describe “‘an inquiry into the state of a country.’” 234 Mowry, “Arizona and Sonora,” 71. 107

It was also ripe for picking: “The Apache Indian is preparing Sonora for the rule of a

higher civilization than the Mexican” just as they had driven Mexican power from

Arizona.235

On the ground, things appeared more complex. Pima agriculture provisioned U.S.

troops. Rather than a poor second to Pimas, the Papago were fierce guards of their lands.

The U.S. and settlers would repeatedly call upon both in defense of the nascent Territory.

The landscape was also more complex.236 Especially away from the rivers, life bent to

the desert and filled the eye with strange botanical markers. Here were the palo-verde,

acacia, and saguaro. The giant cactus stood like “Grecian” columns with their fluted

baffles and Pumpelly mused on the curious disjuncture between their Mediterranean

appearance and their restriction to “a small area on the immense deserts of the New

World.237

In many ways, the nature that the boundary and railroad surveys found was visible

because it posed solvable problems. The basin and range country offered plenty of routes

for railways; the Santa Cruz, Gila, Salt, Yampa, Verde, San Pedro, and Colorado offered

useable water in valleys amenable to irrigation; the mountains were nearly sure to yield

up minerals; the regions ornamental botany adorned a nation transfixed with American

nature; even Native American resistance provided a state-based solution: the need for

military intervention. This legibility was, as James Scott argues, the organizing principle

for a vision of the nature beheld: gradients, roadbeds, resources, these were the important

235 Mowry, “Arizona and Sonora,” 72. 236 Mowry, “Arizona and Sonora,” 70; Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 37. 237 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 38-39. 108

components of nature as seen from solutions to state-building problems.238 However,

these narrow motives existed within a more broad-shouldered mission of describing the natural world. Scientists, like George Englemann and John Torrey, were living out a broad dream sketched by Alexander Von Humboldt. These Humboldtians were building the world up into an edifice visible to science.239 State builders and scientists (not

mutually exclusive) they engaged America’s southern deserts physically and through

organizing new experiences into colonial narratives. They placed the southern deserts—

the Texas, Chihuahua, Colorado, Tularosa, Mojave, Pacific, as they were then called— into American culture. They encountered a world of strange plants and assimilated them within a global encounter with exotic nature: the poles, the Tropics, the world’s deserts.

Exotic peoples and places made sense through these acts of discovery.

238 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 239 See Sachs, Humboldt Current for the idea of scientist explorers as Humboldtians. 109

CHAPTER 3: FRIENDLY AND FAMILIAR NATURE: ESTABLISHING THE CONNECTIONS AND COLLECTIONS OF AN AMERICAN SONORAN DESERT, 1880-1910

“The unguarded and loose use of the term ‘desert,’ as employed, not only in popular writings, but also in scientific descriptions, has given origin to wrong impressions in reference to a large portion of our Western territories, that hold with remarkable persistence both on the popular and scientific mind.” Charles C. Parry, 1869240

“You will be interested in noting also that the local tribesmen [Papago/O’Odham] were among the earliest and most successful agricultural experimentalists of the western hemisphere. They are desert folk par excellence, and entered into the distinctive solidarity of desert life to a unique degree.” William McGee, 1898241

“Tucson has a climate of a thoroughly desert character, and a flora, including mountains and plain, rich in species and genera. In addition to its situation in the heart of the desert of Arizona, it is centrally located, both as to position and transportation, with reference to the deserts of Texas, Chihuahua, New Mexico, California, and Sonora.” Coville and MacDougal, 1903242

An American place in the desert

In his 1977 Space and Place, cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan opened his

description of place by relating a discussion between Niels Borg and Werner Heisenberg

about the meaning of Denmark’s Kronberg Castle: “Isn’t it strange,” Borg said to

Heisenberg,” how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here.”

240 C. C. Parry, “Botany of the Region along the route of the Kansas Pacific Railway,” in William Abraham Bell, New Tracks in North America, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869); see notes on Parry at http://www.csupomona.edu/~larryblakely/whoname/who_pary.htm (viewed 3/13/2012); S. B. Parish, “Parry and Southern California Botany,” Plant World 12, no. 7 (July, 1909): 158-162. 241 Description of the Papago by W. J. McGee cited by Fredrick Coville and Daniel T. MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab of the Carnegie Institution (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1903), 16. 242 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory, 13. 110

“As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones,” he continued, yet once we

see this castle through the story of Hamlet, “suddenly the walls and ramparts speak a

quite different language.”243 A sense of place could emerge from a story, a tale designed

to impart meaning. Even fictional stories could become associated with a location,

transforming its meaning. Something similar happened in the Sonoran Desert through a

series of landscapes: castles of stone and sand, of ecological systems and archeological

ruins, of histories and memories. By adding stories, desert meanings changed.244

A crucial period for generating these stories began with the trans-desert Southern

Pacific railway and grew into full bloom before World War I. In these thirty-odd years

between the 1880s and 1910s newcomers inhabited the Sonoran Desert physically

through transforming the desert with irrigation but also by describing the region’s nature

through natural and human histories.245 They re-inscribed the land with stories and

gathered up historical interpretations into a new sense of place. The process required the

production of new knowledge and the re-interpretation of old. Experts from both without and within the region provided the material and interpretations for these stories.

Scientists, first from without, and then based regionally, led in the production of a natural history that saw a holistic vision of a desert region spanning two nations and a great

243 Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 4. 244 Patricia Nelson Limerick made clear the power of narratives to interpret the desert in her Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985). 245 For a discussion of the Salt River Valley see Thomas Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 212-217; Karen Smith, The Magnificent Experiment: Building the Salt River Reclamation Project, 1890-1917 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986). 111

diversity of landscapes. Loci for this production included individuals like plant dealer

Charles Russel Orcutt and geographer Godfey Sykes. Their interests led them into relationships that diffused their expertise into national arenas. Other motors for these stories included government-employed scientists like Major Edgar Alexander Mearns and the Unites States Department of Agriculture’s C. Hart Merriam and Frederick Coville and the Bureau of Ethnology’s William McGee. All travelled into the region to gather and export their knowledge and specimens back to the museums and intellects in the eastern

U.S. Even while outsiders gathered the desert back to the core, Tucson-based regional centers like the University of Arizona and Carnegie Desert Laboratory provided new institutional homes for scientists working to describe Sonoran Desert nature. There were also differences of contact and connection. When 1890s boundary surveys returned to resurvey the international boundary they saturated the region. Whereas boundary work of the 1850s often took the form of a quick crossing, in the 1890s, surveyors crisscrossed a broad boundary region. These acts of emplacement differentiated this second era from the pre-Civil War expeditions.

The actors in this chapter also represent a new diversity of institutional homes.

They were either self-supported like C. R. Orcutt, housed by the territorial University of

Arizona and the private Carnegie Institute of Washington (with its desert lab located in

Tucson), or based out of the public-private New York Botanical Garden. Federally funded workers like William McGee (Smithsonian Institute), Frederick Coville (National

Botanical Garden), and C.H. Merriam of the USDA also continued to define the region.

But much of the description took place from within the region and utilized the quick 112

connections provided by railroads. The point of vision had also shifted. Historical and geographical descriptions looked east from California into the Sonoran Desert. The stories sent out and written from within produced a body of work that formed the basis for a holistic vision of the Sonoran Desert as a natural area filled with familiar themes and knowledge: an American desert for U.S. consumption. They provided the material for domesticating the region through a new cultural occupation.246

Decoding and presenting nature was central to these stories of place yet they worked in concert with ethnographic information and histories as a way to situate a story of human progress in the desert. Explanations of nature were never far from explanations of human nature. Interpretation of O’Odham as “desert people” worked in concert with natural descriptions to explain the region. Ethnographic adventures produced stories linking human bodies to desert land: O’Odham and ethnographers’ bodies became subjects for adventure narratives. Human bodies—imagined from the past, viewed in the present, and extrapolated to the future—became historical material.247

246 If the scientific work was, by design, meant to stand ‘on its own’—meaning it gained its truth content without an audience—its shape grew partially from the social reception and reproduction of the information by non-experts. 247 The act of writing histories is explicitly the act of naturalizing a narrative through authorship: the author accounts for the shape of the world. Historian Shahid Amin puts it this way: “the master stage of nationalist struggle is built around the retelling of certain well-known and memorable events…the significance of nationalist narrative lies in their elaborate and heroic setting down, or ‘figurating’, the triumph of good over evil.” In the case of the Sonoran Desert, a new cast of characters filled a reworked stage in a way that naturalized the American colonial presence through the production of detailed stories about nature. The act of gathering this intelligence filled the land with stories within which native peoples played a supporting role that could be rolled into a natural description of the land. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922- 1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1; Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery. 113

Scientists became the authors of a regional description because they produced a

body of knowledge easily convertible into national stories. While certainly not the only

cultural entrepreneurs, these workers created a product that Americans could consume as

a lifestyle or identity: a land filled with natural and human wonders, at once exotic and

available upon familiar terms.248 The term cultural entrepreneur refers to how

individuals and groups are able to leverage specific knowledge into a compelling

presentation of reality that shapes cultural interpretations. The physical and ethnographic

descriptions carried out by antebellum expeditionaries provided the materials for state-

building. In this case, the botanists of the Carnegie Desert Lab, scientists from the

University of Arizona, and ethnologists from Arizona and national institutions pursued a research agenda that provided a natural history for understanding the Sonoran Desert within American national terms as well. However, their stories had a ready audience in

an expanding settler society ready to consume messages of place through stories of

natural history. The products of the desert: botanical specimens and textual materials, and

ethnographic tales, became the commodities of explanation.

Sonoran Desert Nature in National Histories

The most direct route to claiming the land upon terms favorable to the American

nation was to tell frontier histories. Beyond the ethnographic accounts designed to merge

landscape, nature people, and scientific observer, the most direct path to claiming

ownership of the land was through conquest narratives. Writing about Arizona in 1903,

Sidney R. De Long told readers, he wanted his history to fulfill two functions: catalog

248 For an explanation of how Americans consume the exotic southwest see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians. 114

“the progress made…to civilize the wild Indian tribes” and promote economic opportunity by highlighting “the vast resources of Arizona.”249 De Long’s writing built on an archive of work written over the previous half century. Probably the most important histories were the works of Hubert Bancroft but De Long’s writing also grew out of scholarship based in Arizona under the auspices of the Arizona Historical Society.

From this position, he could draw on the experiences of many self-proclaimed pioneer

Americans into the Territory during the nineteenth century. Notably, De Long’s story begins with an explanation about natural features and the process of making the

Territory’s political boundaries. Thus establishing the space of the history, he continued on with a boosterish critique of generalizations about the desert Territory. Rather than wasteland it was contested space. “The great impediment to Arizona’s progress has been the Apache Indians [who] have always shown themselves the determined foe of all civilization,” he complained.250 De Long’s history placed the Apaches at the center of the story but they were merely props for the emergent American civilization in Arizona.

Apache power was an important rhetorical component of American histories of

Arizona. In part, this power represented the reality of native power, but the story also reinforced an American sense of civilizing mission at the turn of the century. Reconciling a dread past with a relatively prosperous present (where labor and racial violence were hidden) provided a narrative engine to turn the wheels of history. Thus historian Thomas

Edwin Farish could title a 1915 chapter in his History of Arizona “Indians-Massacres-

249 Sidney R. De Long, History of Arizona: From the Earliest Times Known to People of Europe to 1903 (San Francisco: The Whitaker & Ray Company, 1905), 5. 250 De Long, History of Arizona, 23. 115

Outrages-Raids,” and paint a picture of territorial people in a state of constant warfare. To

make his point, Farish quoted Rafael Pumpelly at great length: importing to the present, a

sense of the guerrilla war of the 1850 and 1860s.251

Farish and De Long were selling the domestication of Arizona. In so doing, they

drew on a long list of earlier efforts to convert the exoticism of Arizona into a commodity

for American consumption. In his 1878 Handbook to Arizona, Richard Hinton had

merged the themes of domestic and exotic to sell America on Arizona. He positioned the

reader in San Francisco and utilized a touristic trope to ease the narrative eastward. San

Francisco was “truly a congress of the common peoples from all parts of the earth; the

variety of tongues spoken, the new yet old aspect of everything, the exceedingly

picturesque beauty of the environment.” Yet, the city provided beguiling rather than

dangerous encounters.252 Crossing the Mohave Desert then became something of a tourist

ride along the Southern Pacific. By leaving from California by rail, Hinton could utilize

California’s complex landscape narratives—a Mediterranean environment (“our Italy”) or a “semi-tropical” pleasure land—with the relative luxuriance of a Pullman seat.253

Framing nature and culture in this fashion defanged the land without limiting its

251 Thomas Edwin Farish, History of Arizona (Phoenix, AZ: 1915), 26-63. 252 Richard J. Hinton, The Handbook to Arizona: Its Resources, History, Towns, Mines, Ruins and Scenery (New York: American News Co., 1878), 17. 253 See Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 29-34; For a Pacific exchange see Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860- 1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); The rise of American fascination with a beautiful Spanish past would await Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Ramona. Here too, this would be a southern Mediterranean past. See Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) for an explanation of how these pasts are built into the fabric of the American landscape. 116

appeal.254 Hinton could readily borrow from California writers who were seeking to

appropriate the desert as an exotic hinterland. One wrote of the Salton Basin: “‘No pen

can describe the utter desolation of this region. The valley of the lower Jordan and the

shores of the Dead Sea are not more barren.’”255 Arrival in Yuma, with the Colorado

River’s riparian habitat intact, proved that oases existed after the desert interlude.256 From

this introduction by rail to Yuma, Hinton took a historical tour of Arizona as Spanish and

indigenous space drawing on writing from Charles D. Poston, J. Ross Browne,

government surveys, John C. Cremony’s 1864 Life Among the Apaches and Samuel

Cozzens 1874 The Marvellous Country to paint a picture of Arizona’s political history.

Works presenting the physical geography were even more extensive. From Rafael

Pumpelly’s (1860) impressionistic view, through William Phipps Blake’s (1853) geological speculations, to the mass of evidence from the Wheeler and Powell Surveys, scientific descriptions painted the landscape in four dimensions.257

Historical narrative provided a powerful tool for presenting a version of the

region’s past as real. By repeating and encoding a narrative on the past they shaped

254 For discussion of the power of a touristic gaze to appropriate, commodify, and distance the tourist from the toured see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. For a viewpoint on trains, tourism, and power see Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998) and David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). For automobiles and staging nature see David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 255 Hinton, Handbook, 23. 256 Hinton, Handbook, 24-25. 257 For a discussion of these works in the context of American nationalism see Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 467-88. 117

perceptions of reality.258 A good example includes the work of Hubert Bancroft. In 1889,

he sold his history of Arizona and New Mexico as un-“surpassed in interest by that of any portion of the Pacific United States, of perhaps the whole republic,”259 He had a

viewpoint based in broad research. Between 1874 and World War I, Bancroft created a

kind of history factory with a team of researcher-writers who created histories of the Far

West from Alaska to Central America. They rained on readers. His history of Arizona

was volume 17 of 38 written by 1890. He loved New Mexico and Arizona for its

perceived primitivism. Although it was “first among the Pacific States” settled, it was

“last to feel the impulse of progressive civilization.”260 Histories like Bancroft’s primed

readers to think about the southern deserts within the broader arc of the history of

colonialism. Bancroft’s history created colonial imaginings that had populated the land

with the roots of Aztec civilization and the search for fabulous wealth: the discovery of

the latter reinforced the sense of mystery about the former. The U.S. had only recently

defeated the Apache—“the Ishmaelites of American aborigines”—and these links to an

imagined Biblical and Crusading past, coupled with the continued demographic

dominance by Spanish-speaking and native peoples, led professional historians like

258 Hayden White, following Roland Barthes, argues that “narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning.” Arguably universal, narrative, according the Barthes (as cited in White) arises out of “our experience of the world and our efforts to describe that experience in language, narrative, ‘ceaselessly substitutes meaning for the straightforward copy of the events recounted.’” “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1980):5-27, 5. 259 Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft Volume XVII History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888 (San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1889), v, x. 260 Bancroft, History of Arizona, x. 118

Bancroft and Le Long to produce a orientalist discourse linking the land with the people.261

From Pumpelly’s travelogue through Bancroft and Farish’s histories from the

1880s, historians synthesized a master historical narrative for American readers. In producing these histories, authors used human bodies as historical material for an explanation of American place. By World War I, a mountain of official reports, journalistic, and historical works documented Arizona. People filled these stories. Native peoples provided the reason for exploration and conquest. Americans filled the story with a motive purpose; the advancement of civilization.

Descriptions of natural environments and the placement of human bodies into meaningful narratives provided the material necessary to make the region American. Familiarity with the landscape transformed the desert into manageable and less formidable pieces.262

While historians were writing the region from the West, naturalists were also collecting and presenting nature from new home bases in the desert.

Collecting cacti and selling meaning

Collecting had long been a part of exploration but with easy access across the desert along the rails, opportunities to market desert flora grew rapidly. An important example that can provide insight into the scope and importance of these exchanges was

261 Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico v. 262 Frank W. Blackmar, “Mastery of the Desert,” North American Review 182, no. 594 (May, 1906), 680; Ralph H. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1948), See “The High Plains Become a Desert— On the Maps,” 370-375; Francis Samuel Drake, “Samuel Augustus Mitchell,” Dictionary of American Biography, 626. 119

the trade of San Diego-based plant collector Charles Russell Orcutt. Beginning the 1880s

Orcutt explored the region, collecting and selling cacti and other regional plants. He got

his start in 1882 when he accompanied eminent botanist Charles Christopher Parry on a

collecting expedition around Ensenada, Mexico. Parry had extensive experience as a

botanist and geologist beginning with three years along the boundary (1849-52) and spent

the rest of his life botanizing in the West.263 He took young Orcutt along and the experience motivated Orcutt into a career combining the family business of nursery plants with local expeditions across Baja, Arizona, and northern Mexico to collect wild plants for sale and propagation. Orcutt became a wholesaler of desert plants to institutional and private collectors across the U.S. and Europe.

Throughout his career, Orcutt travelled, observed, collected and sold his plants, and fell in love with the desert. Through his commerce he sold a set of meanings about the desert that were both natural and historical. In a 1903 article “Uses of Cacti,” Orcutt points to cacti as having beauty of form and flower, usefulness as forage for grazing animals, as a viable construction material, as medicine, and in food products ranging in use from subsistence to commercial candies. Cochineal provided dye and water in the pulp of giant cacti could save the life of the bewildered traveler.264 With his collector’s

eye, he could enter the heart of the most fearsome deserts and see beauty. He described

the Colorado Desert’s cacti as “beautiful,” especially the teddy bear cholla (Opuntia

263 William A Weber, The King of Colorado Botany: Charles Christopher Parry, 1823- 1890 (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1997). 264 Ann D. Bullard, “Charles Russell Orcutt, Pioneer Naturalist,” Journal of San Diego History 40 (Winter, 1994), accessed 3/13/2012 http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/94winter/orcutt.htm; C. R. Orcutt, “Uses of Cacti,” Plant World 6, no. 6 (June 1903):135-137. 120

bigelovii, named for medical doctor and botanist Jacob Bigelow), the Cereus giganteus, and Cereus Engelmanni, (named for George Engelmann). These plants graced the desert:

“appealing to the eye as a part of the weird ornamentation of the desert places of the world.”265 Summoning the names of mid-century botanists (like Agave parryi or century

plant named by Orcutt for his mentor in 1891) also recalled the history of collecting and

conquest in the region.

More than history, aesthetics mattered and Orcutt saw desert plants as hallmarks

of the landscape he loved.266 His cactus business and his sense of place transformed the forbidding Colorado Desert into aesthetic and domestic commodities. In an 1894 article

for The Californian Orcutt’s descriptions of the geography of cactus led to the conclusion

that they were perfect plants for California gardens. Their flowers were beautiful and

their desert adaptations made them easy to maintain. His business allowed him to place

his plants with collectors across the region and world, and he projected these images of

domesticated wild and beautiful nature through his commerce. His cacti became

specimens in collections and plantings in gardens. Collected and displayed, they entailed

their ecological roots with them.267

265 Charles Russell Orcutt, “A Prickly Family,” The Californian 5, no. 2 (January 1894): 177-187; L. H. Bailey, Jr., “Some North American Botanists, V. Jacob Bigelow,” Botanical Gazette 8, no. 5 (May 1883): 217-22. 266 “One of the most characteristic features in the landscape of southern California…is the extensive, impenetrable thickets of the cylindrical species of Cactus, familiar to all under the Mexican name, Chollas,” Orcutt told Garden and Forest readers in March, 1891, Charles R. Orcutt, “The Chollas,” Garden and Forest (March 4, 1891), 99. 267 Charles R. Orcutt, “A Prickly Family,” The Californian 5, no. 2 (January 1894): 177- 86. 121

Orcutt was an especially early and prolific western collector interested in desert botany whose cactus business linked him to the global botanical community.268 He played a hybrid role of serious scientific collector, popularize, and merchant. His main base of power was the horticultural business. Although he had only tangential associations with academic and governmental institutions he took his work seriously and sought to tie himself into the intellectual world of scientific institutions. To make this happen, in 1884, he began publishing the journal The West American Scientist as a journal for the San Diego Natural History Society. It was a monthly clearing house for botanical information, to report on society business, and a venue for advertizing. Through the pages of the journal, Orcutt sold the desert to local enthusiasts and through his plant lists he sold cacti to the world. The journal offered a venue to condense and present lived experiences and to suggest how nature might serve to make sense of life in the desert.

Examples of the intimacy of these stories abound in his writing: “this morning I found under a piece of cactus in a canyon a beautiful mottled shell of Helix Stearnsiana,” Orcutt wrote to 1889 readers. His writing conveyed the sense that he was simply strolling through the land, comfortably encountering natural wonders. This sense of domestic space took on added impact through advertisements like those for “Chollas Valley

Nurseries” that displayed a Möllhausen like image of native people beneath towering saguaros above the nursery’s address: “North-east corner of F and 8th Streets.269 The

268 Helen DuShane, The Baja California Travels of Charles Russell Orcutt (L.A.: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1971). 269 Charles Russell Orcutt, Flora of the Southern and Lower California: A Check-list of the flowering plants and ferns (San Diego: 1895); C.R. Orcutt, “A Thorny Path,” The 122

juxtaposition of the commercial promise of available plants and backyard plants with the exotic connotations worked to make desert nature a cultural property.

Saturation studies: Federal scientists remap the Sonoran Desert

Government and academic investigators were also selectively exploring the regional deserts. Unlike antebellum surveys, they now had quick access and the ability to range freely over the countryside. An important example of this second wave of exploration was the work of Clinton Hart Merriam, Chief of the Division of Economic

Ornithology in the USDA. In 1889, he rode the train to the San Francisco Mountains near

Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, to map biogeographical zones on the mountains. He climbed from desert to tundra and divided the land into life zones. “The San Francisco Mountain,”

Merriam wrote, “was chosen because of its southern position, isolation, great altitude, and proximity to an arid desert.” He surveyed some five thousand square miles and then

“unexpectedly” produced “generalizations concerning the relationships of the life areas of

North America.” Merriam argued for two primary life divisions that stretched across the continent: boreal and subtropical. Within these bands were seven minor zones. The one that encompassed the deserts of the borderlands he titled the Lower Sonoran.270 By mapping the Lower Sonoran onto the landscape, Merriam provided a scientific model for seeing the land free of culture groups or national boundaries: a natural interpretation of the region. Furthermore, his model gained wide acceptance with both scientists and

West American Scientist 6 (June 1889): 54; Advertisement, The West American Scientist 6 (April 1889), 20; 270 C. Hart Merriam, Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, North American Fauna No. 4, USDA, 1890, 1. 123

general public. In the coming decades, museum displays told visitors across America that

these Arizona mountains were the world in miniature: a map of life zones up a desert

peak analogous to travelling a thousand miles north.271

In 1891, Merriam returned to the desert southwest in charge of the United States

Department of Agriculture’s “Death Valley Expedition.” The expedition crisscrossed

100,000 square miles of country in southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

Expedition members spent time west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains but also baked in

the heat of the desert basins of Nevada and California. Along for the expedition was

botanist Frederick Coville, head of the National Herbarium and among the intellectual

power brokers of the professionalization of science in America. Both men published reports upon the expedition’s botany. Coville placed his work in Science and

Contributions from the U.S. National Herbarium; Merriam published his within the U.S.

Department of Agriculture’s North American Fauna No. 7. Within his report, Coville discussed how the geography and elevation of zonal plants like creosote (Larrea

Tridentata) and Joshua Trees (Yucca arborescens) marked the Lower Sonoran “life zone,” with a visual imprint.272 Botanical markers helped demarcate the desert.273 In

271 Keir B. Sterling, “Naturalists of the Southwest at the Turn of the Century,” Environmental Review 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 20-33; Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 195-197. 272 E.D. Cope, “The Report of the Death Valley Expedition,” The American Naturalist 27, no. 323 (November 1893): 990-995; Frederick Vernon Coville, “Sketch of the Flora of Death Valley, California,” Science 20, no. 515 (Dec., 16, 1892): 342-43; Frederick Vernon Coville, “Botany of the Death Valley Expedition” Contributions from the U.S. National Herbarium 4 (Nov. 29, 1893); C. Hart Merriam, “Report of Desert Trees and Shrubs” and “Report on Desert Cactuses and Yuccas” in North American Fauna no. 7 124

Merriam’s work we see two complimentary aspects of 1890s scientific work. One was

the emergence of general theories for presenting the region: life zones and zonal plants

organized nature into a system easily seen in the land. The second aspect was the

saturation approach to their studies. The USDA scientists covered large areas intensively.

This encyclopedic approach was also in evidence in re-marking the international boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. The effort drew a new generation of governmental scientific workers into the Lower Sonoran region. In 1892, Major Edgar

Alexander Mearns began directing a biological survey of the Mexican Boundary.

Between 1892 and 1894, the survey teams from the U.S. and Mexico crisscrossed the border, measuring, marking, and collecting. Mearns sent around 30,000 specimens to the

National Museum. Beyond working both sides of the border line, he and his party surveyed the Gila and Colorado Rivers from upstream of Yuma to the Gulf of California.

The party worked their way from boundary monument to monument collecting and recording flora, fauna, elevation, and the general lay of the land. They ranged north and south of the boundary line, sometimes camping in Chihuahua, sometimes in New

Mexico, Sonora, or Arizona. Mearns and his crew spent months analyzing, walking, exploring, collecting and living in the desert. As they passed east to west, from basin to

The Death Valley Expedition, USDA, 1893; C. Hart Merriam, Life Zones and Crop Zones of the United States, Bulletin no. 10, USDA (1898). 273 Forrest Shreve, “A Map of a Vegetation of the United States,” Geographical Review 3, no. 2 (February 1917): 119-125; Burton E. Livingston and Forrest Shreve, The Distribution of Vegetation in the United States, as Related to Climatic Conditions (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921); Shreve, “Map of Vegetation,” 122-123.. 125

range to basin, the valleys turned to deserts: the Tule, Lechuguilla, and Yuma Deserts

separated the water sources at Agua Dulce, Tule Wells, Tinajas Altas, and Yuma.

Forbidding land, when well supplied, its dangers receded to matters of logistics

rather than heroics. At the margins of the ‘dreaded’ Tule Desert, they climbed peaks and

camped but usually based themselves out of ranches and towns. They kept in touch with

the rail links and other survey parties and in a matter-of-fact manner compiled a huge scientific archive of their pathway.274 The topography of basin and range created a

rhythm to the desert east of the Colorado as it unfolded as a series of low, parallel

mountain ranges.275 South of the boundary, the Yuma Desert spread into the Desierto de

Altar with few mountains but west of the Sonoyta River volcanic craters with cacti

growing in their basins and a region of medenos—sand dunes offered more profound

desert. The compilation of Mearns archive was a massive second effort along the

boundary and brought renewed knowledge from the Sonoran Desert to Americans. The

work also recaptured stories from the 1850s boundary expeditions.

274 Edgar Alexander Mearns, Mammals of the Mexican Boundary of the United States Bulletin 56 United States National Museum (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), 1-24. 275 Heading east from Yuma, north of the international boundary, the traveler encountered a general rising elevation to basin floors and mountain summits. The boundary nearly follows a division between the watershed of the Gila River to the north, and rivers flowing south, through Sonora to the Gulf of California. Many of the valleys sloped north, north west. Seen from the east, this topography arrives in pairs: the Yuma Desert and Gila and Tinajas Altas Mountains; the Lechuguilla Desert and Copper and Cabeza Prieta Mountains; the Tule Desert and Tule and Sierra Pinta Mountains; the Mohawk valley and Mohawk Mountains; the Cristobal Valley and Aguila and Granite MountainsGrowler, Ajo, Ojo, and Mesquite Mountains; the Quijotoa Mountains and Valley; the Carobabi Mountains and Baboquivari Valley; the Baboquivari Mountains and Altar Valley; the Tucson Mountains and Tucson; the Santa Rita, Santa Catalina, and Rincon Mountains. 126

The international boundary cuts through the heart of the Sonoran Desert and

repeatedly drew Americans into contact with the land. The boundary surveys of the 1890s

were intensively reworking paths travelled in the 1850s. Many of these encounters with

desert nature focused on a string of water sources travelers could link into a trail: the

Camino del Diablo or devil’s road.276 These well-known sources were widely spaced:

From the Colorado it was forty five miles to the Tinajas Altas (water tanks) in the Gila

Mountains; sixteen miles farther were the Tinajas del Tule, in the Tule Mountains; next was the Agua Dulce south of the border, then the O’Odham village of Quitobaquita [in present day Organ Pipe National Park], and finally the Sonoyta River.277 In 1854,

Nathaniel Michler, travelling west from Nogales wrote, “we were soon locked in on all

sides by high mountains,” and only by climbing a steep wall managed to attain the

monument.278 In Michler’s monument drawings the landscape changed. In the foreground

at Monument 19, scrub live oak (Quercus turbinella) and banana yucca (Yucca baccata)

rise crisp against folded hills to east and west. Farther west, the view of Monument 15, at

Sierre de Pozo Verde includes saguaro, yucca, barrel cactus, and ocotillo. The “green

well” had permanent water and was a known Papago ranchería. Michler thought the site

abandoned due to Apache raids. Perhaps it was in 1854. Its O’Odham ownership

remained in artifacts and graves and Michler seemed to know the history of the site. The

surrounding landscape was botanically rich: “The suwarrow grows on it in abundance;

276 The trail entered the historical record in 1699 when Jesuit Eusebio Kino began a series of expeditions to proselytize along the lower Gila. Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico, 352-61. 277 Michler, Report, 113-15. 278 Michler, Report, 120. 127

also the Fonquiera [sic] and many varieties of cacti, bearing beautiful flowers.”279 The

mountains were granitic and separated by plains. Farther west, saguaro continued to

crowd the images but after the party reached Sierra de la Nariz (Ali Chuk) at monument

12, organ pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi), senita (sina or Lophocereus schottii), chain

fruit and teddy bear cholla (Opuntia fulgida and Cylindropuntia bigelovi) made their

appearance. Seen from Mitchler’s report, the border seems linear: a line marked by a

series of dissimilar monuments but heading in a line to the Pacific.

In the 1890s, when survey teams were back to re-measure, re-mark, and describe

the border line in more accurate detail, and they drew upon these earlier stories to

navigate and explain the land. Unlike the earlier work, they spent a great deal of time

moving back and forth over the land. Described west from Nogales, the survey

encountered “probably the roughest and most cut up land in North America.” A

landscape they described as a “hopeless desert, on which none but these [O’Odham]

hardy Indians could find substance.” Leaving Nogales, one party entered the Sierra del

los Pajaritos. It was a “confused mass of rocky crags, peaks, flat-topped mountains.”

Flowers, grass, oak, juniper, manzanita covered the hill sides; in the canyons, sycamore, walnut and ash trees clung to the shadows. These would be the last wooded slopes they encountered as they dropped west and downward. The Baboquivari valley was

“beautiful,” “bare of trees and bushes,” and filled with cattle and horses. South of the border, the Papago Ranchería of Pozo Verde had a stream and 150 people. The valleys held mesquite, palo verde, palo fierro and cactus. The party passed through Rancherías:

279 Michler, Report, 121. 128

Cobota, with a shallow well, Pozo de Luis (El Vanori). At all permanent wells and water sources, O’Odham lived in Rancherías and temporales—seasonal or occasional residences.280

The major water source between the Santa Cruz River at Nogales and the

Colorado River was the Sonoyta Creek. The river had entrenched in the nineteenth century but it flowed reliably. It rose above the surface at the communities of Sonoyta,

Santo Domingo and in pools at agua dulce and agua salada. It created lush desert vegetation. Mearns praised the cacti in particular:

Nowhere along the boundary does the cactus growth attain such luxuriance as in the foothills of the Sonoyta Valley. The giant cactus here attains a height of 40 or 50 feet and forms perfect forests, if the word forest can properly be applied to a collection of these strange, ungainly, helpless-looking objects, which seem at times to stretch out clumsy arms appealingly to the traveler.281

Remarking the boundary re-enforced and expanded the knowledge base created in the

1850s. Mearns’ efforts placed specimens in museum cabinets but also placed information indirectly before the public as continued investigation incorporated the boundary work into ethnographic adventures to study Sonoran Desert peoples.

The 1890s ethnologists also began a series of expeditions into the region collecting stories of people. These stories drew upon the idea that indigenous people were

280 “These ‘temporales’ are located near some natural or artificial water hole…The houses are generally built of adobe, and the fields protected by rude fences of mesquite brush. In the ‘temporales,’ so deserted and forlorn during most of the year, a wonderful change takes place within a day or two after the first rain of summer. Where before all was desertion and silences all is now life and activity. Cattle and horses are being driven to pasture; houses and fences repaired; Indian corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons planted, dams repaired, and shallow irrigation ditches cleaned out.” Report of the Boundary Commission, 22. 281 Report of the Boundary Commission, 23. 129

primitive and therefore close to the land. In this figuration, describing one provided

insight into the other. Their work generated two types of stories linking America with

desert nature. First was the presentation of indigenous people as primitive. The second

involved filling the land with adventure stories. These stories worked together to

demonstrate American modernity while transforming the exotic into familiar narratives.

Like the 1850s, scientists became part of the story of making place. Their expeditions

both described local people and allowed for self-description. They also gathered their work into representations of the desert to publish and promote outside the region.

Work by William John McGee makes this process of discovery, adventure and promotion clear. In 1894, head ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology McGee

began to explore the Sonoran Desert. He was at the beginning of a career that made him

an influential scientist. Historian Curtis Hinsley put it this way: McGee was a motive

force in geology for the surveys of the 1880s, for anthropology in the 1890s, and for

conservation in the first decade of twentieth century.282 Through his writing he influenced both expert and non-expert audiences. As both anthropologist and geologist he was well prepared to read people and landscape and he presented his research through government reports and in more popular formats. His 1898 “Papaguería,” in National

Geographic firmly established the links between the O’Odham and the Sonoran Desert to

282 Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 232. 130

turn-of-the-century America. Papaguería, he wrote “is perhaps the most arid region on the continent” yet people made this land their home.283

McGee used descriptions of nature and people to re-enforce a sense that this was an anthropological region. Viewed east to west, the land fell through progressively lower elevations and declining rainfall. The fifteen inches of the Sierra Madre declined to “a trifling or unmeasurable [sic] amount representing the product of local storms, perhaps separated by intervals of years.” This paucity of precipitation led to a district defined by its desert character.284 The desert was not a sand waste but water defined the land. In relatively lush areas, mesquite rooted deep in the valleys and other trees lined waterways.

All about, “monstrous bizarre cacti haunt the foothills and the lower slopes,” and these plants, McGee told readers, were well adapted to the climate and aridity. Animals were also relatively abundant but like the plants, had developed strange shapes and behaviors.

Water declined eastward but it also followed the “configuration” of the land with mountains playing a key role in producing and harvesting moisture.285To understand the dynamic interaction between geology and water was to understand the region’s life. Plant and animal life clustered richly at perennial sources and water, to some degree, also

283 W J McGee, “Papaguería,” National Geographic Magazine 9, no. 8 (August 1898): 347, 349 284 McGee, “Papaguería,” 347, 349. 285 McGee wrote “As the vapor-charged air drifts up the long slope to the base of the Sierra and up the steeper slope toward the crest, a part of the vapor distills as dew or falls as rain, while the lesser ranges lying athwart the long slope extract a part of the boon; so there are storm-fed streams in all of the higher mountains, rushing torrents in the lofty Sierra, slender streams in the lower ranges, and a part of the flood soaks into the thirsty soil to form ground water, which may reappear as springs toward the mountain bases or in the narrow upland valleys,” “Papagueria,” 350. 131

explained human habitation. Downgrading water, cutting into mountain building left tight

geological spots where sporadic rainfall reappeared from groundwater.286

To make the land sensible, McGee had only to point to water scarcity and the

adaptations of life in the desert. One of the major adaptations to life was the modification

to cooperation between plants and animals in the struggle against “physical conditions,”

or “inorganic nature.” He saw a natural environment where “cooperation or

communality,” between groups of species allowed survival. As an ethnologist he was

particularly interested in the “children of the desert” as he called the O’Odham. For

McGee, O’Odham adaptation to desert conditions summarized central aspects of their culture. He told readers: O’Odham display

fitness to his desert habitat—he has joined the general system of communality, and lives in harmony with the desert flora and the desert fauna in a land so bitterly inhospitable that marauding Apache, pastoral Mexican, and gold-seeking American [sic] commonly pause on its borders. The Papago prefers to live where other peoples famish.287

For McGee and his readers, the O’Odham were primitive people: children of nature that

reflected their environment. Reading and writing their culture was like a prism for

explaining something about the land. The reverse was also true: nothing bespoke the

qualities of land so much as desert people; reading culture revealed the land. For McGee

and his readers, land and people told a story of a hostile but human land. The authority of

286 McGee, “Papagueria,” 352. 287 McGee, “Papagueria,” 354. 132

the ethnographic gaze allowed readers to see themselves in the land through their proxy

(McGee) while also enjoying the land’s exotic scarcity.288

O’Odham, like other Indigenous groups past and present, provided the material

for thinking about history and nature in the desert. Take, for example, Adolph Bandelier

who toured the region in the 1880s and amassed a tremendous knowledge of its

archeological sites. He was a student of Lewis Henry Morgan who, in the face of

continual global encounters with human diversity, sought to provide a monogenesis thesis

for human existence by advocating a developmental hierarchy that set people in stages

marked by technological advances. In this scheme, societies had evolved from savagery,

through barbarism, to civilization.289 His protégé Bandelier was out looking to map this

progress, this sense of time, onto the archeological past of the southwest. His approach,

scope, and interpretations combined into a broad regional view connecting questions

about the relationship between Sonoran Desert and Meso-America archeology and

between contemporary and ancient people. He did extensive historical and archeological

research, visiting some 400 sites around Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua,

288 See Hazel McFeely Fontana and Bernard L. Fontana, Trails to Tiburón: The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), Introduction. 289 One can scarcely overstate the profound impact this thesis had on western societies. It undergirded colonial encounters, pervaded post-slavery society, and shaped everyday interactions across America and the colonial world. With the past unfurling into unexpected depths, Morgan could sense a great story of progress: “It is both natural and a proper desire to learn, if possible, how all these ages upon ages of past time have been expended by mankind; how savages, advancing by slow, almost imperceptible steps, attained the higher condition of barbarians; how barbarians, by similar progressive advancement, finally attained to civilization; and why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress—some in civilization, some in barbarism, and others in savagery.” Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1908, 1877), vi. 133

and thought broadly about the region’s pre-history.290 Bandelier provided a baseline history for thinking about the region’s human history.

McGee placed O’Odham within this sense of time. Reading Bandelier’s diagrams and encyclopedic approach to archeological sites, McGee found his O’Odham impoverished. Once they had occupied mountain fortresses (trincheras), used sophisticated irrigation to grow large scale agriculture, and lived more settled lives. They were now in the desert, itself a new kind of defensive fastness yet seemingly stripped of the advanced material culture of earlier generations.291 For McGee, the O’Odham story was a desert epic akin to Exodus. In his retelling, a few survivors retreated into the desert, became desert people who constantly “engage in a ceaseless chase for water singularly like the chase for quarry in lower culture, and to produce a unique combination of crop- growing industries with migratory habits.” By infusing the desert with this story, McGee filled the land with layered meanings tied tightly to present indigenous people. These usable pasts placed indigenous people within world history and placed them as historical material for national histories.292

290 Wilcox and Fowler, Beginnings of Anthropological Archeology, 155; Adolph Bandelier, Investigations Among the Indians of the Southwestern United States, Carried on Mainly in the Years from 1880 to 1885 Parts I and II (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1890, 1892) part II, 24. 291 McGee, “Papagueria,” 357. 292 W J McGee, “The Old Yuma Trail,” National Geographic Magazine 12 (1901), 103- 04. 134

These pasts became material in the shape of artifacts, human remains, sketches of

ruins, photographs, and theories about the past printed in documents.293 Ethnologists

hauled artifacts out of the ground and from living people in order to collect them in

scientific centers in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Like

collecting cacti, the act of collecting the human past as a set of commodities

impoverished the landscape while producing a research archive for the interpretation by

scientists. The stories (theories) produced and artifacts displayed in museums made the

indigenous past a cultural commodity for an American sense of time. Removing these

objects also removed the native past from the landscape. Replacing the material presence

were interpretations, scientific explanations, and stories told from without.

The revelation of these human pasts also entered American culture through the

ethnologist’s acts of discovery. McGee helped shape the narrative form with his 1890s

trips into the Sonoran Desert. His successors continued to make use of the form to place

themselves as characters within their expeditions. “During the years of 1909 and 1910,”

began ethnographer Carl Lumholtz, “I was commissioned by some influential friends to

look into certain economical possibilities of the arid and little known country along the upper part of the Gulf of California, east of the Colorado River…the extreme western part of this region, the sandy country between Pinacate and the Colorado river.”294

Lumholtz, an extremely successful ethnographer, had already published Among

293 See Hazel McFeely Fontana and Bernard L. Fontana, Trails to Tiburón: The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), Introduction. 294 Carl Lumholtz, “The Sonora Desert, Mexico,” The Geographical Journal 40, no. 5 (November 1912), 503. 135

Cannibals: An Account of Four Years’ Travels in Australia in 1889 when he turned his

attention to Mexico. His books Unknown Mexico (1902) and New Trails in Mexico

(1912) wove a dense descriptive vision of the regions indigenous people. He loved being an adventurer. He co-founded the New York-based Explorers Club in 1904 and waxed poetic on life in the field: “To the lover of nature in all aspects, this land of ‘silence, solitude, and sunshine’ cannot help but present a strong fascination,” he wrote of

Papagueria.295 Lumholtz had an enormous volume of experience travelling and observing

the people of Mexico and was thus equipped to understand his experiences in the Sonoran

Desert from the context of his earlier adventures. He chose to find native societies

primitive and relished presenting them as exotic to his readers. In Among the Cannibals,

he told readers how the need for local informants led him into a fascination with

“primitive people,” and a lifelong interest in “the study of savage and barbaric races.”296

To study the O’Odham, he based out of Tucson. South of town, San Javier del Bac

provided ready access to a thriving community; further out, his subjects lived in small

communities. These people, Lumholtz echoed McGee, were “the great desert people of

America.” He felt their relationships with water scarcity and the terrain proved this point.

Lumholtz’s efforts to describe the Papago gained credibility through his physical

presence in the land. He had travelled through the desert and therefore could speak

authoritatively. In a real sense, his Papago ethnography made him the subject of the

work: it emplaced him in the desert.

295 Carl Lumholtz, New Trails in Mexico, x-xi. 296 Carl Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ Exploration among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre… (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), vii. 136

Local centers for constructing the Region

Ethnographic missions, boundary work, and the collection all relied to a certain

degree on connections provided by the railway. The Southern Pacific, which laid rails

from San Francisco to Yuma in the 1870s arrived in Tucson in March, 1880. As the

railway opened up the Sonoran Desert to quick connections to urban centers on the

coasts, American immigrants and scientists took advantage of the new opportunities to

access more remote reaches of the desert.297 In the process, the city of Tucson emerged as

a regional center for desert studies. Institutional bases like the University of Arizona

(1891) and Carnegie Institution’s Desert Botanical Lab (1903) provided support for

scientists to collect, describe, and export knowledge about the desert.298

297 For general trends in Arizona history see Thomas Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); duBuys, Salt Dreams, 52. 298 The 1880s also brought a generation of anthropologists into the southwest. Principal theorists and workers included: Lewis Henry Morgan, John Wesley Powell, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Adolph Bandelier, and others, Wilcox and Fowler, Beginnings of Anthropological Archeology, 145-65; Anthropologists were working to firm up a vision of the human past that could act as a baseline guide amid the rapid changes of the gilded age. Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 83; A cadre of Arizona historians was busy generating a master narrative to ‘write’ Arizona into the American nation. In the background of these histories was a sense of time as captured by the metrics of human bodies. Bodies were a gauge of the discourse of civilization. Historian Gail Bederman argues civilization had three strong themes in turn-of-century America: “race, gender, and millennial assumptions about human evolutionary progress.” All focused on the human body. Encounters with ‘primitive’ people in imperial settings provided the material of demonstrating Anglo-Saxon superiority through political or cultural domination. It also provided the material for a discourse on human evolution/development. As a Foucaultian discourse, civilization defined both the terms of the discussion and exercised social power through the organization and deployment of facts. Thus civilization was, in Social Darwinian terms, racial and therefore temporal. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 23, 25; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, 167-70; Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 1. 137

In 1891, using federal Hatch Act funds, the University of Arizona opened as a college of agriculture. Its location in Tucson placed it well to become an important institutional home to study America’s deserts.299 Most early university work was in agricultural improvement including acclimatization of plants to the local environment.

Taking an early lead in these efforts was botanist James W. Toumey who arrived in 1891 to work as a professor and at the Agriculture Experiment Station. During his seven year residence, Toumey made a lasting impact through his work with cacti and date palms.300

His date palm work resulted in an extensive bulletin on Arizona’s nascent date palm agriculture that illuminated distant deserts, but his cactus work made the University a resource for understanding North American desert botany.301

In a series of 1890s articles Toumey presented cacti within their Arizona context.

He relayed the amazing ability of opuntia (prickly pear and related species) to withstand drought conditions with little ill effect. These were well known facts about these plants, yet Toumey placed them in a new, familiar light. “On the first of July, 1892, half of one of the flat joints of Opuntia basilaris was brought to my room and placed, without soil or moisture, in a small open box,” he wrote.302 The point of his account was how this piece of the plant grew in the absence of water, healing its wound and setting forth new growth.

299 Virginia E. Rice, “The Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station: A History to 1917,” Arizona and the West 20, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 123-140. 300 Henry S. Graves, “James William Toumey,” Science, New Series, 75, no. 1953 (June 3, 1932): 575-77. 301 James W. Toumey, The Date Palm, Arizona Agriculture Experiment Station Bulletin 29 (June 1898). 302 James W. Toumey, “Vegetal Dissemination in the Genus Opuntia,” Botanical Gazette 20, no. 8 (August 1895): 356-57. 138

Yet, the story captured an additional meaning. Toumey was on site. He simply cut a stem of cactus and then observed it in his office.

A Sonoran Desert location had definite advantages for researching desert plants and Toumey quickly utilized them. Beginning in 1893, he planted a cactus garden on the

University of Arizona Grounds. The garden was adjacent to the University’s sole building and it gave him a place to plant what he hoped would be a complete collection of U. S. and regional cacti. The ability to collect local and regional plants then plant them cheaply made the site an instant botanic garden. Rather than placing them in an elaborate and expensive hot house, the garden simply flowed from the research building. Further, the plants bloomed, a rarity in many botanical settings, allowing for study of their life cycle, flowers, and fruit. Generalizing from imperfect samples or narrowly describing plant behavior based upon a single sample had, to his mind, made many efforts at description inadequate despite the great efforts of scientists involved. Gathering many specimens, placing them in groups, and watching their relatively quick development was a distinct advantage.303

Toumey’s plantings were a typical garden in the sense that he hauled in a foot of soil to cover the ground and contoured the surface to capture rainfall, prevent runoff, and provide greater conservation. In dry times, he irrigated.304 He still faced the problems of all outdoor gardens when importing species from outside the area. His Mexican plants mostly died in frosts. Yet even these observations provided knowledge for understanding

303 James W. Toumey, “An Arizona Cactus Garden,” Garden and Forest (Oct. 28, 1896): 432-33. 304 J. J. Thornber, “The Toumey Cactus Garden,” The Plant World 9, no. 12 (December 1906), 273. 139

temperature and plant distribution. His garden condensed a regional diversity into one corner that was easily monitored and compared. By 1896 he had a hundred species and

350 plants which he had collected or received from Mexico and across the southern

United States from dealers and other collectors. Over time he produced a herbarium collection of seeds and flowers.305

Like Orcutt, Toumey was in position to distribute desert plants to herbariums and botanic gardens. His expertise and institutional support lent weight to his specimens and he sent substantive collections to the New York Botanic Garden, Kew Gardens, and the

Royal Botanic Gardens in Dublin, among others. In New York, Toumey’s collection provided hundreds of plants. Dublin was especially pleased with Toumey’s efforts writing that “the most important purchases made [in 1896] were those of a collection of

Cacti, from Arizona and a portion of the Orcutt collection of Cacti which collection was sent to Kew for sale.” Toumey’s cacti, the report continued, “can hardly be called a purchase, as through the courtesy and consideration of Professor James W. Toumey, of the University of Arizona…I only had to pay expenses.”306 In 1897, Toumey organized

305 Toumey, “An Arizona Cactus Garden,” 432-33. 306 The New York Botanical Garden accession list from 1898 credits Toumey with 400 plants. Bulletin of the New York Botanical Garden 1, no. 3 (1898); The quote from Statistical Abstract from the Principle and other Foreign Countries 34 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1898), Appendix H, 365, continues “I had only to pay expenses of collecting and carriage, which amounted to about 50l. Very marked thanks are due to Professor Toumey for all the trouble he took in selecting the plants, and in supervising the collection and packing, a very serious undertaking. This collection came safely in five large crates, and included specimens of Cereus giganteus 10 to 12 feet high, also grand stems of Echinocactus Wislizeni [also called fishhook barrel or Ferocactus wislizeni]. Owing to the careful way in which they were packed they came quite safely, and are now growing well.” 140

Kew’s collection.307 These collections and connections established sustained links between Tucson’s desert and the major academic centers of Europe and the United States and made Tucson an obvious location for accessing the Sonoran Desert.

Toumey and Orcutt’s efforts to collect, describe and distribute cacti helped fill the plants with meaning. They became place images closely associated with the desert of

Arizona. A clear example comes from the Arizona territorial display at the 1893

Columbian Exposition. Reporting for Garden and Forest, L. H. Bailey noted that “every visitor is interested in the Giant Cactus, Cereus gigenteus, which is shown in a dozen good specimens in front of the Horticultural Building. The tallest one is seventeen and a half feet…These Cacti were collected in Arizona by William Reed, of Tucson.308 Reed was part of an effort by Arizona to sell its image to the nation. Upon request, Arizona’s

World’s Fair Commission provided a box car full of cacti for landscaping. They dug up saguaro then:

To get the prickly monsters inside the car it was necessary to remove the roof and, with two feet of straw on the floor, the Saguaros were lifted by a railroad derrick and lowered into the car When the entire floor was covered with the speciments [sic] they were covered with another foot of straw and in this way the car was eventually loaded to its full capacity with Saguaros of various shapes, lengths and weights.309

The rest of the rail car they filled with other species. The hundreds of plants provided adorned the fairgrounds. Sending out cacti for consumption in urban America was fairly

307 I am uncertain whether Toumey travelled to London or whether he provided some form of guide for the cacti. This claim comes from Graves, “Toumey,” 576. 308 L. H. Bailey, “The Columbian Exhibition: Cacti,” Garden and Forest 6, no. 294 (October 11, 1893), 429. 309 Will C. Barnes, “Migration of a Saguaro,” Arizona Highways (December 1936), 13, 23. 141

common practice by the 1890s. At the Columbian Exhibition, commercial business

displays by A. Blanc & Co. of Pennsylvania had a large display and sale. The largest

display was from Anna B. Nickels from Laredo, Texas. Hailey believed Nickels had the

first commercial catalogue in the country, dating from around 1876. She was a prolific

collector: “Mrs. Nickels has collected Cacti over a wide range of country in many

journeys, in one season gathering with her own hand 60,000 speciments. Mexico, the

U.S. Botanic Gardens, and the Women’s World’s Fair Society of San Diego also had

displays.310 Arizona sent the cacti to help sell the Territory; people consumed them to buy plants closely associated with the Southwest and Mexico.

Infrastructure and intellectual links made Tucson an attractive spot for visiting

scientists. In 1902, New York Botanical Garden Assistant Director Daniel MacDougal

took advantage of the railroad links and expertise of Tucson when he travelled to Arizona

and Sonora on a cactus collecting trip for the Garden. He studied Toumey’s cactus,

agave, and yucca collection in order to decide what he wanted from the Sonoran Desert.

He networked with Experiment Station botanists Robert H. Forbes and John James

Thornber, exchanged some plants from Northern Arizona for future UA shipments to the

New York Botanical Garden, and then went south through Nogales to Guaymas, Sonora.

In the Mexican town, he hired a mule team and labor, loaded his wagon with cacti and

returned to Tucson. There, MacDougal and Thornber compared the specimens against

Toumey’s collection and MacDougal received university specimens to fill out missing

species. To crown the collection, MacDougal selected a thirteen-foot saguaro from the

310 Bailey, “The Columbian Exhibition,” 429. 142

Tucson basin. Packed in creosote bush and crated for shipping to New York, the saguaro was a real prize.311

The movement of plants between backcountry locations and colonial centers was part of what historian Londa Schiebinger calls the “European Colonial Science

Complex.” Scientists gathered the empire back to the metropole for interpretation and display. The figurative and literal gathering of the natural world provided a semblance of control. Especially, control of interpreting the nature of the hinterlands for core of the nation.312 It was also a process of establishing a sense of place in the region. Material nature like cacti had strong associations with the southern deserts. Collecting and displaying them provided material and narrative links between the region and centers of

U.S. cultural production. The systematic collection of nature from colonial outposts and the redeployment of that knowledge provided the material for natural collections; the act of collection and the material reality of physical nature resonated in stories that tied periphery to center. Toumey’s garden, university expertise and desert nature made

Tucson an obvious stopping off point for investigations of the Sonoran Desert. Its advantages made it the hub of an emergent effort to systematically study desert botany.313

311 D. T. MacDougal, “Report of Dr. D. T. MacDougal, First Assistant, on an Expedition to Arizona and Sonora,” Journal of the New York Botanical Garden 3 (May 1903): 89- 99. 312 Londa Schiebinger, “Forum Introduction: The European Colonial Science Complex,” Isis 96, no. 1 (March, 2005): 52-55. 313Samuel Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); The NYBG had founding members like John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan and a host of New York’s upper society. By design, founding members hoped the garden would provide a New York version of London’s great Kew Garden or, more realistically, rival Asa Gray’s Gray Herbarium at Harvard or Charles Sprague Sargent’s Boston-based 143

The Desert Botanical Lab

A year after his Sonoran collecting trip, MacDougal returned to Arizona as

assistant to USDA botanist Frederick Vernon Coville scouting possible locations for a

Desert Botanical Laboratory for the newly formed Carnegie Institution of Washington.314

Coville and he were enthusiastic about the idea of a permanent base for studying

America’s desert lands. Tucson was a likely option, but before committing MacDougal

and Coville rode the rails in a wide survey of the desert Southwest in order to describe

the field of their study.315 Their ability to make this trip represented the new geography of

Arnold Arboretum. These gardens represented the power of research and state-building to co-evolve. London’s Kew set the mark. It began as a royal garden in 1759. In 1840, Kew became a national botanic garden under the direction of William Hooker and a resource of global importance. At approximately the same time (1842), Asa Gray took charge of an existing botanic garden (1807) which he shaped into a major center for botanical research. It became part of Harvard in 1864. Harvard also ran the Arnold Arboretum, a research center founded in 1872 and under the direction of botanist Charles Sprague Sargent. It was upon these models that NYBG took form. In an 1896 address, New York Botanical Garden’s director, Nathaniel Lord Britton, argued that the garden had economic, aesthetic, scientific, and philanthropic potential. The garden would collect, interpret, and diffuse botanical knowledge into America’s largest urban center. Collecting desert plants fell within this mission; http://www.huh.harvard.edu/collections/gray.html, May 3, 2012; Sharon E. Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology 1890-2000 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 18-39; Bulletin of the New York Botanical Garden 1, no. 1 (April 15, 1896), 6; Nathanial Lord Britton, “Botanical Gardens Origin and Development,” Bulletin of the New York Botanical Garden 1, no. 2 (Jan. 1, 1897), 63-66. 314 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory; Kingsland The Evolution of American Ecology, 100-105; William G. McGinnies, Discovering the Desert (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), “The Establishment of the Desert Laboratory,”; Patricia Craig, Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Vol. 4, The Department of Plant Biology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), “An outpost in the desert.” 315 Craig, Centennial History, 2; Jeremy Vetter, “Science along the Railroad: Expanding Field Work in the U.S. Central West,” Annals of Science 61 (2004): 187-211; Jeremy Vetter, “Field Science in the Railroad: The Tools of Knowledge Empire in the American West, 1869-1916,” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 15, no. 3 (July 2008): 597- 144

railroads. They left Washington, D.C., on January 24, 1903, visited El Paso, Northern

Chihuahua, New Mexico, Tucson, Sonora, the Gulf of California, Los Angeles, the

Mohave Desert, hiked the Bright Angel Trail to the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and returned to Washington, D.C., on February 28. With the exception of local side excursions to the Tularosa Desert (New Mexico), the Sonoran Desert near Torres,

Sonora, and the riverbank of the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, they travelled the rail network that had grown rapidly throughout the desert Southwest between 1880 and

1903.316

MacDougal’s reconnaissance for a desert lab site opened his eyes to the lack of published material studying deserts. The lacuna spelled opportunity and a chance to engage in the major research agenda promising to influence fundamental questions in botany and address concerns raised by the development of the American West— agriculture in arid lands.317 The trip also staked new claims on old stories by re-surveying mid-nineteenth century scientists and placing the region into an organizing context. By

613; Jeremy Vetter, “Rocky Mountain High Science: Teaching, Research, and Nature at Field Stations,” in Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 316In the U.S., the Southern Pacific cut from Los Angeles to El Paso in 1880. Beginning in 1880, Mexican firms established the Mexican Central Railroad between El Paso and Mexico City and a line between Nogales and Guaymas. The Copper Borderlands also produced mining spur lines that ran from Douglas, Arizona, to Nacozari, Sonora, and between Bisbee, Arizona, and Cananea, Sonora. Coville and MacDougal required this network for their fast and easy passage For railroad development see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 years of History Vol. 3 Transcontinental America, 1850-1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 152- 157; Thomas Sheridan, Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995): 112-123; Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman and Susan M. Deeds, The Course of Mexican History Seventh Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 424-27. 317 D. T. MacDougal, “Some Aspects of Desert Vegetation,” Plant World 6, no. 11 (November 1903): 249-50. 145

writing the deserts, MacDougal effectively took a landscape of colonialism of the

Mexican American War era and transformed it into a scientific region.

Translating Nineteenth-Century Paper Deserts into Desert Science

In a re-creation of nineteenth-century exploration, Coville and MacDougal re- visited many desert hotspots detailed in the paper deserts of the Mexican-American War and later boundary and railroad survey work. At El Paso, they crossed the border to see

Chihuahuan sand hills made familiar by the mid-nineteenth century writing of physician- botanist Adolph Wislinzenus, naturalist-writer Josiah Gregg, physician-botanist George

Englemann, and explorer John Russell Bartlett. Gregg had called Los Médanos “a stupendous ledge of sand hills,” while Wislinzenus called them “a dreadfully arid sandhill district.” Gregg noted: “These Médanos consist of huge hillocks and ridges of pure sand, in many places without a vestige of vegetation.”318 Bartlett found the romance of the dunes irresistible: “the sand is very light and fine and forms deep ridges resembling the large waves of the ocean.” Passing through, the traveler encountered “the spring known as Samalayuca (Ojo de Samalayuca)…a complete oasis in the desert…placed here by nature for the weary and thirsty traveler.”319 Coville and MacDougal arranged with

318 Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, Max L. Moorehead, ed., (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 274; Adolph Wislizenus, Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico Connected with Colonel Doniphan’s Expedition in 1846 and 1847 (Albuquerque: Calvin Horn Publisher, 1969), 100; George Engelmann, “Sketch of the Botany of Dr. A. Wislizenus’s Expedition from Missouri to Santa Fe, Chihuahua, Parras, Saltillo, Monterey, and Matamoros,” in The Botanical Works of the Late George Engelmann, William Trelease and Asa Grey, eds. (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son University Press, 1887), 49. 319 Quoted in Daniel Trembly MacDougal, Botanical Features of North American Deserts, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 99 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1908), 11. 146

officials from the Mexican Central Rail to drop them amid the dunes of these stories.

They found “scant winter vegetation,” but noted that yucca roots bound the sands, where

perennial grasses and some woody plants thrived.320 They marked the dunes as a location

with interesting although limited botanical potential. Almost certainly, the team would

not have visited the Médanos without the rail connection. But these were storied lands.

Revisiting these dunes allowed the team to begin creating the geography of their desert

studies and absorb and modify the stories of mid-century colonial landscape into their

work. They acted out the mid-century explorations in a way that updated and modified

them into the legitimate work of situating the desert lab.

Dune formations were a major attraction because they held both cultural

associations and scientific value as idealized desert conditions. Their next stop was New

Mexico’s nearby Tularosa Desert and Otero Basin, east of the San Andreas Mountains

and Rio Grande. Anciently occupied by subsistence hunters and semi-permanent agriculturalists, the contemporary ranching landscape was part of an internally draining

basin once home to an extensive lake. The extinction of the lake fascinated scientists as

part of ongoing studies into climate change.321 The most compelling aspect for Coville

and MacDougal was the white gypsum dunes of the vanished lake. Approached from the

south, the El Paso and Northeastern Railway line passed through a red-hued (Tulare-red

320 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory, 4-5. 321 Raphael Pumpelly and Ellsworth Huntington would both receive funding from the Carnegie Institution to pursue these topics. Pumpelly published Explorations in Turkestan in 1905 and 1908; Huntington, who accompanied the expedition, went on to publish many works upon climate change and civilization. All followed MacDougal and Coville’s initial visit but grew out of the contemporary debate over the Ice Ages and climate change. See John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 147

weed) landscape dropping toward the dune lake.322 They found a rich botanical

environment. The dunes reached sixty feet high but poking through their edges were a

variety of desert plants including sumac (Rhus trilobata), four-wing saltbrush (Atriplex

canescens) and yucca elata or soaptree yucca (Yucca radiosa).323 The soaptree was a

zonal flora that tied the Tularosa Desert to the Chihuahuan Desert. Some of these yuccas

built pedestals of gypsum bound by their roots and provided a micro-environment for

other plant growth.324 They symbolized the hardiness of plants in arid environments.

Visiting sand reaches in the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico and

northern Chihuahua repeated the paths into the Sonoran Desert of the mid-nineteenth

century. The visits also recaptured the mission of the Death Valley Expedition which

sought hostile wastes to ask questions about vegetation in an extreme environment.325

Both sites constituted important research locales dominated by dunes but neither had the breadth of research interest to house a desert laboratory. Catching the train in El Paso,

Coville and MacDougal turned to their attention to the Sonoran Desert and a lab site.

In the Tularosa Desert, they had entered the basin and range so important to

Sonoran Desert Nature and consistently represented in the work of William Emory,

William Blake, Nathaniel Michler, Rapheal Pumpelly, William McGee and others.326

From El Paso, the rail line took them from the high grassland basins and ranges of the

322 Michael Welsh, “Dunes and Dreams: A History of White Sands National Monument” (Santa Fe: National Park Service, 1995); C. L. Herrick, “The Geology of the White Sands of New Mexico,” The Journal of Geology 8, no. 2 (Feb.-March 1900): 112-28. 323 Colville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory, 5-8. 324 Welsh, Dunes and Dreams, 10. 325 Coville, Botany of Death Valley. 326 See John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) for accessible works on North American geology. 148

Chihuahuan desert scrub into the Sonoran Desert thornscrub around Tucson that Cooke

had gratefully crossed. These mountain and valley duets proceeded in a northeast,

southwest orientation. From the east, the rail line passed south of the Peloncillo

Mountains, crossed the grassy San Simon Valley, hooked around the northern end of

Chiricahua Mountains (the Dos Cabezas Mountains), cut through the Wilcox Playa (an

internally draining and seasonal lake like those upon which Bartlett witnessed mirages

and thought of Africa) in the Sulfur Springs Valley, through the Gunnison Hills and

Dragoon Wash between the Dragoon and Little Dragoon Mountains, crossed the San

Pedro River, and followed the weakness south of the Rincon Mountains, north of the

Whetstones into Tucson.

The town they entered hugged low hills along the creek-like Santa Cruz River. To the north, the jagged escarpment of the Santa Catalina Mountains formed a wall. The aspect was of a bowl, walled by mountains.327 Taken together, the relative abundance of

327 Tucson sits in a basin filled deep with depositional layers from the surrounding ranges. The Santa Catalina and Rincon Mountains rise abruptly in an arc to the north and west. Summits include Mount Lemmon at 9157 feet, Mica Mountain at 8666, and more than a dozen other peaks measuring more than 5000 feet. The city core sits at an elevation of 2200 feet. To the city’s west, the Tucson Mountains form a line of peaks three to four thousand feet in elevation. The visual impression is one of a basin sitting deep between rugged mountains. The Tucson basin focuses water drainage into a series of major arroyos leading into the Santa Cruz River. This intermittent stream starts south and east of Tucson in the Canelo Hills where it sheds both south and north. The southern drainage loops south and west through Mexico until describing a 180 degree turn to the north and passing through Nogales, Tucson, and northwest to the Gila River. Water draining northward from the Canelo Hills follows Cienega Creek into Pantano Wash, Rillito Creek, and then joins the Santa Cruz River west of central Tucson. Godfrey Sykes, “Rio Santa Cruz of Arizona; a Paradigm Desert Stream-Way,” PanAmerican Geologist 72, no. 2 (September 1939): 81-92; Michael F. Logan, The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); In the 1880s, the river was a meandering, and intermittent stream flowing through 149

water and visually striking mountains made a striking impression. In 1903, Tucson

remained a majority Hispanic town with 7500 residents living largely within the early

town footprint around the Santa Cruz River near the Tucson Mountains.328 The core of

the old city sat along the river at the base of volcanic Tumamoc Hill.

This anciently occupied site was an obvious place for a desert town. 329 The

geology of Tumamoc Hill creates a reach boundary forcing the Santa Cruz River to the

surface. For thousands of years, people lived by the reliable waters brought to the surface

by the substrata. Archeological evidence of Archaic, Hohokam, and O’Odham people

cover the area.330

In 1903, the city’s built environment included the Southern Pacific Railway that cut through the 1280-acre town site and linked Tucson to the east-west trade patterns of the United States. A horsecar street railway connected downtown to the University of

Arizona a mile away.331 Since the 1880s, Tucson residents had been planting trees

a mesquite bosque and a poplar-willow gallery forest from San Xavier through Tucson. See Logan, Lessening Stream, 165 for image near Tucson; J.C. Stromberg, “Frémont Cottonwood-Goodding Willow Riparian Forests: A Review of their Ecology, Threats, and Recovery Potential,” Journal of the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science 27, no. 1 (1993): 111-124. 328 Donald Bufkin, “From Mud Hut to Metropolis: The Urbanization of Tucson, Journal of Arizona History 22 (1981): 63-98. 329 See Kiva 45, no. 1 & 2 (Fall-Winter, 1979). 330 This term comes from work by Archeology Southwest, http://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/what-we-do/investigations/e-a-p/ (March 2, 2012); The succession of people who lived here stretches thousands of years into the past see Suzanne K Fish, Paul R. Fish, and M. Elisa Villapando, Trincheras Sites in Time, Space, and Society (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007); “The Tumamoc Hill Survey,” Kiva 45, no. 1 & 2 (Fall-Winter, 1979). 331 Bufkin, “From Mud Village”; population statistics from Michael F. Logan, Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 86. 150

throughout the city and the greening of Tucson increased dramatically after Arizona

adopted Arbor Day in 1901. The plantings required well water, and Tucsonans were

rapidly increasing their use of ground water to plant their town and increase

agriculture.332 It was a city undergoing conversion to U.S. urban design but still

contained many Hispanic elements. It was a city of newcomers and families with deep

roots in indigenous and Hispanic societies.333

Outside the town’s disrupted areas, the desert was lush with numerous Opuntia

species with either cylindrical stems like the arboresent chain fruit or jumping cholla

(Opuntia fulgida), Staghorn Cholla (Opuntia versicolor), Cane cholla (Opuntia

spinosior), Teddy bear cholla (Opuntia Bigelovii), along with prickly pears like the

purple hued Opuntia violacea var. santa-rita, Opuntia phaeacantha, and barrel cactus

(Echinocactus). On the surrounding slopes, saguaro, the “giant cereus,” (Cereus

giganteus), Foothills Palo Verde (Parkinsonia microphylla), Blue Palo Verde

(Parkinsonia torreyana), ocotillo (Fouguieria splendens), Cat’s Claw Acacia (Acacia

greggii), and mesquite (Prosopis), rose above numerous perennial and woody shrubs.334

332 Logan, Lessening Stream, 142-50. 333 Nina Veregge, “Transformations of Spanish Urban Landscapes in the American Southwest, 1821-1900,” Journal of the Southwest 35, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 371-459; Thomas Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 334 Outside the town’s disrupted areas, the desert was lush with creosote (Larrea tridentate also called by Carnegie Institute personnel Covillea tridentate, various Opuntia species with either cylindrical stems like the arboresent chain fruit or jumping cholla (Opuntia fulgida), Staghorn Cholla (Opuntia versicolor), Cane cholla (Opuntia spinosior), Teddy bear cholla (Opuntia Bigelovii), along with prickly pears like the purple hued Opuntia violacea var. santa-rita, Opuntia phaeacantha, and barrel cactus (Echinocactus). On the surrounding slopes, saguaro, the “giant cereus,” (Cereus giganteus), Foothills Palo Verde (Parkinsonia microphylla), Blue Palo Verde 151

The saguaro was a prominent aesthetic component of the land always noticed by

newcomers. In 1897, visiting entomologist Henry G. Hubbard wrote: “The entire mesa at

the foot of the Sta. Catalina Mountains near Sabina canyon, about 18 miles northeast of

Tucson, is covered for miles and miles with immense giant cactus in one unbroken army,

as thick as mullein stalks in an eastern cattle pasture.”335 Toumey told 1897 Popular

Science Monthly readers: “the finest and largest specimens [of saguaro] that I have ever observed are growing only a few miles from Tucson, on the foothills of the Santa

Catalina Mountains, where hundreds may be seen growing on a single acre.” This was,

Toumey reminded them with an image of two women amid a group of saguaro, “a cactus forest.”336 “Riding one day over the sandy plains, near Tucson,” MacDougal told August

1902 Plant World readers, he “saw the giant cereus cactus covering the slopes of an

entire mountain. It was the strangest sight ever beheld.”337 Strange to New York eyes,

Tucson was also a perfect environment for a desert lab.

Coville and MacDougal choose Tucson for a mixture of communications

infrastructure, botanical diversity, the presumption that its desert would remain largely

unchanged, for reasons of comfort (climate), and geographical location. Tucson provided

crucial infrastructure like rail and telegraph lines to link to the outside world. This was a

(Parkinsonia torreyana), ocotillo (Fouguieria splendens), Cat’s Claw Acacia (Acacia greggii), and mesquite (Prosopis), rose above numerous perennial and woody shrubs. Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory, 12; Lyman Benson, The Cacti of Arizona, 3rd ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969). 335 H.G. Hubbard, letter from April 22, 1897, “Insect Fauna of the Giant Cactus of Arizona,” Psyche 8 (May 1899, supplement): 1-14. 336 James W. Toumey, “The Giant Cactus,” Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly 51 (September 1897): 641-42. 337 D. T. MacDougal “Through the Arid Lands of the Southwest,” Plant World 5, no. 8 (August 1902): 149-50. 152

critical feature of the lab’s mission since local researchers must produce their knowledge

into the institutional centers of Eastern America and Europe to engage their funding

source and communicate with a global network of professional scientist.

Questions about the character of desert nature were equally important. The lab

staff needed quick access to a desert that was neither semi-arid (Kansas and Nebraska provided examples), nor likely to suffer reclamation (a vote against Phoenix). They believed the Mohave and low desert around the lower Gila were too arid to support the burst of vegetation found around Tucson. Flat places like the Tularosa’s “Yucca flats,” and “the sage plains along the Snake and Columbia Rivers in Idaho, Washington, and

Oregon,” were also out since vertical change could provide an important resource for acclimation projects and in studying physiographic limits to vegetation types.338 Tucson

basin’s vertical relief, its lack of reclamation plans, and its twelve-inch rainfall provided the right environment: desert enough but filled with plants and topography. The topography of the Tucson Basin was also appealing because researchers could trace life zones from the riparian town to pine forests that darkened the mountains slopes.339

Comfort and convenience also mattered. The plan was for a permanent base with

laboratories. Isolation in “charming situations in the mountains of the desert, remote from

civilization, rich and remarkable in their flora,” were great for field expeditions but

required complex efforts to house people and create acceptable lab conditions. The

338 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab, 12-13. 339 See chapter 3 for a discussion of the topography and metaphor of sky islands in a desert sea. 153

isolation could even drive away potential researchers unwilling to rough it.340 Like the

wilderness camps, Coville and MacDougal also thought some towns too unpleasant.

These included Yuma (hinted at) and Guaymas, Sonora. Political considerations also

marked the rejection of a Mexican locale. The Carnegie Institution had (obviously) strong connections with the industrial and political elite in the U.S. Although Mexican President

Porfirio Diaz had created a political climate that supported scientific expeditions from the

U.S., leaving the states complicated the lab’s mission. Taken together, Tucson was the right place, “in the heart of the desert of Arizona,” and closely connected “to the deserts of Texas, Chihuahua, New Mexico, California, and Sonora.”341

A homeland through desert research.

Beginning in the 1880s, U.S. experts established tighter connections between the

Arizona desert lands and the American nation. Through the soaring histories written from

Bancroft’s California workshop and the collection and distribution of desert nature, the

region grew increasing familiar. Research and consumption made it feel well-worn and

familiar. This sense of familiarity had a physical presence in the land as institutional

homes like the University of Arizona and Desert Botanical Lab in Arizona, or Orcutt’s

cactus business in San Diego began to drive the descriptions of the desert stretching

around and between them. Further saturation of the desert with scientific, ethnological

and government survey parties fleshed out the land with a new generation of stories tied

explicitly research topics that focused on the region from the gaze of the U.S. nation: the

natural region as part of a science of life, primitive peoples in the ethnographic present,

340 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab, 13. 341 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab, 13. 154

and the landscape as national border. MacDougal and Coville’s search for a desert lab completed the transition from the region as colonial hinterland to national research center. Their work would make Tucson the center of describing the natural region within the American national geography.

155

CHAPTER 4: CRAFTING AND CONSUMING THE SONORAN DESERT

“We will put on a reel from Sonora, and go to a wild wonderland. And south Arizona will show you, A desert without any sand. The valleys are level and cheerful, the mountains are sudden and steep. The cacti will fill you with wonder, and also with spines, till you weep.” William Hornaday342

“In the Winter of 1911 the writer made a trip…into the Cababi, Comobabi, and Quijotoa mountains and the surrounding country…This region…lies at the heart of one of the most unique and remarkable floral empires of the earth, the Lower Sonoran region of southern Arizona.” Jacob Blumer, 1912343

“In the heart of the Saguaro forest, ancient tribe, stands a carcass, stark and dry, stripped of its green mantle, bared of flesh, vulture-eaten, skeleton against the sky.” Elise Pumpelly Cabot, 1919344

The Desert Botanical Lab became an engine for crafting the Sonoran Desert out

of the rich natural diversity of the southern deserts. Its research agenda flowed out into

popular explanations of the region. In the process of explaining the desert, researchers

coalesced a body of work into a contemporary vision of the region. Today we routinely

acknowledge the existence of an ecological region known as the Sonoran Desert. In large

part, we owe this linguistic habit to the scientists working out of the Lab. The Carnegie

Institution of Washington, D.C. founded the Lab in 1902 to study desert environments. It

342 William Hornaday, “The Sonoran Desert,” in Old Fashion Verses (New York: Clark & Fritts, 1919), dedicated to Daniel T. MacDougal. 343 Jacob Corwin Blumer, “Notes on the Phytogeography of the Arizona Desert,” Plant World 15, no. 8 (August 1912): 183-189, 183. 344 Elise Pumpelly Cabot, “Arizona,” from Arizona and Other Poems (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1919), 7. 156

opened in 1903 on the shoulder of Tumamoc Hill, above the Santa Cruz River and

overlooking Tucson. Dedicated to generating knowledge about arid lands, its research

staff continued work until it closed in 1940. Even after its closure, the Carnegie

Institution supported Forrest Shreve in his goal of writing a synthetic definition of the

Sonoran Desert. It appeared posthumously in 1954 through the efforts of co-author Ira

Wiggins.345

Lab staff refined earlier definitions of the Sonoran Desert and in the process

reduced a less nuanced and more broadly defined life zone model proposed by Alexander

Von Humboldt and modified by C. Hart Merriam.346 His Sonoran Division was one

among many names given to the desert Southwest and northern Mexico in the nineteenth

century. Richard Brinsley Hinds called the region the “Chihuahua Region” in 1843.

Hinds thought of the region as extending from the Gulf of California and Colorado on the

west, to the United States prairies and Gulf of Mexico on the east and north. Over the

next fifty years, scientists called the region different names: the Arizonian, New

Mexican, Cactus, Mexico-Californian, Aztec, Mexican Forest, North Mexico and Texas,

345 McGinnies, Discovering the Desert; Janice Bowers, A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Craig, Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. 346 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, 134. Worster writes: “The central concept of the Geography of Plants was that the plants of the world must not only be considered in their taxonomic relations but also grouped in relation to the geographic conditions in which they live. Humboldt called these groups ‘divisions physiognomiques,’ of which he identified fifteen general categories: there were groups dominated by palms, first, cacti, grasses, mosses, and so forth. Each major kind of community, in other worlds, was named after the species most responsible for its composite appearance. The effect of this procedure was to emphasize the visual patterns in vegetation, leading to a basically aesthetic approach to the ‘ensembles’ of nature.” 157

Sonoran Transition, and Sonoran Province.347 The region also had culturally defined place names: New Mexico, Sonoran, Pimería, Papaguería. Sonoran Province was C. Hart

Merriam’s preferred term. His natural category was broad:

The Sonoran Region as a whole stretches across the continent from Atlantic to Pacific, covering nearly the whole country south of latitude 43˚ and reaching northward on the Great Plains and Great Basin to about latitude 48˚…while to the southward it occupies the great interior basin of Mexico and extends into the tropics along the highlands of the interior. It covers also the peninsula of Lower California, the southern part of which seems entitled to rank as an independent subdivision.348

Merriam noted that within this bio-geographic division, one could differentiate between upper and lower Sonoran using temperature and also divide it into arid and humid categories by moisture. The humid lower Sonoran merged “insensibly” into the arid in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories and Texas. What others later thought of as the

Sonoran Desert was, to Merriam, part of the arid Lower Sonoran.349

During the early decades of the century, scientists reworked nineteenth-century descriptions of the various deserts. In 1908, Daniel MacDougal tentatively described the

Sonoran Desert as a desert delineated on the west by the Colorado River delta, generally following the Gulf of California coast southeast and including the mountain ranges. He told readers: “accurate information concerning this region is, however, difficult to obtain.”350 That lacuna had led MacDougal to mount a famed expedition from Tucson to

347 C. Hart Merriam, “The Geographic Distribution of Life in North America with Special Reference to the Mammalia,” Proceedings of the Bio. Soc. of Washington 7 (April 1892): 1-64. 348 Merriam, “Geographic Distribution,” 26. 349 Merriam, “Geographic Distribution,” 28. 350 MacDougal, Botanical Features, 34. 158

the Gulf of California.351 His exploration of ‘Papagueria’ (land of the Papago) or the

“Pacific Coastal Desert,” mapped many of the mountain ranges yet yielded no coherent

short-hand name for the region. In 1908, MacDougal placed Tucson at the “heart of the

desert of Arizona,” but not explicitly within the Sonoran Desert as later defined.352 He

was, however, firming up a more contemporary view through his travel and study. In

1912, MacDougal told readers that the Lab was in a wide valley of the Sonoran Desert.

His unifying view was more broadly shared with other scientists. One example comes

from Alexander G. Ruthvan of the American Museum of Natural History who used the

description “Sonoran Desert” as a delimiter for the range of animals in the desert

Southwest. He defined the Sonoran Desert as “the extreme southwestern United States

and western Mexico.”353 MacDougal’s travels, based on so much borderlands and

Mexico experience, allowed him to think across the international border and reconnect

Arizona to Sonora, and scientists like Ruthvan explicitly drew upon these experiences.

Like MacDougal, DBL researcher Forrest Shreve was also beginning to gather the

observations and experience to define the Sonoran Desert. In 1917, Shreve was calling

the U.S portion of the Sonoran Desert “the Arizona Succulent Desert” and drawing

distinctions between it and the California Microphyll Desert (Mojave) to the west and the

Texas Succulent Desert (Chihuahua) to the east.354 Yet, in 1924, Shreve felt comfortable

351 D. T. MacDougal, “Across Papagueria,” Bul. Am. Geo. Soc. 40, no. 12 (1908): 705- 725; Hornaday, Camp-fires on Desert and Lava. 352 MacDougal, Botanical Features, 44. 353 Alexander G. Ruthvan, “A Collection of Reptiles and Amphibians from Southern New Mexico and Arizona,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 23 (1907): 483-603, 546. 354 Bowers, Sense of Place, 74. 159

telling his readers that the well-known desert of southwestern Arizona “may well be

termed the Sonoran Desert” since it extended from the Colorado Plateau on the north,

Sierra Madre Occidental on the east, and the Colorado River and Gulf of California on

the west and covered a portion of the Mexican State of Sonora and southern Arizona.355

This definition remains in use today. Mark Dimmitt of the Arizona-Sonora Desert

Museum describes the Sonoran Desert as covering roughly 100,000 square miles. It has six subdivisions, including Saguaro National Park’s Arizona Upland, and extending across the Colorado River to Indio and El Centro, and follows the shoreline along the

Gulf of California to Guaymas Sonora on the east and down to La Paz, in Baja California

Sur.356

Researchers from the lab saturated the Sonoran Desert with their studies and their

extensive expeditions became visible highlighting the Sonoran Desert as a region tied together with both similar plant life and scientific activity (see Fig. ). All areas were not of equal interest to staff. Their studies followed specific problems and specific nature.

From these landscape types, researchers were able to generalize a story about the desert.

The process by which scientists played a role in crafting the meaning of the desert can be captured by looking at three specific research sites. First was the Lab and its grounds—

Tumamoc Hill. Second were the desert basins in southern California. Third was

Papagueria, the trans-border region between Nogales and the Coast. In all three locations,

355 Forest Shreve, “Across the Sonoran Desert,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 51, no. 7 (July 1924): 283. 356 Mark A. Dimmitt, “Biomes & Communities of the Sonoran Desert Region,” in Steven J. Phillips and Patricia Wentworth Comus, A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13-15. 160

scientists from the Desert Lab produced scientific knowledge about the desert that led to more popular circulation and consumption. These labscapes became emblematic of the

Sonoran Desert as a whole and in their repetition and elaboration in popular accounts we can see how scientific studies influencing the creation of a region. The way sub-parts became representative of the whole also demonstrates that meaning about nature needed grounding in space. These labscapes represented the region in ways that made nationalization of the trans-border desert possible.357

North American Deserts: The Research Agenda

The search for a desert lab convinced MacDougal that an intensive research program into desert nature could illuminate larger questions about the natural qualities of desert lands. “The current conceptions of desert are neither adequate nor correct,” he wrote. Descriptions of deserts as “wholly or approximately without vegetation,” or

“uninhabited” were inappropriate. These definitions arose from colonial experiences in outdated reports from old world deserts like the Sahara, Arabian, and Gobi, or encounters with North America’s Great Plains in the mid-nineteenth century. In these encounters, desert had cultural connotations and meant something like wilderness: a culturally problematic land. A scientific definition would predicable transform these generalizations. Research in the American west had shrunk these generalities into local phenomenon like the Badlands of South Dakota, the Staked Plains of Texas, the desert west of the Great Salt Lake, and the Colorado Desert along the lower Colorado River.

These threatening lands posed problems for travelers and state building. Yet, defining

357 For a discussion of Labscapes see Robert Kohler, Landscapes, Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 161

areas as desert often involved ignorance about local conditions and the conflation of

habitability with aridity. Increased familiarity was rendering these generalizations

unsupportable. The lab’s research could illuminate North America’s million square miles

of arid lands and the Carnegie Desert Lab would provide a way to further describe deserts

on specific terms.358

Tumamoc Hill Labscape

The location from which botanists could ‘discover the desert,’ was the Desert Lab

on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson. It became the center for scientific research into North

American deserts and the hub for understanding the Sonoran Desert in particular. For

nearly forty years, researchers based at the lab travelled regionally creating a skein of

observations and studies that saturated the Sonoran Desert Their work literally knit the

desert together (See Fig. 14). The works produced flowed out into the scientific

community and beyond into scientifically-interested, and conservationist publications.

Scientific knowledge of the Sonoran Desert thus had the dual effect of producing a body of scientific knowledge and providing cultural material for explaining the region.

The creation of the Lab became a publishing event as scientists wrote about it in academic and more popular works. Coville and McDougal started the process with their

1903 report published by the Carnegie Institution.359 The story of their survey and

founding of the Desert Laboratory entered wider circulation when authors wrote the story

358 Studies from Atacama, Arabia, Egypt, and Coville’s work in the Death Valley provided analogous research into questions about arid vegetation, Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab, 32-34; D. T. MacDougal, “Some Aspects of Desert Vegetation,” Plant World 6, no. 11 (1903): 249-57. 359 Frederick Vernon Coville and Daniel Trembly MacDougal, Desert Botanical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1903). 162

of the Lab’s founding mission into larger circles. The most direct line between Lab

research and wider audiences was through the semi-popular Plant World. As Sonoran

Desert expert Janice Bowers has shown, Plant World was a conduit between scientists and a broader audience. Founded in 1897, it transformed from poplar journal and official voice of the New York-based Wild Flower Preservation Society, to a publishing outlet for the Lab, and in 1920, became the journal Ecology. From 1911-1920, Forrest Shreve

edited the journal and research from the Lab filled its pages.360 Plant World had a limited

readership but still managed to bridge the gap between science producers and science

consumers. It was like other journals where a common interest in botany brought gardeners and botanists together.

Other publications carried the creation of the Lab into larger circles. These

included Popular Science Monthly, Out West, Torreya, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and

Garden and Forest, among others. Columbia botanist Francis Ernest Lloyd, editor of

Plant World, wrote about the lab for 1904 readers of the Journal of the New York

Botanical Garden, for Popular Science Monthly in 1905, and for the German language

Biologisches Centralblatt. In Popular Science Monthly he placed the lab within its

general and natural setting and provided detailed descriptions of the research goals and

building itself.361 Pictures of the Lab building amidst desert foliage on the shoulder of

360 Janice Bowers, “Plant World and its Metamorphosis from Popular Journal into Ecology,” Bull. Torr. Bot. Soc. 119, no. 3 (July-September, 1992): 333-341. 361 Francis Ernest Lloyd, “A Visit to the Desert Botanical Laboratory,” Journal of the New York Botanical Garden 5 (1904): 172-177; F. E. Lloyd, “A Botanical Laboratory in the Desert,” Popular Science Monthly 66 (February 1905): 329-342; F. E. Lloyd, “The Desert Botanical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,” Biologisches Centralblatt 26 (1905): 791-801. 163

Tumamoc Hill, with its orderly lab spaces and descriptions of the library presented the

built structure as a serious research facility and provided a vision of an easy merger

between science and the environment. Made from the volcanic stone of the mountain, the

low building blended with the environment. Tucson, Lloyd affirmed was the right place

for desert lab because it was at the border between of the saguaro-palo verde desert and

the grasslands of Texas.362 Popular Science continued to track the Desert Laboratory

with descriptions of research during the next decade.363 William Cannon, the first

resident researcher at the lab, told readers of Charles Lummis’s Out West that the lab

could pursue “scientific possibilities which lay practically untouched in our midst.”364

Scientific journals also followed Lab work. The geographer Ellsworth Huntington published his description of the lab in Harper’s Magazine in 1911. To emphasize the lab’s work, Huntington placed the reader in a vast landscape dominated by distance and emptiness and expressed empathy for those who saw in the desert between San Antonio and San Bernardino as a monotonous landscape. The Desert lab, he suggested, was working to help see the true nature of the desert. Its work had “the same relation to agriculture that a knowledge of human anatomy and pathology bears to the practice of

362 Lloyd, “A Botanical Laboratory in the Desert,” Popular Science Monthly, vol. 66 (Nov., 1904-Apr., 1905): 329-342. 363 “The Progress of Science,” Popular Science Monthly 74, no. 27 (May, 1909), 515; D. T. MacDougal, “The Water Relations of Desert Plants,” Popular Science Monthly 79, no. 36 (December, 1911): 540-553; “Ten Years of the Carnegie Institution,” Popular Science Monthly 80, no. 15 (March, 1912). 364 William Cannon, “The Desert Botanical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,” Out West 24, no. 1: 25-38. 164

medicine.” Revealing the desert would help educate people to see it anew.365 Word

spread in international circles with articles in Germany and a description in Scottish

Geographical Magazine among others.366

The Lab became both a hub for distant research and a research environment in its

own right. Its rich botanical setting on Tumamoc Hill provided researchers a living lab

and authors a proxy landscape useful in presenting desert nature to their audiences.

Lloyd’s description in Popular Science lavished attention on describing the natural

setting. “The view commanded from the laboratory site,” he wrote, “is a panorama of rare

beauty.” The rugged Santa Catalina Mountains marked the northern view, to the east rose the Rincon Mountains, on the west the Tucson Mountains. Out of sight behind the summit of hill, the southern view looked across mountains into Sonora and, Lloyd imaged, the malpais of the international frontier. At the foot of the hill, the Santa Cruz

River provided water for cotton wood, willow, and mesquite trees. Above the river bed, and away from the town, creosote brush, brightly flowered Opuntia, palo verde, and acacia trees followed the contours of water availability. On the slopes, the palo verde’s green bark provided a greenish cast to land. Over the hills, ocotillos showed their distinctive spiny sprouts into the sky. Throughout the landscape, “the sentinel-like saguaro,” claimed the most attention.367

365 Ellsworth Huntington, “The Desert Laboratory,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 122, no. 731 (April, 1911): 651-662, 655. 366 “The Plant Life of the Arizona Desert,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 26, no. 1: 9- 17. 367 Lloyd, “Botanical Laboratory,” 333-34. 165

The nature of Tumamoc hill provided both base for regional study and research

material for researchers at the lab. Through ownership and lease, the lab controlled some

800 hundred acres on the hill.368 The land held many of the desert plants characteristic of

the desert around Tucson and offered opportunities to study important topics like

population dynamics, transpiration, and climatic affects on plant species.369 Botanist

Jacob Corwin Blumer, who worked at the lab in 1907 and 1908, can serve as an example.

His work at the lab involved mapping many species on the lab grounds. Work

instrumental in lab-researcher Volney Morgan Spalding’s 1909 Distribution and

Movement of Desert Plants. Blumer made use of the lab grounds form his own work on

the effects of environmental conditions and distribution on plants. In Plant World, he

showed readers shrub distribution centered on the lab. After describing locations where

the shrub Lippia wrightii, first described by George Thurber from specimens collected by

William Emory, grew in Chiricahua, Rincon, and the Tucson Mountains, Blumer noted:

“on Tumamoc Hill it grows as considerable colonies only in the best protected places of

steep, northerly aspect, between the contours of 2500 and 3100 feet.” In this description,

as with many others, the lab was both scientific and cultural reference point. Studies imitated on the grounds provided a point of reference for seeing larger patterns.370

368 The Carnegie Institute owned 220 acres of their 860 acre reserve. State school trust land and the University of Arizona owned the 640 acre balance, Note from Alfred Atkinson to the Board of Regents, Nov. 3, 1939, “Carnegie Desert Laboratory, 1939-40,” AZ 426, box 32, folder 4, UASC. 369 See McGinnies, Discovering the Desert, 1-16, also McGinnies provides an extensive bibliography of lab research. 370 Janice Bowers, “Jacob Corwin Blumer, Arizona Botanist,” Brittonia 35, no. 2 (July- September, 1983): 197-203, 201; Volney Spalding, Distribution and Movement of Desert Plants (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1909); J.C. Blumer, “Distributional 166

Of the many long lasting efforts begun in the first years of study was the saguaro

population survey. In 1907, the lab fenced the property to exclude domesticated animals.

The following year, staff mapped the hill’s vegetation. This initial map provided

invaluable baseline material for many research projects. For example, when staff wanted

to understand the rate of reproduction among saguaro they could compare the base list to

ongoing surveys. In this effort they could count on William Cannon and Effie Spalding’s

work on saguaro growth rates on Tumamoc Hill plants, on the plotting and monitoring of

individual plants, and by using repeat photography.371 In 1911, Forrest Shreve used

plotted saguaro in his research defining the plant’s geographical range. By watching

individuals during cold periods, he generated estimates about the saguaro’s range based

on maximum consecutive freezing hours.372

The saguaro studies are a good place to look for evidence of how the labscape of

Tumamoc hill entered broader conversations. In 1910, Forrest Shreve elaborated the

growth rate for saguaro in the pages of Plant World. His data points came from work by

Lab member Effie Spalding. She had been monitoring 16 individual plants for up to four

years and from these measurements, Shreve constructed a rough guide tying age to

height. Based upon the scheme calculated from the 16, Shreve and Spalding mapped the

Features of some Southwestern Shrubs,” Plant World 11, no. 6 (June, 1908): 117-123, 118. 371 Effie Spalding, “Mechanical Adjustment of the Suaharo (Cereus giganteus) to varying quantities of stored water,” Bul. Torrey Bot. Soc. 32, no. 2 (Feb., 1905): 57-68; Elizabeth A. Pierson and Raymond M. Turner, “An 85-year Study of Saguaro (Carnegiea gigantean) Demography,” Ecology 79, no. 8 (Dec., 1998): 2676-2693; Forrest Shreve, “The Rate of Establishment of the Giant Cactus,” Plant World 13, no. 10 (Oct., 1910): 235-240. 372 Forrest Shreve, “The Influence of Low Temperatures on the Distribution of the Giant Cactus,” Plant World 14 (1911): 136-146. 167

ages of an additional 240 saguaro on lab property.373 The ability to see the age of

individual plants was crucial in reconstructing landscape history. It gave some sense of

the age of the giant cacti. The lab was also crucial in mapping the geographical range of

the saguaro. Shreve believed temperature had a limiting effect on the plant’s distribution

but was unsure how it worked. To figure it out, he harvested 11 small saguaro and then

placed them in a freezer for extended lengths of time. The conclusion he drew was that

the limit saguaro faced was one of sustained freezing temperatures.374

Other desert plants received equal attention. Lab researcher Volney Spalding had

a history of presenting botany to the public. He had taught forestry courses at University

of Michigan and advocated for conservation. These two ideas merged in his efforts to measure changes in the plant communities at the Lab and in his desire to convey desert nature to a wider audience. Utilizing Lab grounds Spalding presented a series of papers on major desert shrubs like the Creosote Bush in Botanical Gazette and Bulletin of the

Torrey Botanical Club but he also wrote an article on spring flowers for Plant World. In

the latter publication, Spalding placed the Lab within a context designed to draw in

popular readers. Telling readers that winter rain made for a good flower season in

Arizona, Spalding noted, “Tumamoc Hill…has for a week or more presented a great

profusion of spring flowers.”375 Likewise, William Cannon used the Lab grounds and

373 Shreve, “Rate of Establishment,” 236. 374 Shreve, “Influence of Low Temperatures,” 143-44. 375 Volney Spalding, “Biological Relations of Certain Desert Shrubs I: The Creosote Bush (Covillea tridentate) in its relation to Water Supply,” Botanical Gazette 38, no. 2 (August, 1904): 122-138; Volney Spalding, “Biological Relations of Certain Desert Shrubs II: Absorption of Water by Leaves,” Botanical Gazette 41, no. 4 (April 1906): 262-282; Volney Spalding, “Spring Flowers of the Arizona Desert,” Plant World 10 168

vicinity to understand root habits and other biological processes. In the American

Naturalist he pointed readers towards an understanding of how cactus biology revealed

desert conditions. Lab personnel were creating a rich archive of images, information, and

published work useful for broader applications. In her 1912 Myths and Legends of

California and the Old Southwest, historian Katharine Berry Judson drew upon the Lab’s

stockpile of images to enable her to stage her ethnographic explanations. Her choices

were interesting. She included an image of Tularosa Desert sand pedestals from

MacDougal’s Botanical Features of North America to illustrate a section on flood myths.

Presumably, she was evoking the fact that change happened on a grand scale like when

desert basins dried out. Thus, Native American memories should be considered

seriously.376

The Desert Botanical Lab became both a lab site and a reference point for

understanding the region. It generated specialized knowledge about the region and

became a way to understand the region through the practice of science. Huntington told

Harper’s readers the Lab “is now actively at work with a considerable staff of botanists,”

trying to understand the relationship of plants to their physical environments.377 The presentation of science as taking place in the lab had a profoundly inspiring effect on

Americans. Part of this celebrity came from the problems Lab staff chose for research. A

(1907): 63-64, 63; Volney Spalding, “Suggestions to Plant Collectors,” Plant World 10 (1907): 40; Volney Spalding, “Cultivated Plants in the Arid Southwest,” Plant World 12 (1909): 18-21; Volney Spalding, “Plant Associations of the Desert Laboratory Domain and Adjacent Valley,” Plant World 13 (1910): 31-42, 55-56, 86-93. 376 Katharine Berry Judson, Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & CO, 1912), 62-63. 377 Huntington, Desert Botanical Laboratory, 654-55. 169

perfect example was the problem of the Lower Colorado, irrigation, and the flooding of the Salton Sea.

Desert Basins

In February 1905, the Colorado River breeched the cut to a canal created by the

Colorado Development Company and flowed uncontrolled into the Salton Basin. By

November 1905, 80% of the Colorado River was flowing into the Basin. For two years, efforts to redirect the river to the Gulf of California focused unprecedented attention on the Colorado and its basins as the Salton Sea filled into a mighty lake.378 The flood drew national media attention with exemplary articles by the The Los Angeles Times that reported on the flooding of salt works in the basin, The Washington Post reporting on how rising waters forced the Southern Pacific to move its tracks, the Chicago Daily

Tribune discussing the advantages an inland sea held over the arid basin, and the New

York Times trumpeting the damage caused by submerging potential farm land.379 The flooding of the Salton Basin, set within larger discussions over desert reclamation, made the area fascinating to popular and academic audiences.

Desert Basins were one of the most fascinating and prominent research topics pursued by Lab researchers. They had historic roots in U.S. scientific description of the region. In 1853, William Blake had looked out from Travertine Rock and imagined an ancient lake outlined in the land. He named it the Cahuilla Basin after the resident Native

378 deBuys and Myers, Salt Dreams, “A Sea of Unintention.” 379 “Salton Sea Racks ‘Salt Kings’ Nerves,” Los Angeles Times (Sept., 9, 1905), H1; “Salton Sea Rising: Southern Pacific Forced to Move its Tracks for Fifth Time,” The Washington Post (July 4, 1906), 9; “The Salton Sea,” Chicago Daily Tribune (Nov., 11, 1906), B4; “The Problem of the Salton Sea,” New York Times (Jan., 20, 1907), SM5. 170

Americans. Revisiting the site in 1906 Blake wrote that “concentric lines of sparse vegetation marked where the waters had stood centuries before.” In his mind’s eye he could see an ancient lake while before him he could also see the gleaming new Salton Sea where once he crossed dry desert.380

Between the 1890s and 1910s, Blake’s vision of the relationship between river

and desert basin had received repeated proof. His name for the land, the Colorado Desert

was accurate because the Colorado River repeatedly flooded the area. Subsequent

research demonstrated that the valley was once an extension of the Gulf of California.

Sediment transported by the Colorado River cut the valley from the sea and for hundreds

of years, Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea) filled periodically with Colorado River water. At its

greatest extent, the lake was one hundred by thirty-five miles and 300 feet deep.381

The transport of sediment and the filling of Salton Sea were visible and well

documented.382 In 1891, Flagstaff-based Godfrey Sykes, who would become a crucial

member of the Lab staff, was looking for adventure when he built a 22 foot boat in

Flagstaff, Arizona, freighted it to Needles aboard a Santa Fe rail car, and then floated the

river to the Gulf. Sykes had the sense that the tide of colonization had lapsed between

1877 when the Southern Pacific reached Yuma. The delta “had once more become almost

a terra incognito,” he wrote. Sykes wanted the adventure of rediscovery and he found it along the river. He drifted and sailed down the river and out into the upper reaches of the

380 William Phipps Blake, “The Cahuilla Basin and Desert of the Colorado,” in Daniel T. MacDougal The Salton Sea (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1914), 4. 381 http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/AncientLakeCahuilla.html. 382 Blake, “The Cahuilla Basin,”4; deBuys and Myers, Salt Dreams, “A Sea of Unintention.” 171

Gulf of California. He planned to continue south as far as possible but accidently burned the boat on the Baja coast. Marooned, he and his companion walked back to Yuma

through the Colorado River Delta. To survive they relied on scavenging local resources

and the aid of strangers.383 On this trip, and subsequent excursions, Sykes investigated

the relationship between the Colorado River and the complex landscape of desert basins

and its network of channels.

The connections were somewhat hard to miss during years of high flood and 1891

was a flood year. The waters of the Colorado and Gila inundated Yuma and breeched the

western banks of the Colorado. Water flowed north into the Salton Basin. On June 23rd,

residents of Salton, on the Southern Pacific Line, noticed trickles of water approaching

from the south. Salton was a scorching dry town and the arrival of water unexpected.

Within weeks, a forty by ten mile lake lay at their doorstep. Prospectors confirmed that

the region to the south was underwater—3200 square miles of water. Curious to

understand what was happening, The San Francisco Examiner and Banning Herald

outfitted an exploratory group to discover the water’s source. They put in at Yuma and

floated the Colorado downstream until they found a mile wide breech in the Colorado’s

western bank. The breech water current carried them west and north and their channel

merged with the New River, a side channel of the Colorado that periodically flooded the

Pattie Basin’s Lake Maquata (the basin south of the Cahuilla Basin). The combined water

had topped a sand ridge into the Cahuilla Basin (Salton Basin) to fill the Salton Sea. They

383 Godfrey Sykes, A Westerly Trend (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 208- 224; Godfrey Sykes, The Colorado Delta, (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington and American Geographical Society of New York, 1937), 35. 172

estimated the flow at 300 yards wide, 16 feet deep, with a current of 6 miles an hour.

Rushing through the breech, they saw other streams flowing into the basin and found a

lake they couldn’t see across. They sailed on, and landed at Salton after travelling 200

miles from Yuma.

Understanding the relationship between river, desert basins, and delta were

important to American efforts to irrigate the desert. Between the 1880s and 1905 promoters developed miles of canal and sold thousands of acres of land for agriculture.

Flooding in Yuma and the Salton Sink seemed to offer both opportunity and danger.

When the river began to establish a canal to the basin and away from the sea, it created

uncertainty for developers. The switch appeared to indicate that the Colorado River had

diverted from its course from the Gulf to the Sonoran Desert basins. The New York Times

summarized the uncertainly by noting that the flowed into what “was, until recently, the

dry basin of an extinct inland lake,.” In the process it flooded 700,000 acres and promised

to evict “thousands of settlers.”384 The idea that this mighty river, flowing from the top of

the Rockies would end in the blazing heat of the Colorado Desert caused consternation

and excitement in both scientists and the public.385 It appeared as the antithesis of the

promise of reclamation and ominously like a biblical flood. By the turn of the twentieth

century, Blake was one of numerous scientists working to explain the Colorado Desert as

384 “The Problem of the Salton Sea,” New York Times (Jan., 20, 1907), SM5. 385 B. A. Cecil-Stephens, “The Colorado Desert and Its Recent Flooding,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 23 (1891): 367-77; For these stories see William deBuys and Myers, Salt Dreams; Daniel T. MacDougal et. al. The Salton Sea; MacDougal, “A Decade of the Salton Sea,” Geographical Review 3, no. 6 (Jun., 1917): 457-473. 173

something recognizable to irrigation and science. What had been the bleakest of deserts was being reimaged as the grocery to the world.

The desert basins offered a rich field of study for naturalists at the turn of the twentieth century. They had a historical pedigree steeped in era of the Mexican American

War and the Gold Rush, a contemporary present in the dramatic question of flood control, and a future in the question of irrigation. Yet, it was an exceedingly complex landscape poorly understood. Scientific knowledge about the land helped shape explanations and expectations even as irrigation agriculture transformed it.386 Below Yuma, the river had a series of southwestward potential channels. Travelling down river, one encountered known channels like the Alamo headed north and west into the Cahuilla Basin, the

Paredones and more ephemeral channels that created a region of braids pouring into

Volcano Lake. The lake, the Pescadero and Boat Slough drained into the Hardy, itself a major channel of the Colorado. The Hardy flowed south but periodically overtopped sand ridges along the international border and poured over into the Cahuilla as the New River.

386 Godfrey Sykes would return again and again to the river, basin, and delta of the lower Colorado. In his series of visits spanning the 1890s to the 1930s, Sykes began to describe the hydrology of the delta system. What he discovered was that after a period of stability, during the nineteenth century, the river was shifting westward in its delta. Sykes argued that the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth marked a turning point in the delta when sediment build-up shifted the river into its western pattern: “The estuary was quite thoroughly examined at this time [1898], and the impression was gained that it was in general shallower…then observed three years previously. There appeared to be two possible explanations for this condition: either that it was merely a temporary one…,or, and more probably, that it was to be understood as a continuing, rather than a transitory, state and the effect of an overloading of the estuary by an excess of detrital matter from the river. Subsequent events have practically proved that this was the correct hypothesis and that the final years of the nineteenth and the first five years of the twentieth century marked the culmination of a phase in the geomorphic development of the delta.” The Colorado Delta, 46. 174

Westward of the lower Colorado, the Hardy could also flow around the southern tip of the Cocopa Mountains to fill the Pattie Basin as Lake Maquata/Laguna Salada (Fig. 15).

The dramatic events of 1891 appeared as variations of the normal fluctuations of this intricate teeter-totter land.

The landscape was easier to understand using local knowledge and in 1894 Sykes engaged a Cocopa man to show him the water ways of the Pattie Basin. Memory and intimate knowledge was necessary to really understand the relationship between water and land and read this landscape. The Cocopa guide provided this past. In 1897, Sykes returned to the delta and found old channel’s filled, new islands and sand bars. On a stormy night in 1898, he watched tide and rain melt the bank beneath his boats: “the shoreline in the vicinity of the boats was receding at a rate of more than two feet a minute, in spite of the fact that it stood fully ten feet above the half-tide level and had a depth of water alongside of about two fathoms (12 feet).”387 The delta world was a rapidly changing and fascinating place filled with adventurous research potential.

The knowledge Sykes gained in the 1890s intersected with the Desert Botanical

Lab in January 1904, when he returned with the Daniel MacDougal and Robert H. Forbes of the Arizona Agricultural Station. They travelled by boat from Yuma to the Gulf at San

Felipe Bay. The party botanized. MacDougal reported desert prizes like “the great cactus tree (Cereus Pecten-aborignum) [Pachycereus tehuantepecanus]” and Pilocereus shottii

(called Lophocereus schottii or totem pole cactus), towering ocotillo, and numerous cacti, agave, and yucca. Collected, many went to the New York Botanical Garden to add to the

387 Sykes, The Colorado Delta, 41-45, quote 45-6. 175

collection and effectively emphasize McDougal’s 1904 account to NYBG readers.388

The delta plain was thick with mesquite, willow and poplar and the size of

Massachusetts. It was also fantastical: “In the upper part of the delta, the newly formed

low-lying land supports great plantations of a huge cane (Phragmites phragmites ) which

in the lower part is replaced by a cattail ‘tule’ (Typha angustifolia)” wrote MacDougal.389

Forbes’ account of the trip is equally exotic. He recalled awaking to “mountain lions fighting over a carcass” while “sleeping on sand bars at night.” The river moved sluggishly and unpredictably. They had to row downriver into headwinds and in stifling heat only to run aground and drag the boat free. The land was thick with people and animals and exotic enough that Forbes likened it to the Nile in several publications.390

Like the Nile, Forbes believed the Colorado should provide irrigation for the

region. “Under proper management,” he wrote, “the agricultural possibilities of this

region are very great, resembling in a general way those of Egypt.391 Like Forbes,

MacDougal saw the lower Colorado as “the Nile of America,” because it arose in distant

mountains then flowed through “the most arid desert in North America.”392 Forbes and

MacDougal were hardly unique in thinking about the river in this way but their writing

did spread into poplar print at a time when the Colorado River drew national Attention.

388 MacDougal, “Botanical Explorations in the Southwest,” 93; Daniel T. MacDougal, “Delta and Desert Vegetation,” Botanical Gazette 38, no. 1 (July 1904): 44-63. 389 MacDougal, “Delta,” and “Botanical Explorations in the Southwest,” Journal of the New York Botanical Garden 5, no. 53 (May 1904). 390 Robert Humphrey Forbes, “The Colorado River of the West,” University of Arizona Monthly 6, no. 4 (April, 1904): 112-121, this was the University of Arizona school paper; 391 Forbes, “The Colorado,” 119. 392 Daniel T. MacDougal, “The Delta of the Rio Colorado,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 38, no. 1 (1906): 1-16. 176

G. Gordon Copp of the New York Botanical Garden published their story as “The

American Nile,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1905. Copp provided all the necessary

cultural trappings for selling this river as an American Nile. It was mysterious: “when

you have drunk of the red waters of the Colorado you will be filled with an infinite

longing.” Exotic people called it home and lived at its whims: “Cocopa Indians…build

their house of arrowweed, Pluchea sericea, with supports of willow or poplar, and

conduct their crude husbandry according to the river’s moods.” It was a land of “constant

change,” and he provided descriptions and illustrations of channels, desert mountains,

dunes, and volcanic mud baths to prove it.393 In National Geographic, C. J. Blanchard of

the U.S. Reclamation Service presented the Nile theme in his reclamation article

“Winning the West.”394 The theme had utility and durability. Business picked it up as

evidenced by El Centro’s American Nile Cotton Company.” Managers also liked it: The

Arizona and California River Commission titled its 1914 report “The Colorado River

(The American Nile). Finally, the idea seeped into histories of Arizona as part of the

story of domesticating the State.395

MacDougal was drawn to the Salton Sea because it offered a chance for big

science. It was a place under transformation and a site within a global arid lands

393 G. Gordon Copp, “The American Nile,” Harpers Monthly Magazine, 112, no. 671 (1905): 786-792. 394 C. J. Blanchard, “Winning the West: An Account of the Marvelous Progress of our Reclamation Service in Reclaiming the Desert,” National Geographic Magazine 17, no. 2 (February, 1906): 82-99. 395 Arizona and California River Regulation Commission, The Colorado River (The American Nile): Its Present Importance and Its Enormous Potential Value to the Nation as a New Field of Rich Agricultural Production Under an Effective System of Flood Control, Water Conservation and River Regulation (1914) 177

agricultural agenda. The flooding provided a further opportunity because he had a

baseline from his 1903 reconnaissance for the Lab site.396 With the flooding, he now had

the opportunity to see the retreat and advance of plants as the water levels changed in a

desert basin. He saw this work with a broad appeal because, as he wrote in his

culminating 1914 work: “extensive basins occur in various parts of North America,

Australia, Africa, and Asia.”397

The idea that Desert Basins were somehow central to thinking about arid lands

had been catching hold since the mid-nineteenth century but the research at the Salton

Sea was part of a turn of the century wave trying to unlock the secrets of extinct lakes.

The Carnegie Institution funded expeditions by Rapheal Pumpelly and Ellsworth

Huntington to Asia. In 1905, Huntington published his work on the depression of Sistan, in the borderland of Afghanistan and Iran. It was an ephemeral and seasonal lake region clearly more arid than in the past. He attributed it to climate change. The Helmund river provided water to create marshlands and croplands in the depression, and, in a very similar fashion as the Colorado, it created the conditions for its own unpredictability. The river, Huntington wrote, “deposits silt, especially upon the inner portions of its floodplain, until the stream flows on the top of a broad, smoothly-arched ridge, very flat, but very real. Then, during some flood, the stream breaks from its old course and follows a new radius, along which another ridge is built.” Like the Colorado delta and desert basins, the soil was fertile but required irrigation because rainfall was seasonal and light.

396 Coville and MacDougal, Desert Botanical Lab, 20. 397 Daniel MacDougal, “Movement of Vegetation due to Submersion and Desication of Land Areas in the Salton Sink,” The Salton Sea (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1914), 115. 178

Irrigation water, like the Colorado, arose in the distant mountains.398 In Australia, John

Walter Gregory was also looking to desert basins for big explanations about the natural and human past and a possible irrigation future.399 MacDougal was thinking about these other examples when he researched the Salton Sea.400 Likewise, research from the Lab influenced these accounts of other places.401

The Story of the Salton Sea and its relation to extinct lakes and future irrigation cropped up in the popular press like major news papers and in specialty press like The

National Geographic Magazine (1908), Popular Science Monthly, Presidential Speeches and Congressional Hearings. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt called on Congress and the Southern Pacific Railroad to save the Imperial Valley from inundation. He feared for reclamation efforts and the loss of settlement. The give and take of the January 18,

1907 Committee on Public Lands Hearings is especially interesting since Frederick

Newell, irrigation crusader, presented to the Committee. After describing the situation, he had this exchange with the Chairman:

The Chairman: Was that whole region formerly a portion of the Gulf of California? Newell: The depression is the ancient head of the Gulf of California. The Chairman: When the Gulf occupied the whole territory, do you know geologically where the Colorado River ran into it?

398 Ellsworth Huntington, “The Depression of Sistan in Eastern Persia,” Bull. Am. Geog. Soc. 37, no. 5 (1905): 271-281, 274; Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919). 399 J. W. Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia (London: John Murray, 1906); J. W. Gregory, “The Flowing Wells of Central Australia,” The Geographical Journal 38, no. 1 (July, 1911): 34-59. 400 Clear in his footnotes, “Movement of Vegetation,” 115; Volney Spalding, “The Western Edge of the Colorado Desert,” Plant World 11 (1909): 208-215. 401 This relationship was especially true for Huntington who had connections with MacDougal through the Carnegie Institution. 179

Newell: The Colorado River discharged into the eastern side of the head of the former gulf. The Chairman: Below or Above Yuma? Newell: Near Yuma.402

The idea that the desert was becoming an ocean held profound implications for

America’s national agenda for the lower Sonoran region.

The Lab contributed to describing the region in a series of publications dating from 1903 to 1937. MacDougal’s efforts culminated in a 1914 summary but the work lived on. In a series of articles and books titled “Reclamation of a Desert,” “Delta and

Estuary,” and The Colorado Delta, Sykes mapped and described a landscape under rapid revision. If specific examples of how the public used his work are hard to come by, his work helped shape the scientific understanding of the region at a time when policy makers expected experts to help describe and develop irrigation in the desert.403 Engineer

Harry T. Cory drew on this work for his 1915 The Imperial Valley and the Salton Sink.

Cory was instrumental in closing the breech and also associated with MacDougal, Sykes,

402 Frank H. Bigelow, “Studies on the Rate of Evaporation at Reno, Nevada, and in the Salton Sink,” The National Geographic Magazine 19 (1908): 20-28; Charles Alma Byers, “The Possibilities of Salton Sea,” The Popular Science Monthly, (January, 1907): 5-18; Theodore Roosevelt, “The Threatened Destruction by the Overflow of the Colorado River in the Sink or Depression Known as the Imperial Valley or Salton Sink Region” (Jan. 12, 1907) 59th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 212: 1-7; Frederick Newell, “Salton Sea, California, Imperial Valley, and Lower Colorado River,” Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands (Jan. 18, 1907) HRG-1907-PLH-0002. 403 Godfrey Sykes, “The Reclamation of a Desert,” The Geographical Journal 46, no. 6 (Dec., 1915): 447-457; Godfrey Sykes, “The Delta and Estuary of the Colorado River,” Geographical Review 16, no. 2 (April, 1926): 232-255; Godfrey Sykes, Delta, Estuary, and Lower Portion of the Channel of the Colorado River 1933-1935 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1937); Sykes, The Colorado Delta. 180

and William Phipps Blake.404 Like ripples, the impact of Lab research expanded into

debates much broader in geographical scope and implication than initially envisioned.

Papagueria

Like the basins of the Colorado Desert, Papagueria—land of the Papago (Tohono

O’Odham) –along the international border continued to attract attention. In 1907,

MacDougal launched an expedition from Tucson to the Pinacate region then on to the

Adair Bay on the Gulf of California.405 MacDougal’s group consisted of conservationist

and Bronx Zoo Director William Hornaday, Pennsylvania Game Commissioner John M.

Phillips, the Carnegie Desert Lab’s cartographer and general expeditor Godfrey Sykes,

Immigration officer Jeff Milton, guide Charlie Foster, hunter and packer Frank Coles,

Coles’ assistant Jess Jenkins, and a man named Saunders.406 Hornaday popularized the

adventure in a well received book Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava. MacDougal wrote a

small article titled “Across Papagueria” for the American Geographical Society. Both

works emphasized the exploratory aspects of the expedition. MacDougal argued: “No

adequate natural history survey has yet been made of any portion of this region. The

Boundary Survey Commission traversed the northern part…and made collections…but

the nature of the work did not permit any attempt at studying the general relations of the

life of the region.”407 Hornaday opened his book by telling readers: “While it is true that

the Pinacate region was known to a few Papago Indians and perhaps half a dozen

404 Harry T. Cory, The Imperial Valley and the Salton Sink (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915). 405 MacDougal, Botanical Features of North American Deserts, 34-5. 406 Bill Broyles, “Adventure in the Pinacate,” Journal of Arizona History 28, no. 2 (Summer 1987):155-88. 407 MacDougal, “Across Papagueria,” 705. 181

Mexicans, to the reading and thinking world it was totally unknown.”408 What was

seldom visited or unknown was in another fashion completely legible.

For Hornaday and his readers, the Arizona Desert unfolded through the work of

scientists at the University and Desert Botanical Laboratory staff, who, based in Tucson,

were explaining its desert environment. Hornaday pointed to the Carnegie Library

(1901), University (1891), hotels, hospital (1880), and schools as demonstrating the

town’s modernity.409 “If it is good to make two blades of grass grow where only one

grew before,” he wrote, “surly the men who make a University in the desert shall acquire

Merit.”410 It was also the “Queen City of Cactus-land” because it was set amidst a lush

desert. Work from the DBL was uncovering the qualities of plant life in the desert. For

example, in 1906, lab research Burton Livingston published a work on the relationship

between soil and desert plants. He synthesized work from numerous researchers. He

discovered that the deep soils remained moist protected by the desiccated upper soil, that

rocky soil aided water penetration, that plants like Fouquieria awaited adequate moisture

before germinating and then, they and others like Cereus and Covillea sank a tap root deep into the moist layer. Their transpiration rates were also slow, making them conservators of scarce water. These exquisite adaptations allowed germination and root growth during the rainy season. They then grow in pulses, with roots protected during dry

408 William T. Hornaday, Camp-fires on Desert and Lava (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), vii. 409 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 16. 410 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 17. 182

periods.411 These findings provided a sense that harmony underlay the desert. Rather than

a savage land, it was a reasonable environment, governed by recognizable mechanisms

illuminated through scientific studies.

Using Tucson as physical base and the DBL as intellectual springboard, readers

could travel fearlessly into the desert. The knowledge of roots conveyed a sense of

mastery.

“I am the Desert; bare since Time began; Yet do I dream of motherhood, when man One day at last will look upon my charms, And give me towns, like children, to my arms,”

quoted Hornaday. And his readers understood. Understanding nature could provide

appreciation and mastery. Science provided explanations making the land sensible.

For his readers, Hornaday feigned surprise at the diversity of Sonoran Desert nature. Traveling south and west into Papaguería he asked, “where is the barren, lifeless

waste of drifting sand?” Stretching ahead were blue mountains and a green desert floor

covered by the dark greens of creosote and mesquite, and the pale greens of palo verde,

cholla, and brittle brush. It was an “arboreal desert” where cacti and short trees rose

above eye level to provide a textural three dimensional aesthetic.412

In reality, Hornaday could draw understanding from his friend Daniel MacDougal

whose voice trained writer and reader in seeing the desert. Approach the desert with an

open mind or don’t enter it at all, he opined. It was a landscape best taken on terms of

411 Burton Edward Livingston, The Relation of Desert Plants to Soil Moisture and to Evaporation (D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1906), 72-74. 412 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 28. 183

marriage—“for better or worse”—and deserved a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. Taken as a whole, the desert was “literally teeming with plant and tree life.”

These plants appeared as though grown in a nursery, wrote Hornaday. Some places held a stand of creosote, other locations cholla, and in some spots a nice selection. Bare ground only enhanced the visual impression of planted ground.413

Topography was a constant companion. They travelled along a plain bounded by mountains. It felt like passing through a series of amphitheatres. The mountains seemed to grow abruptly from the ground. They were jagged and sharply defined. They “seem like after-thoughts, modeled in the shop long after the general plans were finished…They constantly reminded me of the artificial peaks of stone, or concrete, or furnace slag that have been built in several of the level zoological gardens of Europe,” wrote Hornaday.414

When the plants became thickly spaced, or large, Hornaday presented them as a garden This approach had a great deal of merit. His readers would think about cactus as components in gardens. Novelties collected and displayed, cactus grew in window boxes and the hothouses of botanic gardens.415 With Hornaday, the reader encountered gardens where nature had mixed saguaro, barrel cactus, “tree cholla,” (Opuntia fulgida). “The million spines of the choyas,” he wrote, “glistened yellowish-white in the sun, like a million glass toothpicks. The planting was beautifully disposed for a picture, being neither crowded nor scattered.”416 The landscape was charged with beauty.

413 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 35-37. 414 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 38-39. 415 See Figure 19. 416 Hornaday, Camp-Fires, 44-45. 184

Plants often arrived in groves, or stands, where a single species predominated.

Fifty miles from Tucson the party began encountering these forests. Hornaday noted a

forest of saguaro, then of barrel cactus (bisnaga or Ferocactus wislizeni), an expanse of

ocotillo, and even a forest of mesquite and palo verde trees.417

While MacDougal cherished the scientific value of the reconnaissance, the goals

behind the trip were laden with the baggage of turn-of-the century American imperialism

and male camaraderie provided an additional vehicle for occupying the desert.

MacDougal presented the idea to Hornaday as primarily a hunting trip. Hornaday choose

to wear a belt of bullets and dress in the costume of a Rough Rider.418 Despite

Hornaday’s dismissals of these theatrics as unimportant, the display of masculine

theatrics was serious business and part of a cultural package we might variously describe

as frontiering or simply colonialism. The remaking of American society as increasingly urban, industrial, and bureaucratic had fostered a desire to express manhood through a primitivism of athletics, outdoor enthusiasm, and the promotion of martial qualities.

Sitting President Theodore Roosevelt was the poster boy for the merger of masculinity with outdoors enthusiasm and he fashioned his whole political and personal identity upon it.419 Hornaday and MacDougal were more nuanced in their embrace of this personality

but they still found their way through a masculine desert.

417 Hornaday, Camp-Fires, 61. 418 See images in Broyles, “Adventure,” 167, 185. 419 See Gail Bederman’s powerful Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Chapter 5: Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and ‘Civilization’; George V. Nash, “A Revision of the Family Fouquieriaceae,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 185

Stories of the Pinacate and the Lab’s trip reverberated through scientific and

popular culture. Hornaday’s Campfires and his other writing kept it alive. Among other

publications, ee wrote an image filled summary of his book for the National Geographic

in 1910.420 Other scientists used it as a written guide for their later work.421 Ethnologist

Carl Lumholtz acknowledged their work in his 1912 New Trails in Mexico.422 Novelist

Robert Wells Ritchie presented the Pinacate to readers in his 1915 Dust on the Desert.423

The region’s volcanic craters drew the story into press in The Scientific Monthly when the

United States Geological Survey set out to examine the geology. MacDougal, Sykes, and

Hornaday named a number of features after one another and these place names reminded

later travelers of their trip.424 Hornaday told readers of Boys’ Life (the magazine for all

boys) of the grand “Wild Life on the Sonoran Desert.” “I wish I had it in my power to

conduct all the Boy Scouts of America across the central belt of the Sonoran Desert,” he

told them. It was nature’s wonderland and a good place for adventure.425

Research about and popularization of the heart of the Sonoran Desert continued

with work by Lab staff in the subsequent years. Godfrey Sykes wrote up an article on the

30, no. 8 (Aug., 1903): 449-59; MacDougal, Botanical Features of North American Deserts, 20-21. 420 William Hornaday, Old Fashioned Verses (New York: Clark & Fritts, 1919); William Hornaday, “Campfires on Desert and Lava,” National Geograpic Magazine 21, no. 8 (August, 1910):715-718. 421 Joseph Nelson Rose and Paul Carpenter Standley, “Report on the Collection of Plants from the Pinacate Region of Sonora,” Contributions from the United States National Herbarium 16, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912). 422 Carl Lumholtz, New Trails in Mexico (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912). 423 Robert Wells Ritchie, Dust on the Desert (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1915). 424 N. H. Darton, “Explosion Craters,” The Scientific Monthly 3 (November, 1916): 417- 430. 425 William T. Hornaday, “Wild Life on the Sonoran Desert,” Boys’ Life (October, 1923): 19. 186

“Devil’s Road:” The border trail between linking watering holes between Nogales and

Yuma. It cut through the very heart of the desert and recalled Spanish history and the

survey expeditions of the 1850s and 1890s.426 Other works on the Sonoran Desert’s heart

included Huntington’s 1911 “Greenest of Deserts,” in Harper’s, J.C. Blumer’s 1912

“Phytogeography of the Arizona Desert,” and Forrest Shreve’s 1924 “Across the

Sonoran Desert.” All these stories of Papagueria flowed out through academic and public

accounts to build a body of knowledge shaping the Sonoran Desert as a region in U.S.

literature.

Crafting and Consuming the Sonoran Desert

Tumamoc Hill, the desert basins, and Papaguería were rich research environments

with national potential. Together, these areas constituted three of the five Sonoran

Desert’s natural landscapes receiving increasing interest. Under scientific study, the

Sonoran Desert became a set of environments posing a series of research questions and

aesthetic locations. Tumamoc Hill became a lab that could explain local nature and solve

general problems. The Cahuilla and Salton Basins and Colorado Delta at the desert’s

western edge provided research interest because it held questions important to

agricultural reclamation. The physical relationship between the basins, delta, and river

evoked images of the Nile; like the Nile Valley, irrigated agriculture remade the land.

Papaguería was the desert’s heart including the trans-border basin and range. Finally, the desert mountain ranges, represented here by the higher, forest clad slopes of mountains like the Santa Catalina or Rincon mountains told an ecological story that became central

426 Godfrey Sykes, “The Camino Del Diablo: With Notes on a Journey in 1925, Geographical Review 17, no. 1 (January, 1927): 62-74. 187

to life in the American Sonoran Desert. By World War I, these areas were becoming part

of a unified research agenda and a consumptive landscape that would merge middle class

U.S. culture with the Sonoran Desert.

From Labscapes to Regional Description

Of all the research projects undertaken by the staff at the lab, the largest was

Forrest Shreve’s effort to create a comprehensive description of the Sonoran Desert. His

opening articles began in the 1920s when he finally named the Sonoran Desert as a

comprehensive region.427 The process of re-defining the region had taken some time and extensive observations (see Fig. 11 for map of researcher trips). During the early decades of the century, scientists reworked nineteenth-century descriptions of the various deserts by the 1920s the Desert Lab had taken it diverse regions and tied them together. Shreve’s narrative of the Sonoran Desert continued to fill out with detail as he accumulated evidence from Mexico, California, and Arizona. In articles on the California deserts and coastal mountains, through his work around the lab and in southern Arizona, and on the deserts of Baja and coast Mexico, he produced the work to integrate the desert.428 Shreve began his Sonoran Desert project in 1932 and culminated in the posthumous publication

427 Forest Shreve, “Across the Sonoran Desert,” 283-93. 428 Forrest Shreve, “Ecological Aspects of the Deserts of California,” Ecology 6, no. 2 (Apr., 1925): 93-103; “The Desert of Northern Baja California,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53, no. 3 (Mar., 1926): 129-36; “The Vegetation of a Coastal Mountain Range,” Ecology 8, no. 1 (Jan., 1927): 27-44; “Vegetation of the Northwestern Coast of Mexico,” Bul. of the Torrey Bot. Club 61, no. 7 (Oct., 1934): 373-80. 188

of Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert. The work, tied all the region and its

research into a united whole.429

For Shreve, MacDougal and Hornaday, as with McGee and Lumholtz, the

Sonoran Desert was bound up with natural environments, native histories, and their own

adventures. They wrote themselves into the land as they wrote natural history and

ethnology. By venturing into the land, they inscribed meaning on the land while also

authenticating their experiences through first hand labor. Placing their bodies in the

desert and writing about their experiences created a cultural archive that made the

landscape familiar, even it was exotic.

The process required the production and domestication of the desert on the terms

of physical connections, interpretive knowledge, and as a national landscape where

national problems could find resolution. The railroad and boundary surveys cut linear

lines of direct communication through the land mapping connections upon diversity.

Tucson became a regional hub that developed tighter links with the rest of the nation.

Familiarity with these environments led to a redefinition of landscapes. MacDougal and

Shreve became successive theorists placing the desert with a national context.

429 Forrest Shreve and Ira Wiggins, Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). 189

CHAPTER 5: DOMESTICATING SONORAN DESERT NATURE: CONSUMING CACTI AND PLANTING PROXY LANDSCAPES

Consuming Desert Nature as Identity

The image (Fig. 18) centers upon a man in dark suit facing the stripped steam of a

massive saguaro. In the middle distance more saguaros thicken the desert. They form a backdrop of soaring trunks and twisted arms pointing pell-mell in all directions as they rise above bristling cholla, palo verde, mesquite, hackberry, iron wood and cat claw.430

Homer Shantz, president of the University of Arizona, stands with gaze focused on the

chain-fruit cholla within arm’s reach. In the background, the Rincon Mountains rise

against a hazy sky. Although the saguaros are obvious, important, and prominent icons of

this distinctive landscape, the image focuses on Shantz. He is at once scientist and

devotee of desert plants and his presence signals that the profusion of desert nature

pictured is a cultural landscape that, by 1930, was filled with scientific explanations and

national meaning. In this place, Shantz chose to promote and protect a “magnificent stand of saghuaro [sic]” at the western base of the Rincon Mountains, as “probably the finest in the state” and worthy of protection.431 It would be the core of a National Monument

claiming national status for these regional plants. Shantz played a crucial role in creating

Saguaro National Park that today spreads over more than 100,000 acres of land on the

430 “Narrative Report SP-11-A Saguaro Forest, Tucson Arizona 10/5/35,” SAGU 257, Box 1, Folder 30, Western Archeological and Conservation Center Archives, Tucson, Arizona; Hereafter SAGU 257, Box #, Folder #, WACC. 431 Homer L. Shantz, “Letter to State Land Department 8/17/29,” University of Arizona Office of the President Papers Homer L. Shantz (1928-1936), AZ 420, Box 22, folder 10, University of Arizona Special Collections; Hereafter University of Arizona collections listed by AZ #, Box #, Folder #, UASC. 190

east and west of Tucson.432 The creation of the national monument (1933) was one culminating outcome of a decades-long process of using natural history to emplace

American society upon the Sonoran Desert.

Shantz was part of a cohort and an era that merged the emerging definition of the

Sonoran Desert with conservation to make the natural history region central in the shaping a relationship between nature and consumers. In making the flora of the Sonoran

Desert the center piece of conservation areas—Papago Saguaro National Monument;

Tucson Mountain Park; Saguaro National Monument—people like Shantz completed a turn in the cycle of enculturation of Sonoran Desert into an American place. They created proxy landscapes for the celebration of desert nature within the American nation-state. In

Tempe, Papago Saguaro, the nationalist message was specific. In Tucson’s Mountain

Park, the story was progressive and civic. Saguaro National Monument place Sonoran

Desert flora among America’s treasured landscapes. All three example drew on specific metaphors of place drawn out of consuming nature as part of making a regional identity.

Conservation landscapes like Saguaro National Monument demonstrate the connections between scientific knowledge and popular consumption. The knowledge gained through research in Sonoran Desert labscapes developed in the last chapter became interpretive tools for explaining these conservation spaces. These landscapes took regional nature and elevated to national status. The production of natural and national histories of the Sonoran Desert fed an avid audience who consumed and

432 President Herbert Hoover proclaimed the eastern portion of as Saguaro National Monument in March, 1933. In 1961, President John Kennedy proclaimed a second district to the West of Tucson. In 1994, both districts received the designation National Park. 191

reproduced the stories into a network of conservation spaces and projects. Private

consumption of scientific explanations took the form of informed metaphorical visions of

the desert as a set of gardens, forests and mountain islands. Natural scientists created a

thorough-going description of Sonoran Desert nature that could act as a justificatory

example for preservation. They drew upon the ideas of ecology to sell their story. Other

inhabitants consumed these stories as they consumed desert nature. Arizona garden clubs

worked within a national effort to protect native plants. People planted native plants to

talk about belonging. Civil governments produced spaces for conservation; planting

middle class values of park-lands on the Sonoran Desert. The fabrication of this

American Sonoran Desert drew upon the pioneering scientific work generated by local

centers like the Carnegie Desert Botanical Lab and the University of Arizona; it grew

through the consumption of cacti in domestic and public gardens and flowed through the

pages of popular works. Transformed through the prism of a series of interlinked national

movements, desert plants worked to tie local nature to modern civic national life. These

movements included the Nature Study Movement; City Beautiful; the Conservation

Movement; and the Parks movement. All were ways that people consumed nature in

order to understand their place in the American state, within modernity, and as a

community.

Sonoran Desert Proxy: Saguaro National Monument

Saguaro National Park was a major example of the nexus of these ideas since it

formed a conservation landscape advocated by scientist-public intellectuals like Shantz who merged scientific and aesthetic values with distinctive natural features. Shantz called 192

upon the democratic rhetoric of the parks movement and required a coalition of people willing to consume the message of the site: the protection of an exceptional ecological site. Packaging beautiful nature and scientific theory together made a very desirable product. The park protected a cactus forest well known from territorial days. It captured the topography of desert mountains, (sky islands), that claimed the Sonoran Desert as a landscape filled with plants worthy of a garden that also defined a distinctive environment in the nation. Saguaro National Monument took its motive force from the production and consumption of desert nature as the currency of living in southern

Arizona. It became a proxy landscape that could exemplify the greater Sonoran Desert.

“Nowhere in the world,” wrote Shantz, “is there so fine a stand of the giant sahuaro

(Carnegiea gigantia) as in the area included in the University Cactus Forest. Here the plants rise so close together that at times it is difficult to see through them for any great distance.”433 In writing these words, Shantz drew upon four descriptive metaphors already in use: cactus garden, cactus forest, mountain islands, and ecological nature. This chapter follows the use of these metaphors in the creation of America’s Sonoran Desert.

These acts of creation used a selection of exemplary conservation landscapes that were proxies for the greater desert and merged regional natural with national meaning.

Cactus Gardens: Metaphors of Place

The image of a garden is an intimate and domestic one rightly suggesting control, familiarity and belonging. Seeing the desert through these metaphors made a clear

433 H. L. Shantz, “Description,” September 20, 1929 University of Arizona Board of Regents meeting in Ben H. Thompson, “Concerning the Boundaries of Saguaro National Monument,” April 23, 1945, RG79, E10, Box 2365, Folder 602, NARA II. 193

statement of possession. On his 1907 trip into Papaguería William Hornaday saw an

endless series of “glorious cactus gardens…planted and tended to perfection by the

Divine hand.”434 He provided an image in his book Camp-fires on Desert and Lava (Fig.

19). Its composition is important. Readers would see thick clumps of cholla and the

columnar accents of saguaros hemmed by mountains rising in the background. Between

the plants, bare ground looked like built trails. Together—interesting plants, trails, and a wall evoked a garden; a place where people could draw nature close and in safety gain

access to its transformative power.435 Seeing order in the land was a clear sign that

Hornaday felt a sense of possession. His use of the garden metaphor also indicated a

common trope for possessing nature on acceptable terms. His certainty that readers would

understand the metaphor drew upon a history of using plants to talk about place. Cacti

were not exempt from this conversation.

For some people, cacti were obvious plants for landscaping, gardens, and window

sill boxes. Often small, they were long lived, hardy and produced stunning flowers.

Advocates argued for their use in situations ranging from decorating public spaces to

beautifying private homes. In 1889, William Watson of Kew Gardens in London felt

there was enough interest in England that he published Cactus Culture for Amateurs. He

wanted to democratize the planting of cacti. Noting that a 1830s cactus craze by elite

434 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 43-44. 435 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 219, Nature, a slippery and power word that Williams argues starts as process but ended as noun, was, in the monument always a “hybrid landscape,” a place where people impacted the land yet where non-human processes continued to operate; Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” The Historian 66, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 557- 564. 194

amateurs had since lapsed, Watson told readers that cacti had “unsurpassed” flowers and

made good horticultural plants.436 “Cacti form the most beautiful and interesting plants

for window decoration,” wrote plant nursery operator Frederic Adolf Haage, who

translated his work into English in 1898. He felt they showed beautiful form and flowers

and evoked distant and exotic lands.437 Grace Clark of Massachusetts thought it best for

New Englanders to “buy and transplant miniature cacti for the window garden,” in

summer.438 Leon C. Croizat of Brooklyn agreed. His “sill garden” was a table packed

with diminutive cacti.439In the United States, cactus societies began to sprout up. The

Baltimore Cactus Society was one of the earliest. Incorporated in 1890, its journal

provided a venue for popularizing cactus. Britain gained a National Cactus Society in

1895. In California, David Howland advocated for cacti as an option to beautify Los

Angeles streetcar depots. His example was the Arcade Depot Cactus Garden which had

ocotillo, various prickly pear and a columnar cereus (perhaps saguaro or cardón,

Pachycereus pringlei).440 In the 1912 Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin Ornamental

Cacti, Assistant Botanist of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Charles Henry Thompson felt confident that interest in growing cacti warranted a work that dealt in both generalities and specific techniques for cultivation. To whet reader interest, Thompson included many images, including an astounding grove of Cereus weberi (giant candelabra) as well as

436 William Watson, Cactus Culture for Amateurs (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1889), 1-3. 437 Frederic Adolf Haage, Hagge’s Culture of Cacti in Rooms (Erfurt, Germany: 1898), 7. 438 Grace A. M. Clark, “The Window Garden,” Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America 1, no. 7 (Jan., 1930), 137. 439 Leon C. Croizat, “Cactus Gardens on Window Sills,” Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America 2, no. 4 (Oct., 1930), 327. 440 David B. Howland, “Making Stations Attractive,” The World’s Work: A History of Our Time, vol. 1 (New York: Double Day, Page & Company, 1901), 517-27. 195

other enormous cereus from southern Mexico. He also showed cacti tamed in the

Missouri Botanical Garden, the A.S. White Park in Riverside, California, and the

“Succulent Rockery” at Alamo Park, San Antonio, Texas.441

Interest in cacti as garden plants was high in California. In a January 1906 issue of

The Garden Magazine, Ernest Braunton reported upon a Los Angles cactus garden he

planted for a client around the turn of the century. Although the plants started small they

had grown rapidly and now some reached heights of ten feet. He urged others to plant

these collections since California’s climate was ideal for their growth. A Cactus garden

was, he felt, the best wild garden for California.442 Braunton knew what he was talking about. In 1893 he began a 10 acre cactus nursery in Los Angles for the company Lyon &

Cobbe. Charles Orcutt oversaw their collectors in the field. Plants came from Mexico and islands off the Pacific coast. Braunton also bought cactus from Anna B. Nickels of

Laredo Texas, Mrs. Francis Bright of Bexar County, Texas, and others. Nickels had a large display of cactus at the Columbian Exchange and a large subscription list for her plants. Some of their collectors were more informal. Ranch boys scoured the land for cacti. The collection was amazing: “I do not know of its equal today,” although he knew private German collections had, at the turn of the century, huge diversity. “We had many

441 Chares Henry Thompson, Ornamental Cacti: Their Culture and Decorative Value, USDA, Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin no. 262 (D.C.: GPO, 1912), 8, Plates XI-XVII. 442 Ernest Braunton, “A California Cactus Garden,” The Garden Magazine (Jan., 1906), 288-91; Ernest Braunton, “A Garden of Desert Plants,” The Garden Magazine 1, no. 1 (1905), 93. 196

carloads…of nothing but cactus, coming from every district in North American and

Mexico. Some species,” he wrote, “I have never seen since.”443

Public and private cactus gardens kept springing up. In her Garden Book of

California, Belle Summer Angier noted public cactus gardens at Golden Gate Park, the

Arizona Garden in Monterey and in Los Angles, Pasadena, Santa Barbara, Coronado, and

San Diego. She thought Charles Orcutt had a personal collection of 1200 species [an

over-estimation] and knew he was planting a large garden for E. W. Scripps at

Miramar.444 For his part, Orcutt knew that cacti from the Rocky Mountains were hardy

enough that gardeners planted them in Europe and around the U.S. but many of the most

interesting species needed virtually frost-free environments. Many grew in southern

California with minimal support. Orcutt was doing his part to plant cactus gardens across the region and world. He reported selling 30,000 plants to one collector, and five hundred to another. He supplied cacti to major botanical gardens across the region and world.445

Others advertized cacti. The Southern Pacific Railroad advertized the cactus garden at

Riverside. Articles appeared in American Homes and Gardens, Scientific American, and the Century. Two of the most concentrated forums for information on cactus was Charles

Orcutt’s West American Scientist and Katherine and Townsend Brandegee’s California-

443 Ernest Braunton, “Local Cactus History,” Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, 1, no. 6 (Dec., 1929), 5-6; The Western Garden and Poultry Journal 1, no. 8 (April, 1891), 119; H.L. Bailey, “The Columbian Exposition Cacti,” Garden and Forest (Oct. 11, 1893), 429. 444 Belle Sumner Angier, The Garden Book of California (San Francisco and New York: Paul Elder and Co., 1906),34-37. 445 Charles Russell Orcutt, “Cacti,” American Plants, Vol. 2 (1909), 781-86. 197

based Zoe.446 All these sources told readers about the wonders of cacti and the possibilities of placing them in the garden.447

Gardening guides showed the way. In his 1915 The Garden Beautiful in

California, Ernest Braunton told readers that cacti were some of the best plants for amateur gardeners because once planted they needed little care, were naturally hardy, and possessed “grotesque and curious forms with beautiful flowers.”448 Contemporaneously,

Eugene O. Murmann included desert garden plans and pictures in his 1914 California

Gardens. He showed a drive lined with cacti, agave and yucca. These had “a charm of its own,” that produced “a tropical effect.”449 Ysabel Wright’s Santa Barbara garden was probably typical of advance amateur efforts. She started small but eventually dedicated a large corner of her garden to cacti. She told readers she wanted “a student’s garden; a place where the cactus specialist can not only observe the growth and development of native and foreign specimens OUT OF DOORS, but where he can see spread before him in their consecutive order the several series that form the various genera.”450Taken together, the upwelling of interest in cacti created a groundswell of planting gardens.

These places made it easy to see cacti as welcome natural features of the land. Housed in the most domestic of locations—the garden—and easily available for purchase, cacti

446 Townsend Stith Brandegee and Katharine Layne Brandegee, Zoe 1 (1890). 447 Drawn from a list provided by Clara Hunt Smallwood, “The Cactus Garden,” Sunset Magazine (July, 1915), 166-69. 448 Ernest Braunton, The Garden Beautiful in California: a practical manual for all who garden (Los Angeles: Cultivator Publishing Co., 1915), 68-69. 449 Eugene O. Murmann, California Gardens: How to Plan and Beautify (Boston: Applewood Books originally self published in Los Angeles, 1914), 54-57. 450 Ysabel Wright, “A Living Herbarium,” Journal of the Cactus And Succulent Society of America 1, no. 11 (May, 1930), 214-215. 198

began to remake sensibilities about desert flora. The consumption of cactus in garden

settings domesticated wild places as well. By first seeing the plants in the city, wild

plants, and wild spaces reflected the values of the garden: civilized, ornate, and

manageable.

The Garden of Papago-Saguaro National Monument-Proxy Landscape

One of most remarkable early public examples of this process occurred in 1914 when Phoenix convinced President Woodrow Wilson to proclaim Papago Saguaro

National Monument.451 For Phoenix’s Committee on a Cactus Park, the proposed lands

represented both economic wasteland—“not included in the land under irrigation by the

Salt River Irrigation Project, nor will this land ever be included…on account of the

elevation [and] soil.”—and an exemplar of the iconic desert flora of the area—“The said

area of land has at this time growing thereon a great number of every species of cacti and

especially are there large numbers of Giant Cactus, the Sajuara.” At 2050 acres it was of

intermediate size for a monument. It’s proximity to Arizona’s capital offered “a convenient place for the preservation of these most unique forms of desert plants, where the great variety of desert vegetation may be observed and studied by the people generally.” The advance of irrigation had “caused the destruction of great areas of this plant life of the desert, and many people are each year willfully destroying, by burning, a

451 Proclamation No. 1262, 38 Stat. 1991 (January 31, 1914); April 22, 1913 letter from Phoenix Attorney Thomas J. Prescott to Carl Hayden; Board of Trade, Phoenix, AZ report from the Committee on Cactus Park, Records of the National Park Service, Record Group 79, NPS, NARA II, College Park, MD, (hereafter RG79, NARA II) Central Classified Files, Box 662. 199

great number of these cacti.”452 Exceptional plants, a distinctively Arizonan landscape, a local population center to utilize the garden-like park, scientific and aesthetic interest, links to the past, the pressures of development in destroying similar landscapes, and the obvious slow growth rates of cacti all pointed city representatives toward protection.

Beyond accomplishing all these goals, the national monument offered symbolic value for a city in the American borderlands. It would make a statement about modernity and inclusion in the American nation. This point did not escape the notice of the field agent for the General Land Office who noted:

The city of Phoenix is growing rapidly, within a few years its population should be in excess of one hundred thousand. Its citizens are of the stalwart, virile, native American variety, who take great pride in the advancement of their country, state and city. The municipality, as a whole, is greatly interested in the creation and improvement of this National Monument, not only for its great scientific interest, but that at some future date they may assist in making of it a great botanical garden of desert flora.453

Clothed in the rhetoric of progressivism, the monument presented wild plants as a desert garden.454 The Arizona Republican announced: “[the] 2,000 acres are filled with beautiful spots and natural settings for architectural gardening and improvements of every description. The park, through the co-operation of the people here and federal government, can be made one of the best in the country and a permanent attraction for visitors and people of the community. Here could be built waterfalls, a series of ideal

452 Committee on Cactus Park Report, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 662, NARA II, p. 1-2. 453 Letter from Field Agent [Helms] to Commissioner of the General Land Office, Oct 4, 1913, recommending establishment of the Monument, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 662, NARA II, p. 3 454 Harry Welch to Carl Hayden May 22, 1916; Hayden to Secretary of Interior May 27, 1916; Commissioner of Public Lands to Stephen Mather June 23, 1916; J. S. Palmer to H. M. Albright May 14, 1917, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 662, NARA II. 200

pleasure parks tucked away in the nooks of the rocky hills, with the 100 or more varieties

of cacti standing as landmarks on the desert.”455 Papago-Saguaro planted an Americanist

society and in so doing, enculturated desert nature.

Phoenix residents viewed the monument as a park along the lines of New York’s

Central Park—a garden of nature planted and maintained in the middle of the city. The

social value of the place overrode even the natural features of the park or any scenic,

historic, or scientific values National Monuments usually captured. In concept, this

national monument borrowed more from Central Park’s designer Frederick Law

Olmstead than from the wild lands tradition emerging in the nascent national park

concept. Olmstead developed his landscape engineering in the context of the

environmentalism of social reformers during the nineteenth century. The

environmentalism of these reformers became a staple of the reform thought of Gilded

Age and Progressive America.456 Progressives like Olmstead believed that by constructing parks, eliminating slums, and cleaning up cities generally, they would

455[illegible names], January 23, 1918; Earl M. Tarr to Franklin K. Lane June 13, 1918; Custodian J. E. McClain to Stephen Mather, October 9, 1919; “Cactus Park of 2,000 Acres May be Landing Field,” Arizona Republican, [June 26, 1920]; Frank Pinkley to Stephen Mather June 27, 1920; “Famous Park Site Will Be Improved,” Arizona Gazette, August 11, 1920, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 662, NARA II. 456 The classic and comprehensive work on this topic is Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Boyer writes: “Today, parks are so ubiquitous and familiar a feature of the urban scene that we give little thought, beyond a vaguely favorable feeling, to their social significance. Thus, it takes a considerable imaginative leap to realize that the park movement once had the force of a fresh social discovery that could arouse intense and passionate commitment, and that its moral implications were carefully explored and debated by moralists, urban reformers, social critics, landscape designers, and municipal authorities alike,” p. 236 and continuing a discussion of the parks movement and the moral and social objectives of park advocates. 201

facilitate a positive change in the behavior of the poor, creating civic virtue and American middle class values.457 A park was a place to highlight human interactions through exposure to a controlled nature, and did not necessarily preserve nature in any pristine sense. A park could elicit in residents a sense of place, of citizenship, and pride. The parks movement spread from New York across the country in a roiling expansion that one historian called a “parks Americana,” of local, county, and state parks numbering in the thousands.458 Papago Saguaro fit nicely into this model of an urban social space that staged American values in nature. It provided a venue on a grand scale for linking

Sonoran Desert flora to the nation.

The Gardens of Saguaro National Monument-Proxy Landscapes

Private and commercial gardens had academic corollaries that also interpreted and presented cacti through the domesticating lens of progressive values of education and economic development. In Tucson, the University of Arizona’s cactus garden, (1894), was aesthetic lesson and valuable scientific guide for economic exploitation of prickly pear. Locals sometimes referred to it as “a desert in an oasis,” and it allowed many to see the desert beyond the city.459 University administration also thought it valuable for identifying economically important species of prickly pear. There were some fifty species of Opuntia including plants that were known forage in the old world: Algeria and

457 See Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1999); also Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 458 Ney C. Landrum, The State Park Movement in America: A Critical Review (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004) 459 J. J. Thornber, “The Toumey Cactus Garden,” Plant World 9, no. 12 (1906), 273-77. 202

Sicily.460 When Homer Shantz became president of the University of Arizona in 1928, he injected a new sense of mission in revitalizing the cactus garden on campus and began buying up land along the Tanque Verde Wash thickly covered with saguaro (Fig. 20). He saw the campus garden and natural space as part of a unified whole. Together, they could make a world-class resource for the study of arid lands nature. The research garden of the campus and the wild garden along the Tanque Verde could act as compliments for studying and enjoying desert ecology.461

460 “Economic Cacti,” Eleventh Annual Report, University of Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station (1900), 169. Prickly Pear was of great economic interest as a forage plant in the first years of the twentieth century. The great cattle boom of the 1880s had combined with drought to strip range grasses from many places in the arid southwest by the end of the century. Arizona had some 1.5 million cattle in 1891 and in the subsequent die-off lost upwards of 75%. Images of bare range and piles of cattle carcasses emphasized the desperate conditions. See Nathan Sayre, “The Cattle Boom in Southern Arizona: Towards a Critical Political Ecology, Journal of the Southwest, 41, no. 2 (Summer, 1999): 239-271; Conrad J. Bahre and Marlyn L. Shelton, “Rangeland Destruction: Cattle and Drought in Southeastern Arizona at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of the Southwest 38, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 1-22. With the grass severely damaged and drought a recurring certainty, prickly pear offered a partial solution to the problem of cattle forage and the rebuilding of cattle ranching. In 1901, David Griffiths of the Arizona Experiment Station observed the destruction of the rangeland first hand. He understood the utility of having a taxonomically accurate Opuntia garden on hand for research into potential fodder species. Several years later, as “Assistant in charge of range and cactus investigations” for the USDA, he pursued a research agenda on the utility of prickly pear as forage more broadly. His conclusions were not heartening. He viewed the plants as a more likely farm rather than range crop. See David Griffiths, Feeding Prickly Pear to Stock in Texas, Bureau of Animal Industry Bulletin 91 (1906); David Griffiths, The ‘Spineless’ Prickly Pears, Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin 140 (Jan, 1909), 19. At the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in Las Cruces, others were working on the prickly pear as well. R. F. Hare of the USDA Bureau of Animal Industry mapped the nutrition of the plants in 1908. The college propagated cacti for study and housed both Hare and Griffiths as they worked. See R. A. Hare, Experiments on the Digestibility of Prickly Pear by Cattle, Bureau of Animal Industry Bulletin 106 (1908); E. O. Wotton, Cacti in New Mexico, NM Col. of Ag. and Mech. Arts Ag. Ex. Station Bulletin 78 (May, 1911). 461 Shantz to John E. Harrison, Dec. 18, 1930, John Harrison Papers, AZ170, UASC. 203

Shantz was a plant physiologist and plant geographer of wide intellectual latitude

and experience. He received a 1901 Doctorate for the study of vegetation in Colorado and

worked on grasslands ecology and the acculturation of plants to the arid West. By end of

his life in 1959, his work had become internationally recognized and his classification for

the natural regions of North America was considered standard. Trained to think in terms

of ecological systems and recognized the grandeur of climax ecology promoted by

ecologist Frederick Clements, Shantz was also a photographer with vast experience. He

utilized photography to survey plant species and distribution, document erosion, and

simply record the spectacular. In his work, he described levels of ecological organization

and then illustrated them with images of ‘typical’ formations. In the processes, Shantz

was working toward visualizing healthy landscapes, and interpreting ecological science

visually. By the end of World War I he had taken thousands of photographs recording

ecological conditions in the Great Plains and across the West.462

In 1919, working for the Department of Agriculture, Shantz turned his

photographic botanical skill upon Africa to map the resources of the continent for

American policy makers. In 1919 and 1924, Shantz made major transits of Africa.463

462 Carl O. Sauer, “Obituary: Homer LeRoy Shantz,” Geographical Review 49, no. 2 (April 1959): 278-280; Michael G. Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996): 234-36; H. L. Shantz, “A Study of Vegetation of the Mesa Region East of Pike’s Peak: The Bouteloua Formation,” Botanical Gazette 42, no. 1 (July 1906): 16-47; Homer L. Shantz Biographical File, “Obituary,” and “Biographical Note,” Special Collections, University of Arizona Library, Tucson. Shantz’s images can be found in digital form at http://uair.arizona.edu/. 463 John E. Sanford, “A 9,000-mile Trip Through Africa in Search of New Crops,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Press Release” (Monday, December 6, 1920), Homer Leroy 204

Captivated by the landscape as well as by the botanic gardens he visited, he was

especially drawn to the aesthetics, organization, and setting of the South African National

Botanical Garden in Cape Town, Kirstenbosch.464 Kirstenbosch was a combination refuge for plants, a site for scientific investigation, and provided a location for the presentation of native and introduced species to the public. Shantz thought it a model for what was possible in the Rincon Mountains. He wrote:

This cactus area lies close to the University of Arizona, and it is sage to predict that if it can be preserved for scientific use it will become not only outstanding in its value to the scientists of the Southwest but also an area known throughout the world of science for nowhere else can so fine a collection of native desert plants be found as on these lands. There is only one garden in the world which would compare with such an area and that is Table Mountain in South Africa [emphasis added]. This garden is maintained as a great natural area, and a small portion of it is set aside for the inclusion of native species which grow in the region but are not included naturally in the area. One can in a day at this great garden see growing under practically natural conditions most of the interesting plants of South Africa. If the Tanque Verde area can be secured for the University, we can reproduce here a garden of this type, being careful to retain the natural character throughout most of the region [emphasis added].465 From this perspective, Saguaro National Monument would be an extension of the

university’s cactus garden: a place for research, beauty, and an ecologically integrated

park.

Shantz Papers, MS30, Box 8, folder 6, University of Arizona Special Collections, Tucson, Arizona (hereafter UASC); H. L. Shantz, “Travel Notes on a Trip Through Africa From the Cape to Cairo,” MS30, Box 5, pp. 172, 177, Shantz Papers, UASC; Christopher Willis, Gideon Smith, and Ian Oliver, “From Whitehill to Worcester,” Veld & Flora (March 2006): 34-39; William Roger Louis, “The United States and the African Peace Settlement of 1919: The Pilgrimage of George Louis Beer,” Journal of African History 4, no. 3 (1963): 413-433. 464 In 1913, the South African government dedicated The South African National Botanic Garden on the grounds of Cecil Rhodes’ Kirstenbosch Estate. The garden’s mission was to cultivate endemic and exotic plants for the economic benefit of South Africa. Donald P. McCracken, “Durban Botanic Gardens, Natal: 1851-1913,” Garden History 15, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 64-73. 465 Shantz to John E. Harrison, Dec. 18, 1930, John Harrison Papers, AZ170, UASC. 205

In describing the future site of Saguaro National Monument as a garden, Shantz

helped establish a relevant interpretive metaphor that lasted decades. When Charles,

“Cactus Charlie,” Powell, custodian of Chiricahua National Monument arrived at

Saguaro in March 1935 as the first SNP seasonal custodian, he began to make sense of

the land through use of a garden.466 Largely unfenced, the cactus forest was crisscrossed by roaming cattle, social roads, and hunters and wood-cutters continuing to use the area in their traditional patterns. Frank Pinkley sent Powell to protect NPS interests, but what those were, or would be, was largely uncertain to Powell, Pinkley, and the NPS in 1935.

Arriving into this chaotic setting, Powell felt it necessary to gather and plant desert flora because the land was so worked over around his headquarters. He told Pinkley a garden was necessary since through “cattle grazing and cactus collecting, many of our cacti are conspicuous for their scarcity, or absence.” He needed, “a restored area, near the Ranger station, where the more rare varieties of cacti may be replanted and studied.”467 To create

a garden, Powell wanted to fence out cattle, and then, arrange cacti according to their

taxonomy categories. Cactus’s love of the cactaceae is apparent in his design.

The reason for the tree shaped trails is that a diagram of the cactus family shapes itself in that manner…The first branch, Opuntieae, forks into two arms representing the subgenera cylindrapuntia, and platyopuntia…[he continues on] By superimposing the tree-shaped diagram of the cactus family upon the plat of my enclosed and restored ten acres, I have arrived at the plan for my Cactus garden museum, which Dr. Thornber says cannot be improved upon. (Dr. Thornber will use this diagram in his next book on the cactus family.) The trails which I have been trying to describe will fit into the terrain, and by utilizing the ground cover as is, the whole may be blended into the landscape.468

466 “Abstracts from Superintendents Monthly Reports,” circa 1967, SAGU 257, Box 11, Folder 1, p. 1, WACC. 467 Powell to Pinkley, May 22, 1935, SAGU 257, Box 1, Folder 11, part III, WACC. 468 Powell to Pinkley, May 22, 1935, SAGU 257, Box 1, Folder 11, part III, WACC. 206

Powell did not stay to fulfill his entire vision, however, some version of the cactus garden existed around both subsequent visitor centers in the following decades.469 In March of

1936, the Arizona Daily Star reported “Tucson Garden Club Members Have Pilgrimage to Cactus Forest.” They toured the Monument, stopped for lunch, and listened while

Powell’s successor Paul Beaubien presented some of the plants.470 Throughout the

following decades, NPS managers utilized the language of a natural garden to present the

desert as an intimate encounter mediated by a garden.

Powell had two local models of successful desert gardens to emulate. The

University of Arizona’s extensive cactus garden included exotics like the boojum and soap tree yucca, as well as many endemic species. Extended by Shantz in the 1930s, the

garden spread out from Old Main and made the university grounds a botanical garden.

Through his friendship with J.J. Thornber, Powell would have been well acquainted with

the University’s efforts to make campus grounds an informal botanical garden. The other

model was Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona. In 1923, mining magnet

William Boyce Thompson built Picket Post House near Florence, Arizona. He loved

Arizona flora and oversaw planting of native species. He viewed his garden as a

protective space for native plants and as a test site for acclimating new arid lands plants.

“Preserve every native plant,” he reputedly said. Building the arboretum infrastructure:

housing, administration buildings, visitor infrastructure, and irrigation began in 1924 with

469 This is most evident in images of the first CCC built structure and subsequent 1953 building. The garden would play an important role in describing desert flora to visitors for decades. 470 “Tucson Garden Club Members Have Pilgrimage to Cactus Forest,” Arizona Daily Star (March 10, 1936). 207

a dedication ceremony in 1929. They built infrastructure for propagating and displaying

plants. Boyce Thompson had adopted a semi-naturalistic approach to presenting the

desert—a botanic garden in a natural setting. It had a mission to study and promote desert plants from North American Deserts and became a model for Powell.471 Like these two

gardens, Powell hoped to educate with a more formal desert garden containing a

collection of charismatic plants that marked the area as an exceptional ecological setting.

Visitors could use this setting to acknowledge and interpret their relationships with the

desert.

Powell’s physical space resonated with a series of popular 1930s books

interpreting cactus. In particular, two Tucson authors had new works on cacti. John J.

Thornber was at work with co-author Frances Bonker preparing the popular work The

Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family. They opened their work telling readers:

Here in our own back yard, as it were…time has carved and chiseled out wonderful valleys and canons, and graced their floors with tiny streams…This desert fairyland is brimful of Nature’s most curious plants and flowers. Here in Nature’s workshop you will find plants and flowers weird and marvelous, of fantastic shapes and grotesque design, of glowing hue and exotic fragrance.472 Likewise, Forrest Shreve, with more than twenty years at the Carnegie Desert Lab, was in

the process of publishing his popular work on cacti: The Cactus and Its Home. Both

works tied love of cactus flowers to the ecology of the desert. Other outlets for tying

desert gardens to wild desert included publications like journal of the California-based

Cactus and Succulent Society of America. Popular works, these stories told from a

garden eye view resonated with a middle-class audience. Using a garden metaphor, in

471 “Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum,” (Superior, AZ, 1930). 472 J. J. Thornber and Frances Bonker, The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family (New York: Macmillan, 1932). 208

print or nature, was becoming an acceptable way to narrate the silent flora of the Sonoran

Desert and create connections between middle class America and desert nature from home gardens to national monuments. Papago-Saguaro and Saguaro National Park are two clear examples of how the garden metaphor was both transforming interpretations of

Sonoran Desert lands and providing the language for re-envisioning wild areas as cultural spaces.473

Cactus Forests

“We passed through a real forest of giant cacti, where those desert wonders grew

thick and large,” wrote Hornaday as he passed southwest of Tucson.474 When the sense of

openness in desert foliage gave way to thick stands of cacti the metaphor changed from

garden to forest. These cactus forests often spread in aprons around the foot of mountains

or as dense stands in valley flats. They were mostly the size of a copse or grove but often

drew the term forest. At the foot of the Rincon and Tucson mountains, the bajada flora

produced large groves of cacti. These thick stands conjured images of forests and the

metaphor stuck. The idea of a cactus forest was deeply embedded in historical

descriptions of southern Arizona’s desert. A cactus forest drew attention. In 1859,

German Traveler Julius Froebel told his readers that the hillsides above Tucson “were so

covered with cactus-columns that it might have been called a saguarro-forest, could the

term have been applied to a spot overgrown with bare trunks, without any crown

473 Forrest Shreve, The Cactus and Its Home (Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Co., 1931); Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. 474 Hornaday, Camp-fires, 60. 209

whatever.”475 In 1897, describing the future site of Shantz’s cactus forest, economic

entomologist Henry G. Hubbard told a correspondent: “The entire mesa at the foot of the

Sta. Catalina Mountains near Sabina canon, about 18 miles northeast of Tucson, is

covered for miles and miles with immense giant cactus, in one unbroken army, as thick as

mullein stalks in an eastern cattle pasture.”476 George Barrett told readers that while on a collecting trip to Southern Arizona : “Now I was gettin into the country of the giant cactus (Carneiga Gigantea) and another few miles took me into a regular forest of them. I had to do some tall figurin to navigate the car through this district, but finally hit on the plan of driving up a dry creek bed where there wasn’t no plants growing. This forest of giant cactus reminded me of being in the pine woods.”477 On a field trip to the Santa

Catalina Mountains, Karl Frick noted that “at times we passed through forests of them

[saguaro] so tall and growing so close together, it was a sight well worth going many

miles to see.”478 Frick, like other observers, applied the designation cactus forest to

certain locations where cacti grew close and dominant.

The criteria were both scientific and aesthetic and lent an aura of exotic

adventure. Imagine finding oneself bewildered in a forest of cactus. Author Amelia B.

Edwards staged her protagonist Miguel Cervantes in “a forest of prickly pears,” in

475 Julius Frobel, Seven Years Travel in Central America, Northern Mexico, and the Far West of the United States (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), Book III, 503. 476 H.G. Hubbard, letter from April 22, 1897, “Insect Fauna of the Giant Cactus of Arizona,” Psyche 8 (May 1899, supplement): 1-14. 477 George. E. Barrett, “Lophocereus Schottii,” Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America 1, no. 1 (July 1929): 5-7, 16. 478 Karl O. Frick, “A Day Afield in Southern Arizona,” Journal of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America 2, no. 2 (Aug., 1930), 294. 210

Algeria, where “every tree was a giant cactus rooted in sand.”479 The idea resonated in

American historical imagination: the forest as a scene of wilderness adventure.480 Cactus

Forests had a bewitching effect on lovers of desert flora and at a certain visual tipping point, the increased density of the saguaro rose as if from the background noise of desert plants. Observers noted cactus forests composed of cholla (jumping or chain fruit,

Cylindropuntia fulgida, for example) and yucca forests of Joshua Trees (Yucca brevifolia), as well as saguaros. In the first decades of the twentieth century, saguaro forests of note existed near present day Florence (and the town of Cactus Forest), Sells, the Tucson Mountains and the slopes of the Catalina and Rincon Mountains, as well as in many other locations. Like many American naturalists and travelers, Daniel MacDougal looked to the Tehuacan region in the state of Puebla, southern Mexico as a region with the most intensely specialized clumps of cacti that formed cacti forests. He, like others who traveled widely in Mexico, knew these Arizona locations were outposts of the great cactus lands farther south, yet were impressive enough to deserve designation as a forest.481

479 Amelia B. Edwards, The Story of Cervantes (London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1863), 157. 480 For some 19th- and early 20th-century observers, the cactus forest was not necessarily visually baffling. Its vegetation density compared readily to that of American eastern forests which Americans could recall in memory or through literature. The cactus forest, however, presented serious impediments to movement. Lieutenant William Emory, who led a military topographical unit through the terrain during the Mexican-American War, reported cutting a path through dense cholla to roll howitzers. Ross Calvin, ed. Lieutenant Emory Reports (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968). 481 For example see Daniel Trembly MacDougal, Botanical Features of North American Deserts (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1909), 22; MacDougal points to Tehuacan in southern Mexico. In 1906, MacDougal believed: “the Cactaceae are more abundant here than in any other part of the world yet visited, several of the 211

For the Sonoran Desert, and southern Arizona in particular, Saguaro cacti had

become closely linked with a sense of place. Forests of the cacti seemed to demonstrate

the desert in concentrate. The saguaro is one of a handful of giant columnar cacti in the

U.S. Other large columnar cacti in the U.S. include the Organ Pipe Cactus (Stenocereus

thurberi) and the Senita (Lophocereus schottii). Both occur in Organ Pipe Cactus

National Monument, at the edge of Arizona’s southern border.482 The saguaro is missing

from the other major United States deserts yet distinctive of portions of the environment

we call the Sonoran Desert. Like the Chihuahua Desert’s Yucca elata (soap tree yucca)

and the Mojave’s Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia), the saguaro is a striking visual signal of

a specific place. Generally, these columnar giants grow in tropical and sub-tropical

environments. The saguaro can grow into the tallest and most massive of these

‘American’ cacti. Before the common transplantation of the species, reports placed a few

as relics of changing river patterns on the California side of the Colorado River, yet most

grew in Arizona. They are thus highly distinctive natural feature of the southern part of the state. In a sense, the saguaro is a natural signifier telling people that they were in the

Sonoran Desert.

Saguaro appear as an obvious presence in correspondence from nineteenth-century

travelers, explorers, and trappers writing to the American public. James Ohio Pattie

species being massive forms, which constitute very prominent features of the landscape,” 24. MacDougal included a picture of “a forest of Pilocereus tetetzo,” plate 21. 482 At the beginning of the century, Arizona had a population of Lophocereus schottii, or Sina cacti. However, by 1930, Forrest Shreve worried that collectors had removed the few individual plants north of the border. This proved untrue. They are also found on the Tohono O’odham Reservation and in Sacaton they were planted on the Gila Indian Reservation. Forrest Shreve, The Cactus and its Home (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1931), 134; Phillips and Comus, Natural History, 195. 212

described them as “a species of tree…cone shaped…body is covered with thorns.”483

George Thurber, botanist on the Boundary Commission, called saguaro a “singular

vegetation, at once so grand and dreary.”484 When John Russell Bartlett drew Tucson for his boundary report (Figure 22), saguaros told the story of the place: exotic and distinctive.485 Likewise, when artist H.B. Möllhausen needed to express to his audience

the intense exoticism of the Mojave people and their landscape, he posed them with

saguaro.486 Travelogues and fiction from the nineteenth century often remarked on the

pitayha (conflating fruit harvest from several Cereus species) harvest as emblematic of

the strange links between local people (Mexican and Indian in different accounts) and

local landscape. These accounts placed the saguaro squarely within what we would call a

political ecology of regional people.487 Photographer Timothy O’Sullivan provided an

image of them for George Wheeler’s 1875 report.488 Territorial boosters made the link between Arizona and saguaro explicit in their 1883 Resources of Arizona. “Arizona,” wrote the author, “is the land of the cereus gigantus, called by the Indians and Mexicans

483 Timothy Flint, ed., The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie, of Kentucky (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1930). 484 Gray, Plantae Novae Thurberianae, 302. 485 John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, during the years 1850, 51, 52, and 53 (New York, D. Appleton, 1854); Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 486 Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953); William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination, 2d edition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 487 This needs footnoting since it foreshadows the 1960s controversy. A particularly early description comes from Lt. R. W. H. Hardy, Travels in the Interior of Mexico (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), iii, 212. 488 See image at Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006678927/. 213

the sahuaro.489 Few writers failed to mention the Saguaro when discussing the Sonoran

Desert in the early twentieth century. Such close identification linked Arizona and

saguaro tightly together and meant that saguaro could provide a natural vehicle for tying

the local landscape to American national lands.490 Protecting saguaro was therefore an

obvious approach to protecting a distilled Sonoran Desert nature highlights the role

ecology could play in making arguments for conservation of cactus forests. Cactus forests and cactus gardens defined desert flora in easy cultural terms. The landscapes they presented were well understood within progressive conversations about social order and conservation.491 Gardens domesticated the most wild; seeing forests introduced a sense of

time and provoked images of conservation. Both metaphors drew upon emerging

descriptions of ecological connection and upon the spatial imagery of life zones.

Ecology and Islands in the Desert Sea

For many who looked, cactus forests represented a climax community. To these

eyes, there lay an exceptional story beneath the towering and twisting saguaro: a story

about deep time and unique landscapes. The story, perhaps more than the scenery, made

Tanque Verde Cactus Forest special and caught the attention of advocates for

conservation. The driving force behind climax ecology was Frederick Clements. By

489 Patrick Hamilton, The Resources of Arizona: A Description… 2nd edition (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1883). 490 “Nowhere in the world is there so fine a stand of the giant sahuaro (Carnegiea gigantia) as in the area included in the University Cactus Forest. Here the plants rise so close together that at times it is difficult to see through them for any great distance,” H. L. Shantz, “Description,” September 20, 1929 University of Arizona Board of Regents meeting in Ben H. Thompson, “Concerning the Boundaries of Saguaro National Monument,” April 23, 1945, RG79, E10, Box 2365, Folder 602, NARA II. 491 Robert H. Wiebe, Search for Order: 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Hays, The Gospel of Efficiency. 214

1905, he was theorizing that communities of plants moved through a process of

succession to an ideal state, forming a perfect “climax,” that would last as long as

undisturbed, and that represented a whole different form of organism, a community.

Clements wrote: “the Community is a complex organism of a wholly different order from

the individual plant or animal, but nevertheless an organic entity with functions and

structure.”492 In this ecological scenario, climax landscapes presented to the eye an end

product capturing the deep time of succession. Despite his presence in at the Carnegie

Desert Lab, Clements remained silent about the Cactus Forest. However, his student,

Homer Shantz, promoted the notion of exceptional climax ecology when selling the idea

of the Cactus Forest as both a botanic garden and then a national monument. Writing in

1930, Shantz argued of the Tanque Verde Cactus Forest:

This cactus area has long attracted the attention of men interested in biological science since it is unique in that is represents undoubtedly the finest stand of the giant sahuaro [sic] to be found anywhere in the world. While we have many reserves for the protection of great forest areas such as forests of redwood and the giant sequoia and there are innumerable natural areas maintained through the world, we have no such area in the Southwest desert, a desert which compares favorably in variety and interest of vegetation with any area that can be found in the world.493 In the case of the University Cactus Forest, the ideal state formed a dense stand of mature

saguaro plants. The idea of a climax community had great rhetorical value for those

492 Frederic E. Clements, “The Nature and Structure of the Climax,” Journal of Ecology 24, no. 1 (Feb., 1936): 252-284; Frederic E. Clements, “The Relict Method in Dynamic Ecology” Journal of Ecology 22, no. 1 (Feb., 1934): 39-68; Frederic E. Clements, “Experimental Ecology in the Public Service,” Ecology, 16,1 (July 1935): 342-363. 493 A. Berle Clemensen, Cattle, Copper, and Cactus: The History of Saguaro National Monument, Historic Resource Study Saguaro National Monument (Denver: NPS, January 1987), 115-17; Letter from Shantz to Harrison on December 18, 1930, John Harrison Papers (hear after listed as JHP), UASC. 215

seeking to protect cactus forests since it posited an ideal state and argued against

disturbance.

Mountains as Desert Islands

Partially, the extraordinary nature of the Cactus Forest owed its existence to its

setting on the slopes (bajada) of the Rincon Mountains. They were islands in the desert

sea creating an important ecological setting for the cactus forest. In Euro-American

tradition, the Sahara was the great desert. It was “a vast wilderness of lifeless sand,

parched by the intolerable heat of an almost vertical sun,” half the size of Europe. Within

this wilderness fastness were oases often called “islands” by the Greeks and Romans

because they provided succor for desert passages, or housed criminals banished from the

bright glow of civilization: cast upon a desert (ed) island.494 The Saharan islands were low areas where subterranean water was within reach. In 1837, a British traveler called these oases “tufted isles that verdant rise amid the Libyan waste.”495 The imagery of

islands stuck in the American imagination when they entered the Sonoran Desert. In

1860, Raphael Pumpelly looked at the Sonoran Desert as a “whole country [that] is a

great plain, out of which rise the many outlying sierras of the Rocky range, as islands

from the sea.”496 From the top of Pinacate Peak, William Hornaday felt he stood on a

494 “Africa,” Encyclopedia Britannica (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co, 1823), 258; Robert B. Jackson, At Empire’s Edge: Exploring Rome’s Egyptian Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 495 G. A. Hoskins, A Visit to the Great Oasis of the Libyan Desert (London: Longman et. al., 1837), 9. 496 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 8. 216

“lava island in a lava sea.”497 Seeing these mountains as islands was thus well established in literature. They were also islands in a second, scientific sense.

Since the time Alexander von Humboldt’s 1805 presented a cross-section of

Mount Chimborazo in Essai sur la géographie des plantes, scientists had been refining the idea that mountains could be models for studying transitions between lifezones. C.

Hart Merriam brought the idea with him in the 1880s when he looked at the fauna of

Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks. In his ascent, Merriam counted 7 zones at successively higher elevation: Desert below 6000 feet; Pinion Belt between 6000 and 7000 thousand; the Pine from 7000 to 8200; Fir (Canadian) between 8200 and 9200; Spruce (Hudsonian) from 9200 to 10,500; Sub-alpine 10,500 to 11,500; Alpine above 11,500.498 The power

of Merriam’s life zone model was that it presented an organizational schema to

understand how a series of plant and animal communities at different elevations could

represent a latitudinal change: upward was northward. While this “temperature summing”

proved overly simplistic, it captured important truths about ecological diversity in

Arizona’s basin and range mountains. Animals migrated up and down the mountain; the

mountains provided a watershed for the arid valley.499

The mountains of southern Arizona were an integral part of life in the desert and

constituted one of the principle features of the Sonoran Desert. Although many reach

497 Hornaday, Camp-Fires, 271. 498 C. Hart Merriam, “Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado of Arizona,” North American Fauna, no. 3 (August, 1890), 6-13. 499 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 1998), 19; The San Francisco Mountains are not part of the basin and range fault-block mountains; they are volcanic. 217

above the “desert,” their relationship to the natural and human life in the desert valleys is central to making the region. They act as a bridge between the Sierra Madre in Northern

Mexico and the Colorado Plateau and Southern Rockies and as such are seen as part of the Madrean Archipelago: a series of sky islands. The mountains hold a wealth of ecological diversity. Peter Warshall of the Office of Arid Lands Study at the University of Arizona put it this way: “The Madrean region has exceptional species richness, super- species complexes, unusual neoendemics and archeoendemics, an exceptional mixture of species from the Nearctic and Neotropic regions, important influences from the eastern and western biogeographic provinces.” One of only twenty similar complexes in the world, the Madrean Archipelago is the only such chain to cross two floristic realms, “two major faunal realms as well as the convergence of three major climatic zones (tropical, subtropical, and temperate).”500 In short, they are a four-dimensional ecological crossroads—linking south to north, east to west, valley to mountaintop, and remnant ecologies from past landscapes to the present.

Tucson’s mountain relief helped lure MacDougal and Coville to Tucson and one of the first important projects undertaken by the Desert Botanical Lab was study of the

Santa Catalina Mountains. MacDougal started a project of acclimating plants to different elevations. These efforts culminated in Forest Shreve’s 1915 Vegetation of a Desert

500 Peter Warshall, “The Madrean Sky Island Archipelago: A Planetary Overview,” in Biodiversity and Management of the Madrean Archipelago: The Sky Islands of Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico, Leonard F. DeBano et. al. eds. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-GTR- 264, July, 1995), 6-18, quote, 6, 16. 218

Mountain Range. The steep mountain faces transitioned into alluvial bajada that sloped

into the valley to streambeds, flood plains or playas.

In describing these mountains, Shreve took the reader on an imaginary journey.

From the lower bajada the vegetation changed from desert through “park-like semi- desert” and into forests dominated by spruce or fir. “These three major regions,” he wrote, “constitute the most natural and easily distinguished subdivision of the vegetation, and depend for their distinctness on the radical dissimilarity of the dominant types of plants in each.”501 However visually dissimilar these subdivisions were, they existed in a continuum of change that linked the desert to the forest. The upper bajadas and desert environment of the mountains up to 3500 feet had the most diverse floral composition in the Sonoran Desert. In fact they were a microcosm of Sonoran Desert flora from the Gulf of California to the base of the Catalina Mountains. In some places, many physiognomic species clustered together (up to 10 within sight at once) while in other places single species formed dense clumps (cactus forests).

The notion of integrating a landscape from desert bajada to forested mountain top

lay at the heart of efforts to protect Saguaro National Monument. Forrest Shreve of

Tucson’s Carnegie Desert Lab weighed in on the ecological whole of the Monument. In a

December, 1940 conversation, McDougall recounted Shreve’s position on the issue:

Dr. Shreve, being a botanist, is not particularly interested in the animal part of a biotic community. His discussion of the scientific values of the Saguaro National Monument, therefore, was confined to the saguaros and their plant associates. He has done an immense amount of field work in southern Arizona and northern

501 Forrest Shreve, The Vegetation of a Desert Mountain Range as Conditioned by Climatic Factors Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 217 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915), 12. 219

Mexico and he thinks that this monument is the most ideal place for saguaros that he has seen. The granitic soil and favorable moisture conditions have caused the saguaros and many of their associates to grow better here than on any other area of comparable size. He is inclined to believe that this forest is no older than some of the other saguaro forests that he has seen but that the greater size of the individuals and the greater density of the stand is due to the more favorable ecological conditions under which there plants have grown…He state that he hopes very much that the National Park Service will obtain and retain full control of this particular saguaro forest…He realizes that the Rincon Mountain watershed is largely responsible for the very favorable moisture conditions in the Saguaro forest and that this watershed should, therefore, be protected.502

Alternatively, the University of Arizona’s Dr. Vorhies, as a zoologist, “believes that that

greatest scientific value of the monument lies in its value as a biotic community and not

merely as a saguaro forest. He realizes, therefore, that the scientific value is, and will

remain, much greater if we retain everything from the Saguaro desert up to the yellow

pine forest than if we have the saguaro forest only.” Vorhies also told McDougall he

understood the complexities of the ownership issues and had no opinion on federal

ownership.503 All three men recognized the potential to understand the Monument as originally conceived: “an area ranging from the desert floor to the top of one of our mountains.”504 The model all men were driving at others would later call a sky island and

the use of life zones was a foundational metaphor to narrate and justify the Monument.

The desert mountains provided a way to experience ecology. They formed the conditions

for cactus forests filled with plants that belonged in gardens.

Coalitions for Conservation

502 Milton J. McColm, Acting Regional Director, Memorandum to the Director, February 14, 1941, SAGU 257, Box 4, Folder 40, WACC. 503 McColm, “Memorandum,” February 14, 1941. 504 Homer Shantz to John Harrison, December 18, 1930, AZ170, John Harrison Papers, UASC. 220

In the opening image, Homer Shantz is standing in what he called the University

Cactus Forest. In 1930, there was an established coalition of local conservationists and

scientists who desired the protection of what was known locally as the Tanque Verde

Cactus Forest or Giant Cactus Forest. Named for the wash passing through, the forest

occupied a dozen square miles in the bajada at the foot of the Rincon Mountains. In the

1920s, many of these interested individuals were members of the Tucson Natural History

Society, a group of scientists and prominent locals that included Southern Arizona’s

Coronado National Forest Supervisor Fred Winn, Department of Agriculture county

inspector Cornelius B. Brown, University of Arizona scientists Charles T. Vorhies, John.

J. Thornber, and Andrew A. Nichol, Carnegie Desert Lab head Forrest Shreve, the

Biological Survey’s Walter P. Taylor, and a number of other professionals and community leaders.

Prominent in this coalition were women’s groups like the Tucson Women’s Club

(founded 1901) and clubs run by women like the Tucson Garden Club (1935). Historian

Sandra Haarsager argues that these clubs became avenues to “redefine” the role of women in the state. They “mediated the private and public spheres,” and transformed cultural politics.505 Women’s organizations played a central role in Progressive

conservation.506 In particular, women (often Anglo women) were busy transforming the

505 Sandra Haarsager, Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840-1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 3. 506 Carolyn Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement: 1900-1916,” Environmental Review 8, no. 1 (Spring, 1984):57-85. 221

cultural spaces of cities like Tucson.507 They would often initiate efforts to remake the

physical environment to encode cultural values into their community.508 For example,

when given permission to proceed in purchasing the cactus forest, Shantz retained realtor

John E. Harrison to act as the University’s agent. Harrison succeeded in by using private

donations through a short-lived University Cactus Forest Association.509 Crucial for the

quick success was the University’s ability to leverage its Land Grant status to claim state

trust lands. For private land, large private contributors like those provided by Elizabeth

Hopkins Johnson and Mrs. W. J. Young, provided important funds. Johnson wrote to congratulate:

My Dear Mr. Harrison, Though my very heart has been filled with joy at your success, I have had no opportunity to write…I just can’t tell you how happy I am at your accomplishment…we literally owe it all to you and I’d like to see it called the Harrison Cactus Garden! [T]he real joy of such an achievement as yours must lie in the Knowledge of all the joy + the wonder you are bringing to so many people who otherwise would never have known the real meaning of the phrases ‘Cactus Garden.’ ‘Giant Cactus Forest’ –all hail to you!510

507 These redefinitions could also dis-empower women. As Suzanne Waldenberger demonstrates Mexican American women in Tucson were losing control of the important space of the barrio garden at the same time. “Barrio Gardens: The Arraignment of a Women’s Space,” Western Folklore 59, no. 3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 2000): 232-245. 508 For this process regionally see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); In Tucson see Marienka Sokol, “Illusions of Abundance: Culture and Urban Water Use in the Arid Southwest,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2008. 509 By August 1931, the University had leases on four and three-quarter sections and arranged options on an additional 480 acres for a total of five and one half square miles of cactus lands.Harrison Letter, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 510 Elizabeth Hopkins Johnson to John Ellis Harrison, June 12, 1931, John Harris Papers, AZ170, UASC; Harrison had also gained the support of two prominent Arizona political leaders, former Governor John C. Phillips and present Governor George W.P. Hunt Tillotson to Albright April 18, 1931; Brooks to Albright April 28, 1931; Albright to Tillotson May 1931; Albright to Merriam May 1931, Harrison to Hitchcock August 19, 222

The University Cactus Forest formed the core desert area of Saguaro National

Monument (1933). The financial connection and sense of mission among Shantz,

Harrison, and Johnson is emblematic of how conservation landscapes bridged scientific and aesthetic worlds.

The most well established club linking the city and Sonoran Desert nature was the

Tucson Natural History Club. Established in 1923, the Society’s interests read like a catalogue of Southeastern Arizona’s natural areas. The Arizona Daily Star reported

Society excursions to “Summerhaven in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Giant Cactus

Forest, Chiricahua Pinnacles National Monument, Picture Rocks, Sabino Canyon, Old

Baldy in the Santa Rita Mountains, Baboquivari Peak, Cochise Stronghold, Papago

Indian Reservation near Indian Oasis, the ‘Window’ in the Santa Catalina Mountains,” and others.511

Society members were active in shaping the landscape of southern Arizona. Winn managed the Coronado National Forest; University scientists worked through the

Agricultural Extension Agency to promote farming and ranching; Taylor worked for the

Biological Service; Shreve and Thornber were each respectively working from their institutional bases to describe the cactus family scientifically and in popular print. Both brought out popular works on cactus in 1930-31. All were shaping the agricultural and

1931, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 658, NARA II; H. L. Shantz, “Hunting the Collared Peccary in the Rincons,” Arizona Wildlife and Sportsmen, 2 (March 1930): 4. 511 Walter P. Taylor, “Natural History Society Here Introducing Tucson to Nature,” Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson (Hereafter AHS). 223

forest lands of Southeastern Arizona, and they had also begun to shape conservation landscapes.

In their newsletter, Society members argued: “the Tucson Natural History Society believes strongly that scenery is an economic asset, in addition to being worth careful preservation for its own sake.”512 One example of this attitude was the creation of the

Marshal Creek Wildlife Preserve in the Santa Catalina Mountains, high above Tucson.

The Tucson Citizen reported on the dedication ceremony:

Supervisor Fred Winn was the chief speaker…[he] spoke on the wilderness movement which is being launched in a number of sections of the country. It was a plea for the preservation of the few primitive forests, untouched by motor cars and tourist camps, where canoe and pack trips into the back country may still be enjoyed by lovers of the wild. He referred particularly to the southwest, where in the past few years several material inroads have been made on the wilderness areas. The Gila forest now remains as the best possible wilderness area, and he expressed a hope that no tourist camps or modern roads would be constructed into the heart of this region513 Taylor was in conversations with the National Park Service over the creation of Organ

Pipe National Monument, and all these people provided advice on regional land uses.

One Society priority was the Tanque Verde Cactus Forest. In the Society’s 1928-29

Program, C. T. Vorhies offered to lead a trip to the forest. The Program notes argued:

“The Tanque Verde Cactus Forest is probably the best and densest forest of sahuaro in the United States. The permanent preservation of this area is one of the items of work the society is engaged upon at present.”514

512 Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 513 Tucson Citizen, June 1, 1926, Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 514 “The Tucson Natural History Society Program, 1928-29,” Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 224

In Arizona, the links among desert plants (native plants), garden clubs, and

political action were well established by the 1930s. In 1929, leading members of Phoenix

society convinced the Arizona Legislature to pass “An Act to Protect Native Arizona

Plants from Destruction, Mutilation, and Removal.”515 The integration among

conservation, domestication, and desert plants was extensive.

Like the Rincon Mountains, the Tucson Mountains form a wall of the Tucson

Basin. They contained thick groves of saguaro and other desert vegetation including

ironwood trees and rich brush habitat for many desert animals. In 1928, at the urging of

County Agricultural Agent Cornelius C. Brown, Pima County applied to the Department

of Interior for a lease upon nearly 30,000 acres of land.516 Brown was Chair of the

County’s Park Board, President of the Tucson Game Protection Association, and a

Department of Agriculture county agricultural agent. He was part of a policy community advocating conservation of desert nature using a mixture of civic pride and science.517

515 “Arizona’s Conservation Act,” 12. 516Established in April, 1929, Tucson Mountain Park was possible because the federal government had, under the 1926 Recreation and Public Purposes Act (43 U.S.C. 869 et seq.) made it possible for local governments and nonprofit organizations to seek land withdrawals for recreational purposes. See Hal Coss, “Tucson Mountain Park History,” 11/21/69, SAGU257, b 11, f15c; National Archive and Records Administration, http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text- idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div6&view=text&node=43:2.1.1.2.35.1&idno=43 517 Brown worked with Carl Hayden and Pima County personnel and on 29 April 1929, Interior granted their request, withdrew mining and homestead claims, and leased Pima County the land. The County then leased fifteen thousand additional acres. Brown, through the Pima County Park Board, began grading roads, hired ranger J.C. McCain, and developed some picnic areas. Together they designated the area as a game refuge complete with water tanks. They scavenged labor from the depression’s rising tide. Transients under the guidance of the Salvation Army provided much of the early labor. Pima County requested the land under 44 Statute 741, June 14, 1926; Unknown, “Tucson Mountain Park History,” 11/21/69, SAGU257, Box 11, Folder 6, p.2, WACC. 225

The Tucson Mountains bewitched Brown. “Here,” he wrote, “are limitless views of desert vegetation, strange giant cacti forms, rock formations uprising sharply into forms and craggy peaks almost unreal to strangers and ever fascinating in the changing flood of desert light.”518 The mountains formed a viewscape for the setting sun, and framed the

city’s western edge. As a member of the Tucson Game Protective Association and Pima

County Agricultural Agent Brown was sensitive to the landscape transformations wrought by industry, agriculture, ranching, and increased population during the preceding decades. Although explicitly focused on wildlife habitat, the Association was part of a regional network of hunting groups filled with people intellectually and physically engaged with conserving local habitat.519 The Tucson Mountains were not for hunting but

rather habitat and scenery. Close to the city, they were ideal for recreation, picnicking,

and encountering the Sonoran Desert. Their volcanic slopes and valleys were completely

within the desert biome. Like the rest of the pre-World War II Tucson Basin, there were

areas where ground water approached the surface but they had arroyos rather than rivers.

Luxuriant cacti, palo verde, mesquite, ironwood trees, and a host of shrubs covered the

slopes. Dense saguaro stands marched up the hills. The area was not s ‘wilderness’ as

Clinton F. Rose reported to NPS superiors. It was part of the Amole mining district, and

had been close to human populations for centuries. For a desert lover, scientist, or

518 Peggy Larson and Sam Negri, “Cornelius B. Brown: A Vision of Tucson Mountain Park,” Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum News 10, issue 4 (Oct., Nov., Dec. 2009), 2, UASC; Ethel Stiffler Carpenter and Roger Carpenter, Letters from Tucson, 1933-1942 (Tucson: American University, 2009). 519 Places-Arizona-Tucson-Organizations-Arizona Game Protective Association, ephemera file, AHS; Frederic Winn Papers, MS875, AHS, Tucson. 226

botanist, however, it offered an easily accessible site for the study and enjoyment of the desert.520

It is clear that local connections shaped national conservation possibilities. In

December 1930, Superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, M. R. Tillotson wrote to NPS Director Horace Albright noting, “for some time I have been greatly interested in the establishment somewhere in southern Arizona of a national monument, the feature of which would be typical desert flora and especially the Giant Sahuaro.” He went on:

While in Tucson recently Mr. Hoffman Birney casually mentioned to me an area on which there was an especially fine sahuaro forest and I therefore took occasion to visit the site of which he spoke. I found this to be at the foot of the west slope of the Rincon Mountains, some 17 miles east of Tucson. This is undoubtedly the finest sahuaro forest I have seen with my limited knowledge of that country. It amounts in extent to some two or three thousand acres, lying in a slight basin or depression. The Sahuaro there is exceptional, not only because it grows especially large and with the characteristic varying shapes, but principally because of the fact that here the growth is heavier than in any individual area I happen to know of. This particular forest is readily accessible over a good road by way of Wrightstown, from Tucson, and is only about 17 miles distant. If it were set aside as a national monument for the preservation of this characteristic growth especially it should, therefore, attract many visitors.521

Tillotson noted the need for both caution and action. He celebrated Arizona’s recent protection of native flora, but argued there remained a need for federal protection.

Perhaps other areas in the state might have more diverse flora; the question warranted more research. Given these concerns about land ownership and warning Director Albright that desert flora were woefully under-protected regionally, but with a sense that the

Rincon area was a likely candidate for a new monument, Tillotson recommended a search

520 Clinton F. Rose, “Narrative Report of CCC Accomplishments,” March 31, 1936, RG79, E95, Box 5, NARA II; Clemenson, Cattle, Copper, Cactus, 88-109. 521 Tillotson to Albright, December 13, 1930, RG79, entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 227

of the surrounding areas for other sites, wondering if there was another location, regardless of legal title, that would provide a better showcase of desert flora, than the

Tanque Verde site. Either way he felt the NPS must act quickly to establish a new presence in the cactus lands of Arizona.522

Tillotson’s interest was nothing new. Locals had sought to interest the NPS in the site years before, but Papago Saguaro had blocked these earlier efforts. NPS naturalist E.

D. McKee noted:

This area was first shown to Dr. Vorhies of the University of Arizona by Mr. Harold Bell Wright, shortly after the former’s arrival at Tucson over ten years ago Dr. Vorhies then attempted to have the area made into a National Monument but because of the existence of the Papago-Sahuaro Monument near Phoenix at that time, he met with no success [emphases added]. Still recognizing the value of the land, he later obtained the interest of Dr. Shantz and had a small portion set aside as university land…[the site] contains what is probably the finest sahuaro forest in the state, also many large Palo Verdes, and a representation of most other desert types. The approach is featured by an especially dense area of Cholla. At one place within a radius of ten feet, fifteen Sahuaros were found…After visiting this exceptionally fine area in company with Dr. Vorhies, I was forced to agree with him that all other areas, at least in this part of the State, appear as very poor exhibits by comparison.523

Albright was immediately interested in Tillotson’s report on the Rincon site and asked for a legal description of the land east of Tucson.524

522 Tillotson to Albright, December, 13, 1930, RG79, entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 523 E.D. McKee, Park Naturalist, “Memorandum to Superintendent concerning areas suitable for establishment of a National Monument featuring Desert Flora;” Tillotson to Albright April 18, 1931, p. 3, RG79, Central Classified Files, Box 658, NARA II. This quote reveals a lot about the broad local support for conserving the Tanque Verde Cactus forest. McKee placed responsibility with Wright for initiating the process. Others placed Shantz at the center. Still others pointed other original advocates. All this tells us is that the roots of conservation were deep within the community. 524 Initial investigation revealed that most of the land was already in some way disposed from federal control. Of the forty-six thousand acres in Tillotson’s brief initial description, nearly twenty-three thousand had been surveyed and only 2200 remained in 228

Western writer Hoffman Birney did not gesture randomly to the foothills of the

Rincon Mountains. The area appears in nineteenth-century Arizona “handbooks,”

Territory-sponsored inventories of the natural and human attributes of Arizona. In 1878,

author Richard J. Hinton informed readers that “the giant cactus grows in great

abundance on the southern slopes of the Santa Catalina Mountains.”525 Likewise,

University of Arizona botany professor James W. Toumey told Popular Science Monthly readers in 1897: “the finest and largest specimens [of saguaro] that I have ever observed are growing only a few miles from Tucson, on the foothills of the Santa Catalina

Mountains, where hundreds may be seen growing on a single acre.” This was, Toumey reminds readers with an image of two women amid the saguaro, “a cactus forest.”526

In 1930, as the NPS searched for a monument, there was already an established

coalition of local conservationists and scientists who desired the protection of what was

known locally as the Tanque Verde Cactus Forest or Giant Cactus Forest. Named for the

wash running out of the foothills of the Rincon Mountains, the forest occupied a dozen

square miles in the bajada at the foot of the Rincon Mountains. In the 1920s, many of

these interested individuals were members of the Tucson Natural History Society, a

group of scientists and prominent locals that included Coronado National Forest

Supervisor Fred Winn, Department of Agriculture county inspector Cornelius B. Brown,

federal hands. Hedging his bets, Albright cast a wide net, and authorized a winter search for other potential locales. Albright to Tillotson, January 2, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II; Albright to Tillotson, Feb. 5, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 525 Richard Josiah Hinton, The Handbook of Arizona: Its Resources, History, Towns, Mines, Ruins and Scenery (San Francisco: Payot, Upham & Co, 1878), 342. 526 James W. Toumey, “The Giant Cactus,” Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly 51 (September 1897): 641-42. 229

University of Arizona scientists Charles T. Vorhies, J. J. Thornber, and Andrew A.

Nichol, Carnegie Desert Lab head Forrest Shreve, the Biological Survey’s Walter P.

Taylor, and a number of other prominent professionals and community leaders.

Established in 1923, the Society’s interests read like a catalogue of Southeastern

Arizona’s natural areas. The Arizona Daily Star reported Society excursions to

“Summerhaven in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Giant Cactus Forest, Chiricahua

Pinnacles National Monument, Picture Rocks, Sabino Canyon, Old Baldy in the Santa

Rita Mountains, Baboquivari Peak, Cochise Stronghold, Papago Indian Reservation near

Indian Oasis, the ‘Window’ in the Santa Catalina Mountains,” and others.527

Society members were active in shaping the landscape of southern Arizona. Winn managed the Coronado National Forest; University scientists worked through the

Agricultural Extension Agency to promote farming and ranching; Taylor worked for the

In their newsletter, Society members argued: “the Tucson Natural History Society believes strongly that scenery is an economic asset, in addition to being worth careful

527 Walter P. Taylor, “Natural History Society Here Introducing Tucson to Nature,” Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson (Hereafter AHS). 230

preservation for its own sake.”528 One example of this attitude was the creation of the

Marshal Creek Wildlife Preserve in the Santa Catalina Mountains, high above Tucson.

The Tucson Citizen reported on the dedication ceremony:

Taylor was in conversations with the NPS over the creation of Organ Pipe, and all these

people provided advice on regional land uses. One Society priority was the Tanque Verde

Cactus Forest. In the Society’s 1928-29 Program, C. T. Vorhies offered to lead a trip to the forest. The

Program notes argued: “The Tanque Verde Cactus Forest is probably the best and densest forest of sahuaro in the United States. The permanent preservation of this area is one of the items of work the society is engaged upon at present.”530

Like the citizens of Phoenix, TNHS members wanted to protect a treasured local

landscape; unlike Phoenix activists, the Tucson contingent consisted of many of

America’s leading experts on arid lands. As the NPS cast about for a Sonoran Desert

Monument, Tucson, Arizona’s largest community in 1930, had a network of well-placed

528 Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 529 Tucson Citizen, June 1, 1926, Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 530 “The Tucson Natural History Society Program, 1928-29,” Tucson Natural History Society Ephemera File, AHS. 231

experts and advocates ready to assist and promote the potential of the area as a National

Monument.

Initial NPS reports of the cactus forest as a potential monument were not

favorable. Most of the land of interest, other than the Coronado National Forest, was

spoken for by private parties, Arizona, or the University of Arizona; the Forest Service

had a well-established presence on the mountain but the cactus forest was a patchwork of

properties. With many regional projects underway, and given its recent eviction from the

Phoenix hinterlands, the NPS was not eager to pursue this site through a thicket of legal

titles.531 The obvious course of action was to broaden the search. Turning to the Tucson

scientific and conservation cohort, the NPS asked for recommendations.

To direct the search, Minor Tillotson called on local expertise. Respondents

included Vorhies who mentioned an unclaimed site east of Wickenburg that held Joshua

Trees, “dense cholla and prickly pear,” but no saguaro.532 From the Desert Lab, Forrest

Shreve and William McGinnies pointed to a valley in the Comobabi Mountains on the

Papago Indian Reservation north of Sells, Arizona. The site was a saguaro-filled valley between the northern and southern Comobabi ranges. It had access along the road from

Tucson to Ajo but was far from population centers. The presence of O’Odham villages did not, for the scientists, seem to be a deterrent. The Quijotoa Mountains, Shreve’s other

531 Albright to Tillotson, Feb. 5, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 532 Vorhies provided maps [not available to the author] and described the area as nine miles west of Congress Junction, Vorhies to Tillotson, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 232

suggestion, was in the heart of the Reservation.533 E. D. Wilson and Godfrey Sykes

recommended the Tinajas Altas near the international border and southeast of Yuma.

This site had the added advantage of Big Horn Sheep although it was deep desert with

less lush vegetation. Shreve pointed to the Picacho de Calera northwest of the Tucson

Mountains near Marana. During the 1930s, the area contained many of the major species

of desert plants and was quite close to Tucson. Several members also mentioned the

Tucson Mountains, north of the Tucson Mountain Park.534

The canvassed respondents knew what they were talking about. All of them had

tramped, ridden, bicycled, or driven the Sonoran Desert for years or even decades; some

had raised arid lands adventure to a fine art. Godfrey Sykes was known as a man who

could cross all terrains, building and rebuilding transportation on the trail; Forest Shreve

would ride all day unfazed.535 All agreed that the cactus forest at the foot of the Rincons

was the finest stand. Although other locations could provide similar catalogues of desert

plants and beautiful settings, there was a sense among everyone that aesthetically, and

perhaps ecologically, the Tanque Verde site was the best choice.

533 Forrest Shreve to Edwin D. McKee, May 16, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 534 This peak, named for its limestone, is now a large hole in the ground after it became a mine for Arizona Portland Cement beginning in the 1940s. E. D. McKee, “Memorandum…concerning areas suitable for establishment of a National Monument featuring Desert Flora,” RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II; Raymond M. Turner, “Pima County’s Withdrawal from its Past,” Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, Pima County, Arizona, 2003, p. 21.. 535 Godfrey Sykes, The Colorado Delta (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington and the American Geographical Society of New York, 1937) and Sykes, A Westering Trend; MacDougal, “Across Papagueria;” Bowers, A Sense of Place. 233

The ringing endorsement of the desert experts, coupled with Tillotson’s recommendation that the NPS could swap land with the state and university to craft a monument did not impress everyone. One park official told Albright that “there are practically 20,000 acres of alienated land within this area and, as stated by our letter of

February 5th to Supt. Tillotson, this practically removes the area from any further consideration as a proposed national monument.”536 Instead the Service should look further afield. Other options seemed easier politically. The Sells, Arizona, site was

“within the Papago Indian Reservation and therefore undoubtedly all Government owned.” This site, noted for its heavy saguaro, could provide a reasonable alternative.

Further, the implication was that the Papago would be in no position to argue over the imposition of a monument upon their lands.537 However, unlike the Tanque Verde Cactus

Forest, these locations were far from centers of habitation. The NPS was already working on a project to control Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and a second remote monument made little sense.

Desert experts weren’t the only base of power for conserving desert flora. As landscape historian Linda Flint McClelland has persuasively shown, ideas about staging natural parks changed in tandem with of an aesthetic movement based in gardens.538

536 Tillotson to Albright, April 18, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II; Brooks to Albright, April 28, 1931, RG79, entry 10, Box 658, NARA II. 537 Brooks to Albright, April 28, 1931, RG79, Entry 10, Box 658, NARA II; David M. Brugge and Raymond Wilson, “Administrative History: Canyon De Chelley National Monument Arizona” (Washington, D.C., United States Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1976). 538 Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), Chapter 2, “An American Style of Natural Gardening.” 234

Regionally distinctive plants like cactus, agave, and yucca acknowledged the local

environment.539 The “California garden” aesthetic allowed Tucson gardeners to plant local plants like zebra and pelona agave with their spreading rosettes of stiff leaves, the soaptree yucca with its towering slender trunk and creamy white flowers, or any of the many flowering cacti of southern Arizona. These plants were exclamation marks in a

garden; they announced a distinctly regional aesthetic.540 One group of Tucson women

was particularly struck by the power to beautify society through gardening with local

plants. The Tucson Garden Club formed in 1935 when six women, attending the State

Federation of Arizona garden Club meeting in Phoenix on March 21, 1935, became

inspired to form a club. Eight days later, when they held their first meeting at the

University of Arizona auditorium Shantz was in attendance. He presented a talk on “The

Value of a Garden Club to a City,” and offered the university’s assistance. Also in

attendance was Tucson Mayor Henry Iaastad.541 The women of the Club formed a rapid

partnership between the University and community. They worked to create a ground

swell of support for local plants; in the process, they helped boost the idea that natural

associations of creatures (ecosystems) were valuable to the community.

539 McClelland, Building, 66-8. 540 Mark A. Dimmitt, “Flowering Plants of the Sonoran Desert” in A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert eds. Steven J Phillips and Patricia Wentworth Comus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 159-60, 541 The founding members were Mrs. Alexander Murray, Mrs. L. D. Darrow, Mrs. W. H. Messer, Mrs. C. P. Kramer, Miss Josephine Wallace, and Mrs. J. A. Hunter, in March 29, 1935 and April 1, 1936 club minutes, “Minutes 1935-1937” MS 907, box 1, folder 2, Arizona Historical Society Archives, Tucson, AZ, hereafter abbreviated as TGC, MS 907, AHS. 235

The Club constitution is a stirring summation of their sense of mission. It read:

“the object of the Club shall be to stimulate the knowledge and love of gardening among

amateurs, and to aid in the protection of native trees, plants and birds, and to encourage

civic planting.”542 Their pursuit of knowledge drew University of Arizona professors of botany and horticulture to lecture on cacti, wildflowers, and “Color in the Garden.”

Lectures on famous gardens and the garden as “an oasis of beauty,” alternated with concern for promoting native plants and conservation. Their mottos, “Plant another Tree” and “To Enjoy and Not Destroy,” both carried the lilt of conservation rhetoric. The women of the Tucson Garden Club could see themselves playing a special role through their conservation efforts. They had a mission to change men, to protect nature, and thereby to change society. This mission, is captured in their Club constitution, their mottos, and in the words of August H. Brewer, President of the National Council of State

Garden Clubs. She wrote, “since men’s strongest impressions come through the eyes, it is through our Beautification Program and work that we can develop a feeling of pride in the general public, that this is our own, our native land, and that it must be preserved and made more beautiful for the generations to come.”543

Club member Lilly Starkweather took their message outside the club and to public

forums. In a 1940 lecture titled “Conserving the Native Desert Plants,” Starkweather,

neatly summarized the links combining conservation of native plants with a celebration

of the spectacle of desert flowers:

542 “Yearbook,” TGC, MS 907, box 1, folder 1, AHS. 543 “1941-1942 Yearbook,” TGC, MS 907, box 1, AHS; “Minutes 1935-1937,” idem; There are clear parallels between this expression of preserving land and the climax ecology underwriting the Monument. 236

Because of the unusual rainfall during the past winter, the Arizona desert has been on parade. We have not only seen acres of Arizona poppies in bloom, but whole sections of them. As far as the eye could see they waved in all their golden glory…[but] I am sorry to that on the desert too, the pastime of the great American public was carried on assiduously. Tubfulls of these golden poppies were tornup.544 Despite signs posted by the Desert Garden Club of Tucson and at El Picacho State

Park, motorists picked the blooming abundance. Starkweather contrasted the

callousness of visitors with the newly discovered ravages blighting saguaro over

hundreds of square miles. The Saguaro blight was terrible, but paled when

compared to instances “when man deliberately destroys beautiful, slow-growing plants for commercial reasons.”545 The pace of growth of plants like the sotel

(spoon flower or dasylirion wheeleri), a nolina that produces a soaring

inflorescence covered with flowers, made picking them morally unjustifiable.546

Starkweather bemoaned that state laws protecting these plants did not apply to

private property, or stop cattle from eating the tender stems. Besides the loss of

beauty, the loss of the desert’s unique flowering plants was also bad economic

policy, leading to erosion.

To support her point, Starkweather relied on the opinion of a scientific expert,

University of Arizona botanist J. J. Thornbur, who stated that the sotol bloomed only

after it reached around fifty years of age.547 These slow growing, vulnerable plants were

part of a commercial florist business. Fighting back, the Desert Garden Club of Tucson

544 Mrs. M. H. Starkweather, “Address on ‘Conserving the Native Desert Plants,’” 1940 [Check this date?!? Missing], Merritt H. and Lilly E. Starkweatherr Papers, 1916-1982, MS 1035, box 1, Folder 30, Arizona Historical Society Archives, Tucson, AZ, 1; Hereafter Starkweather, MS 1035, AHS. 545 Starkweather, MS 1035, AHS, 3. 546 Mark A. Dimmitt, “Flowering Plants,” 163-64. 547 Starkweather, MS 1034, AHS, 3-4. 237

began a national campaign to stop their sale. They sent out letters to flower shows across

the country, including “before” and “after” photos of the destruction wrought by the sotol

harvest, and asking them to stop presenting and selling the dried flowers. Response was

swift from the Society of American Florists who agreed with the campaign.548 The

campaign was nation-wide, successful and well planned. The mixture of scientific

authority and aesthetic concerns over the sotol required supporters to imagine a landscape

vulnerable to natural and human disruption, beautiful and irreplaceable and worth

protecting; the climax ecology of saguaros and sotol commerce both threatened that

image.

The desert was no doubt a pleasing garden that held similar interests for Shantz

and Starkweather. Mutual interests found expression in cross-pollination between

University and club. The December following the club’s founding, Shantz organized a

field trip to the Cactus Forest. The Club secretary recorded that Shantz provided a

surprise of chairs arranged “on a knoll with a beautiful view of the forest” where over

fifty people had “cake and coffee” and a lecture.549 As Shantz played host, he displayed the Forest like a garden to the club members. Perhaps they saw the bright red fruit of the

Christmas Cholla, or the feathery leaves masking the ocotillo’s wicked thorns, both winter blooms. Whatever else they saw, they could see thick saguaro, many of the 120

548 Ibid, 4; Starkweather reports the coalition that supported the ban on sotol harvest included the Desert Garden Club of Tucson, Cactus & Succulent Society of America, Arizona cactus & Native Flora Society, Phoenix, AZ, and Arizona Federation of Garden Clubs. 549 Tucson Garden Club Minutes March 29, 1935 and December 4, 1935, MS 907, box 1, folder 2, AHS. 238

tree species found in Arizona, 50 species of cacti, and numerous birds and animals.550

The lecture, chairs, and refreshments choreographed the visit; they were a group of conservationists taking coffee in the garden. They may even have seen themselves in the desert ecology where “plants were social” and required networks of interactions—like garden clubs.551

When not showing off the University’s “garden,” University scientists were accepting invitations to speak to the club on a range of topics. In 1936, Shantz spoke briefly about the Saguaro Cactus j and the Interrelationship of flowers.552 Between 1935 and 1940 numerous scientists and conservationists presented lectures at Club meetings.

The Club reciprocated in its way, supporting local plant life they supported the foundational ideal behind Saguaro, the Sonoran Ark. The give and take among conservationists used the metaphors of desert nature to create conservation landscapes for staging desert nature and mid-class American values. Managing those meanings require managing both the use of the landscape and in policing nature itself.

Managing the meaning of cacti

Cacti were one of the most striking natural features of the America’s Sonoran

Desert. Simply unavoidable, they were part of most descriptions of the desert. When trying to convey the nature of the Sonoran Desert to 1911 Harpers Monthly readers,

Ellsworth Huntington wrote:

550 Friends of Saguaro, www.friendsofsaguaro.org, (April 11, 2007). 551 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 194. 552 Tucson Garden Club Minutes April 1, 1936, box 1, folder 2, AHS. 239

It is not the sandy desert of our childhood fancy, with drifting yellow dunes, …On the contrary, it is the most beautiful of deserts, the strange arboreal desert…The cacti are the most unique feature of the verdant arboreal forest.553 Huntington was not an expert on cacti but he was an expert on desert lands and the

lushness of the Sonoran Desert caught his attention. The consumption of these plants

could lead in conflicting directions. As decorative, scientific, and food commodities, cacti

adorned window pot gardens, home landscapes, botanical gardens and dinner plates

around the world. In contrast, and in their ecological context, cacti demarcated

landscapes with distinctive ecological stories. As commodities cacti could lead one

anywhere; as features of the landscape they pointed to a specific place.

Saguaros were particularly fascinating to new immigrants because they so clearly

demarked the Sonoran Desert landscape. In a typical story for the time, new Arizona

immigrant Moulton B. Smith sought out baby saguaros in an effort to visualize, and

photograph, young plants. In “A Baby Saguaro Fights For its Life,” Smith described his

hunt and subsequent three year observation of an individual plant that eventually

succumbed to predation.554 The idea that the small, elusive plants grew into towering giants motivated Smith to tell his readers that the desert was a harsh place for the young plants. Smith and others cared about saguaro because they lived “in the land of the Desert

Giants.” These cacti were visible manifestations of the past and the passage of time.

Author Joyce Rockwood Muench told her readers, “Sometime about the middle of the

18th century there was a sudden increase in the population of southwestern Arizona.

553 Ellsworth Huntington, “The Greenest of Deserts,” Harper’s Monthly 123 (June/Nov 1911), 53-54, 57. 554 Moulton B. Smith, “A Baby Saguaro Flights For its life,” Arizona Days and Ways (Nov., 2, 1958): 18. 240

Unmentioned by historians, thousands upon thousands of new inhabitants took over the

western foothills of the Tanque Verde Mountains.” As Tucson “slumbered,” Muench

wrote, saguaros grew into a forest.555 Smith, like so many, wanted to document that

history, to see how mighty cacti took root, to peer into the past.556 These, “monarchs of

the Desert,” were a constant source of identification with the desert. Typical was Hal

Moore’s photo essay “Clown of the Desert.” He visualized the humanity of the plants: a

bowing saguaro praying, another had a ‘bustle,’ and one wore hair pins. Others shaped an

octopus or a Spanish dancer or shaped a “‘V’…for Victory and I always knew we’d

win.”557

More scientifically informative essays merged nuanced discussion of

geographical range with the work of the saguaro’s most prominent researchers: Forrest

Shreve, Stanley Alcorn, Charles Lowe, James Hastings and Raymond Turner among others.558 This knowledge became a way to know about the desert and take action to protect nature. For example, in 1969, benefiting from nearly three quarters of a century of observations on saguaros around Tucson, Carle Hodge could merge images of pollinators: bees, bats, and birds, images of scientific measurements, and beautiful desert pictures by a coterie of photographers who had crafted a visual archive that sold desert ecology: Ray Manley, Darwin Van Campen, David Muench, Josef Muench, George Olin,

555 Joyce Rockwood Muench, “In the Land of the Desert Giants,” Arizona Highways 26 (Oct., 1950): 18-25. 556 Smith, “A baby Saguaro,” 18. 557 Hal R. Moore, “Saguaro—Clown of the Desert,” Arizona Days and Ways (May 10, 1959): 7-10. 558 Carle Hodge, “Saguaro: Monarch of the Desert,” Arizona Highways 45, no. 1 (Jan., 1969): 8-35. 241

and others. Images of saguaro fruit and flowers, saguaro landscapes, and desert perennials beneath cholla and looming saguaro, with clouds, rainbows, and the moon rising above, placed the saguaro at the center of a romantic and spectacular Sonoran

Desert. These images of beauty were also didactic; they elucidated the saguaro while placing it in the middle of a broader ecological landscape.559

Americans also saw the future through saguaros. While the constant deaths of

secreted baby saguaro went unobserved beneath nurse plants, death of the aged plants

was conspicuous and haunting. Hodge told readers that “deep freezes scythe through

[saguaro] stands, leaving behind what Dr. Lowe has described as ‘scenes of

devastation.’” Images documenting “Death of A Giant,” was practically a regional trope

in the 1950s and 1960s. Nyle Leatham’s 1963 photo documentary was typical. Four

pictures with captions documented the death. The first noted “even in death this

giant…keeps its rooted grip.” Its size marked its life history as long and complex.

Leatham imagined “generations of birds” and “centuries” of time, and now celebrated the

plant’s lasting fortitude as its skeleton stood erect and decrepit “blasted by time and

elements yet still upright.”560 Consuming the saguaro’s life history provided people to

connect with a sense of the desert’s past through the plant’s natural history.

Given their age, reading mature saguaro’s also provided observers a way to access

the human past. Harold O. Weight believed that “topped” saguaros acted as signposts

announcing hidden water sources. His information came from an Arizona pioneer who

559 Hodge, “Saguaro: Monarch of the Desert,” 9. 560 Hodge, Saguaro: Monarch of the Desert,” 9; Nyle Leatham, “Death of a Giant,” Arizona Days and Ways (Feb., 10, 1963), 12. 242

reported lore from earlier residents. Like other human signs, Arizona’s indigenous people

could trust saguaros as reliable signs. “Indians were aware of this” longevity and utilized

it, according to Weight, to free themselves “from the constant threat of death by

thirst.”561

The creation of national monuments preserving saguaros also meant that their life

cycle became a focus of conservationist thought. The most dramatic moment arrived

when, in 1940, shortly after building the visitor infrastructure for Saguaro National

Monument, University of Arizona and National Park Service personnel, observed a

noticeable dieoff of the plants. The response set the stage for managing saguaro health

and for presenting images of scientists working to ‘save’ the saguaro.

The National Park Service was seriously concerned with the cactus disease. In a special report, McDougall, NPS regional biologist, warned, “The most important wildlife problem at Saguaro National Monument…is the bacterial disease…attacking many of the saguaros.” Proceeding with unexpected rapidity, the “disease” attacked the iconic saguaros.562 They were literally decomposing, shedding their skins and draining the

thousands of pounds of water in their tissue.563 Viewed as a contagion, the blight elicited

561 Harold O. Weight, “Mystery of the Topped Sahuaros,” Westways 46, (Nov., 1954): 20-21. 562 Milton J. McColm, “Memorandum for the Director,” in “Special Report Saguaro National Monument,” SAGU 257, Box 4, Folder 40, WACC, 1-2. 563 Warren F. Steenbergh and Charles H. Lowe, Ecology of the Saguaro III: Growth and Demography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Interior, NPS, 1983). Steenbergh and Lowe provide an extensive discussion of the disease and treatment, including primary documents, in Appendix I. Their earlier volume, Warren F. Steenbergh and Charles H. Lowe, Ecology of the Saguaro: II Reproduction, Germination, Establishment, Growth, and Survival of the Young Plant NPS Scientific Monograph No. 8 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Interior, NPS, 1977), offers a useful summary of the hypotheses and studies 243

a flurry of activity among plant pathologists as they sought to determine how to deal with

the issue. The decision was to designate a test area, delimit a control area, and destroy

diseased plants in the test area.564 From October 1940 to May 1941, Monument

Custodian Don Egermayer directed National Youth Administration engineering students

from the University of Arizona in counting and marking cacti.565 Lake S. Gill, Senior

Pathologist with the Bureau of Plant Industry, and University of Arizona Paul Lightle led

the effort beginning in spring 1941. All living saguaro in sixty-four 10-acre quadrants

received numbered stakes (12,968) between September 1941 and January 1942. The

north half was staked, counted, and each saguaro received notes, but otherwise, these 320

acres acted as a control group. Researchers also recorded 1836 dry cactus skeletons. A

visual survey determined which cacti researchers would remove. Those deemed infected

received a paint mark. At the site where the disease cacti had stood, workers disinfected

the ground and any nearby cacti. By November of 1941, workers were hauling and

destroying between fifteen and eighteen per day. In different reports, the exact overall

conducted up until the time of publication. Part I of their work, a paper, was published as W.F. Steenbergh and C.H. Lowe, “Ecology of the Saguaro. I. The Role of Freezing Weather on a Warm-desert Plant Population,” in Research in the Parks, National Park Service Symposium Series no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976), 69-92. 564 L. S. Gill, “Mortality in the Giant Cactus at Saguaro National Monument 1941-1950” (January 31, 1951) in Warren F. Steenbergh, USDA Bureau of Plant Industry Cactus Disease Investigations: Reports and Related Correspondence 1941-1951 (NPS, March 1980). 565 Lake S. Gill and Paul C. Lightle, Cactus Disease Investigations: An Outline of Objectives, Plans, and Accomplishments on Project J-2-8 (Albuquerque, NM: Bureau of Plant Industry Forest Pathology, June 20, 1942), 10, in Steenbergh, USDA Bureau of Plant Industry Cactus Disease Investigations. 244

number of removed cacti varied. James Mielke, Associate Pathologist for the Bureau,

claimed 335.566

Joseph R. McAuliffe described the methods of the study as a form of hysteria.567

We might add it was a form of war hysteria. In 1942, Gill’s study fit with the highly

visible action of the war effort. In his June 1942 Natural History article, “Death in the

Desert,” Gill used the type of rhetoric, argumentation, and iconography so common from

the early war. Words like plague, virulent, and rot describe the behavior of the bacteria—

Erwinea carnegieana. For Gill, the bacteria attacked and killed its victim, operating

through military metaphors of precision and treachery. Equally importantly to his

presentation, science identified the problem quickly, and then scientists acted in a

completely lucid way—they transformed the world through physical work. Images accompanying the Natural History article showed readers a chain, attached to an off camera truck, pulling down a mighty cactus. Men sprayed chemicals on the infected ground; sectioned cacti with a cross-cut saw, hoisted them with log moving equipment, and buried them in a prepared trench. There acts were not thoughtless acts of vandalism; scientists observed, authorized, and directed the work.568 These images of purposeful

work in nature, coupled with the warlike text, as well as the public’s familiarity with the

working ethos conservation of the CCC, legitimated the rush to judgment and action.

566 Don Egermayer, “Monthly Narrative Reports, Southwestern National Monuments,” September 1941, 30, WACC; Egermayer, “Monthly Narrative Reports,” November 1941, 24 WACC; Lake S. Gill, “Memorandum,” SAGU 257, Box 4, Folder 44, WACC; Meilke in Steenbergh, USDA Report, 1980. 567 McAuliffe, “Saguaro Cactus Dynamics,” 101. 568 Lake S. Gill, “Death in the Desert,” Natural History 50 (June 1942):22-26. 245

Seen as a garden composed of a climax species this work seemed logical.

Protecting the whole and managing the land came easy. However, representatives from the NPS were split over the course of action. While, fear over the loss of the cactus forest justified the Bureau of Plant industry’s actions for Regional Director Milton McColm, the intervention raised alarm bells for W.B. McDougal. On a visit as the work got underway,

McDougal voiced his concern about the underlying assumptions and resulting intervention of the study:

If this bacterial necrosis were a recently introduced exotic, it would not be considered strange if it were to threaten the existence of the entire host species. I understand, however, that Dr. Gill has found a reference as early as about 1886 which seems to refer to this disease, and in conversations with such men as Mr. Nichol, Dr. Vorhies, and Dr. Shreve I have gained the impression that the disease has been known to them for many years…The only place where the disease has seemingly assumed serious proportions is in that part of the Saguaro National Monument where the forest is fully mature; so mature and in so dense a stand that there is practical no reproduction.569

McDougall felt that in this climax forest, change was natural yet warranted concern. He noted, He thought “young and vigorous” saguaros were combating the illness while the

“old” were succumbing in several months. Other scientists were also less certain either of classifying the phenomenon as a disease, or viewing it with alarm. Forrest Shreve was among those who took a longer view, feeling certain that growing conditions would improve.570 Despite these voices of caution, the scientific study went forward based on the assumption that the blight represented a disease that needed quarantine. The study, designed to see if destroying the diseased saguaro would slow the rate of the disease,

569 W. B. McDougall, Regional Biologist, “Special Report Saguaro National Monument,” RG79, Box 2363, NARA II; Clemensen, Cattle, Copper, Cactus, 165-68. 570 Milton J. McColm, “Memorandum for the Director,” in “Special Report Saguaro National Monument,” SAGU 257, Box 4, Folder 40, WACC, 1-2. 246

lasted in various forms until 1950. Some sense of a balanced response remained because,

as McAuliffe points out, a scientist failed to get approval for aerial spraying of DDT.571

A handful of images became iconic of the problem and the interventionist

solution. These images and accompanying themes continued to pop up in publications for

decades. In a typical example from 1960, Lucile W. Herbert set a menacing tone by

suggesting that saguaros could contract “cactus cancer.” Thinking about saguaros as

susceptible to disease in a human sense led to use of cutting edge medical therapies like penicillin, a drug mass produced during the Second World War.572

An American Sonoran Desert

Saguaro National Monument and other proxy landscapes became spaces filled

with cultural meaning. Like the labscape of Tumamoc Hill or the Desert Basins of the

Colorado, the desert mountains could act as surrogates for larger questions about

belonging. Living amid natural cactus gardens and amidst forests of saguaros transformed

the language of the desert. In the newly rich vocabulary, the landscape looked distinctly

American and a far cry from the exoticism of the mid-nineteenth century. The

participants in this conversation had a wide variety of interests and institution homes but

571 McAuliffe, “Saguaro Cactus Dynamics,” 103; Clemensen, Cattle, Copper, Cactus, 167. To date, the best summary of the cactus disease and managerial response is Joseph R. McAuliffe’s “Saguaro Cactus Dynamics.” McAuliffe identifies “three chapters” in the study of saguaro decline: mortality studies from 1939 to the 1960s; ongoing ecological studies into saguaro propagation and survival begun in the 1950s; studies of the effect of air quality dating from the Clean Air Act. Of these three chapters, the initial response was qualitatively different because the Bureau of Plant Pathology actively destroyed cacti in an effort to contain the blight. In contrast, the other two eras involved measuring and monitoring. McAuliffe, “Saguaro Cactus Dynamics,” 96-131. 572 Lucile W. Herbert, “Antibiotics for Sick Saguaros,” Westways 52 (Feb., 1960): 22-23. 247

they could speak a common language of recognizable metaphors. They could also find a common value system in ideals of progress. They made social progress through creating park spaces and explained Sonoran Desert nature through the successional theory of ecology.

248

CONCLUSION: THE WORLD IN MINIATURE:

SONORAN DESERT GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

The geographical focus on the Middle East is crucial, not simply because of oil but also because of the fundamental challenges emanating from this region toward the American Empire. During the second moment of global ambition around World War II, the United States took over from Britain and France as the major world power in the Middle East, but its power eroded almost before it was fully established.573

In April, 1954, Life Magazine put out an issue title “The Desert,” part nine of their

series “The World We live In.” The article justified its topic by highlighting that globally

desert lands covered 10 million square miles. Rather than thinking of desert as wilderness

or emptiness, author Lincoln Barnett invited readers to look beneath these obscuring

generalizations. Sure, massive sand waste ergs surged across the Sahara and Arabian deserts and the hyper-arid dune fields of Namib and the Atacama Desert’s were starkly, even magnificently, threatening.574 Yet, one fifth of desert lands had plant coverage.

Unpacking the word desert allowed its diversity to emerge. Local topography, hydrology,

rainfall patterns, plant populations, and other factors meant that the term desert covered a

573 Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xiv-xv. 574 Lincoln Barnett, “The Land of the Sun,” Life Magazine 36, no. 14 (April 5, 1954): 72- 93. Erg is the name given to a large (125 sq. kilometers) aeolian sand field. Smaller areas are usually referred to as dune fields. The “Empty Quarter,” or Rub’ al Khali is a huge sand desert on the Arabian Peninsula. Bertram Thomas and St. John Philby, in 1931 and 1932 respectively, were early outsiders who explored the region. The movie Lawrence of Arabia 1962 recounts events during World War 1 in the Empty Quarter. 249

dizzying array of landscapes. In short, deserts were more nuanced and interesting than

usually believed.

The Life article shows the enculturation of the desert through familiarizing narratives. Barnett called upon scientific descriptions, developed in part within American national settings, to interpret the world for his American audience. He noted that scientists disagreed on how to define a desert but Barnett led the reader to understand that scientific definitions had the power to explain the place. His knowledge came from

expeditionaries (scientific and otherwise) who had “crossed and recrossed,” the

landscape. And, through their efforts, there was a sense of familiarity. “All deserts,

wherever they exist—whether they are hot like those of central Australia or cold like the

Gobi—share certain aspects in common.575 The desert presented by Life was wondrous

and perhaps even exotic, but it was also domestic and familiar. One hundred years of

paper deserts consumed into an American readership lay behind Barnett’s ease of

explanation and although his article proclaimed its world outlook, the material was from

America’s “southern deserts,” in particular the Sonoran of the trans-border region of

southern Arizona and California. At the heart of this explanation were descriptions

familiar form the crafting of the Sonoran Desert, including plant-life and animals

associated exclusively with the Sonoran Desert, and even references to the role of deserts

in human civilization.576 Looming behind the simple descriptions was a vast archive of

paper deserts collected over a century and now deployed as common knowledge with the

rhetorical power to see the world from America’s desert.

575 Barnett, “Land of the Sun,” 72. 576 Of course, saguaros against a setting sun graced the cover of the cover. 250

Barnett deployed a number of familiar tactics to make his argument. He provided

maps to set the stage and populated the land with interesting nature. A color relief map of

the Mojave, and trans-border portions of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, extending

from the Pacific Coast to the Arizona-New Mexico Border, placed U.S. deserts in its

regional and national context. These North American deserts fit into a global whole through a map of atmospheric circulation: arrows from high pressure systems demonstrated why deserts fell where they did: the North American, Atacama, Sahara,

Kalahari, Australian, and Asiatic Deserts. Reduced in this fashion, the story of desert became at once unified and simplified. In essence, Life argued that through focusing on

America’s own desert—The Sonoran Desert. Filling the land were plants and animals and charismatic weather—dust storms, cloud bursts—presented in photos and paintings. One

explanatory theme was absent: the region’s human past. Barnett’s explanation grew

solely from natural history. By following the initial claim that all deserts were similar

with detailed descriptions of the American deserts, Barnett conveyed the sense that, in

essence, America’s deserts were the world in miniature: A scale model of world deserts.577 This message had been honed through years of research into the Sonoran

Desert and through ties between desert lands studies in the Sonoran Desert and other deserts in Africa, Australia, South America, and Asia. Connections between global arid land, exploration, agriculture and research cemented these ties. This conclusion recaptures connections between the Sonoran Desert and world from a global perspective

577 Life April, 1954. 251

by revisiting familiar expeditionaries who took their knowledge abroad and

demonstrating how scientific

The world rhythm of desert hearts

In 1901, British geologist John Walter Gregory spent a summer recess traveling

around the Lake Eyre District in southern Australia. This arid region has, since then,

attained a kind of scientific and cultural fame. It is an enormous playa (1.2 million square

kilometers) or inward draining basin: a remnant of a mega lake that existed during the

late Pleistocene and continues to receive monsoonal rains.578 Gregory’s 1906 account of

this exploration, The Dead heart of Australia was part of turn-of-the century burst of arid-lands adventure and exploration that accompanied the Scramble for Africa and the

apogee of European imperial expansion into the arid world. It represented a long chain of

associations between the deserts of the old European world of the Mediterranean Basin

and those of the new worlds: Australia, America, China, and India.

Gregory opened his work with the startling image of camels walking in line across a sere and flat landscape. Nothing evoked desert lands like camels in stark land.

They were imports to Australia and their presence provides a window into the connections among colonial science in arid regions.579 Camels had become universally

recognized as important tools of desert travel and were present in European and

American colonial endeavors throughout much of the nineteenth century. They were an

578 P.P. Hesse, J. G. Luly and J. W. Magee, “The Beating Heart: Environmental History of Australia’s Deserts,” in 23° South: Archaeology and Environmental History of the Southern Deserts (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005). 579John W. Gregory, The Dead Hear of Australia (London: John Murray, 1906). 252

obvious choice for arid land travel because they are desert animals. In the 1850s, Edward

Fitzgerald Beale used camels in the American Southwest.580 When he made his

acquisition, the British were busy using them in prosecuting their wars in Afghanistan.581

In Australia, camels became standard travel equipment beginning in the 1860s. Between

1870 and 1920 some 20,000 camels and 2000 Muslim cameleers arrived in Australia.

They created a network of trade routes across the interior the continent.582 Gregory’s use

of camels was part of these arid lands passages and part of the inhabitation of the arid

world by scientists.

More importantly, camels tell us how well-connected ideas about the desert were

in colonial imagination. Gregory’s research is directly to the point. The Lake Eyre region was, in his estimation, an important research location for natural history in Australia. This

“dead heart,” “was once the living heart of Australia,” a geographical center of the continent tied to the rest through geological, biological, and anthropological links.

Desiccated by large scale geological changes, the region reminded Gregory that the inland sea had once created a landscape more amenable to life. As it dried, Lake Eyre lost its outlet to the sea and became more saline and barren. Desire to understand this process

underlay his expedition.583

580 Steven Bonsal, Edward Fitzgerald Beale: A Pioneer in the Path of Empire 1822-1903 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 199. 581 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 582 Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Land 1860s-1930s (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010), 37. 583 Gregory, Dead Heart, 145-47, 151. 253

These interior basins had fascinated scientist explorers since the mid-nineteenth

century. After traveling with William Phipps Blake (who described the Colorado Desert

as a dry lake or sea), Rafael Pumpelly reported that “the great table-land of central Asia forms a shallow trough-like depression, beginning in the region between the Tienshan and the Kwen-lun mountains, and extending northeast to the Kin-gan mountains of western Manchuria and the Amoor River.

Five hundred miles wide, the bottom of the trough was “a dreary waste, called the Gobi desert.”584 “Portions of this great area,” he wrote, “are depressed below the level of the

sea…Its centre, along our route, was a broad plain of fine, sandy clay, strewn with fresh-

water shells, and appeared to be the dry bed of a fresh-water lake.”585

Pumpelly encountered the Gobi Desert as a cold and arid waste in a vast

depression. “From [the] edges,” he wrote, “which have a general elevation of 5,000 and

6,000 feet above the sea, the surface has a general descent toward the centre, where the

altitude of the plains is between 2,000 and 3,000 feet….The sandy plains, which through

the whole length occupy the centre of this shallow trough…form a dreary waste, called

the Gobi desert.”586 This “continental basin, having no drainage to the sea” held Lake

Lop, a remnant of an ancient, vanished sea. The puzzlement for Pumpelly was how this

land had dried.587 In the Gobi Desert, Pumpelly believed he found links between climate,

584 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 381. 585 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 64. 586 Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 381. 587 “At no very remote geological time,” wrote Pumpelly, “this region was the bed of an extensive sea, which during one period of its existence formed part of an ocean, extending over much of Siberia, Tartary, western Asia, and eastern Europe, connecting 254

civilization, and geology. Looking back through the years, he realized that these

connections posed the profound question: what made civilization successful in the desert?

The Gobi was something of an adventure-tourism magnet for European and

American travelers in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was part of a landscape

associated with the Silk Road, the Mongols, and the Tibetan Lamas. It was a storehouse

of the stuff of western history: the Dark Ages of the Mongol Invasion, trade with China,

and infatuation with eastern religion.588 By the turn of the century, the Gobi even offered

a route to adventure for globe-trotting American college graduate bicycle enthusiasts

Thomas Allen and William Sachtleben. Their post-graduation global circumnavigation

atop their ‘iron horses’ took them through the Gobi west to east where they experienced

the inland sea as a sandy, mosquito infested leg of their 15,000 mile trip.589 That

‘modernity,’ the bicycle, could part the desert sands, did nothing to alleviate the major

social question emerging in the United States. Namely, what did it take to subdue the

desert and make it bloom into civilization?590 The nature of desert lands posed an existential problem: did desert landscapes portend the decline of civilization?

Pumpelly returned to Asia in 1903 to answer his questions. He was accompanied

by geographer Ellsworth Huntington. Huntington wanted to uncover the intersection

the Polar sea with the waters of the Caspian and Mediterranean.” Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 381. 588 See for example Jeremiah Curtin’s The Mongols: A History (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908), Theodore Roosevelt wrote the foreword. 589 Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben, Across Asia on a Bicycle (New York: The Century Co. 1897), 162, 168. 590 Here, our attention should turn to Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: California- Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 255

between climate and civilization and found the desert basins of Asia intriguing. Pumpelly

was interested in two primary objectives: a search for ancient roots for Eurasian

civilization and to understand the role of climate in desertification. These ideas had been

in his mind since his first trip and he relished the idea that he could make progress upon

either topic. Of these, his work on desertification is more central to this paper. Looking at

Turkestan, Pumpelly saw the remnants of a vast inland sea that had once connected the

Aral, Caspian and Black Seas. The Caspian and Aral were internally draining bodies; the

Black Sea flowed into the Mediterranean. For Pumpelly, the truly fascinating aspect of this process was that the desiccation of the past seemed to be continuing into the present.

The question of desertification was both intriguing and threatening in an era of reclamation.591

While Pumpelly’s trajectory led from America to Asia, Huntington looked first to

Asia then went to Tucson to work with tree-dating expert A.E. Douglas and Desert Lab staff, especially MacDougal.592 His 1907 work The Pulse of Asia focused on the role of

climate in human history. Ambitious and overreaching, he captured a sense of the global

with his focus at the intersections of geology and civilization.593 Whether intentionally

mimicking Gregory or not, Huntington choose to call the Lop, or Tarim Basin, the “heart

of Asia.” It was the beating heart because it measured time on a vast scale of the advance

and retreat of waters but it was also the heart because it sat in the “middle” of Asia. A

591 Raphael Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan with an account of the Basin of Eastern Persia and Sistan (Wash., D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1903), 1, 5. 592 Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic Basis of History (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919). 593 Huntington went big arguing that climate was also responsible for the social organization Percival Lowell had observed on Mars, Pulse, 6. 256

great declivity of stony desert, rimmed by mountains and inhabited lands, and centered

on the great salt lake of Lop-Nor.594

Huntington was working along parallel paths with other researchers around the globe.595 Utah’s Great Salt Lake, New Mexico’s Otero Basin, and other U. S. locations provided additional examples and these kind of desert basins that could flood and

evaporate. Daniel MacDougal at the desert botanical lab was well aware of all these

examples. The Salton Sea was therefore both an endemic Sonoran Desert environment

and a site for research that could address one of the major intersections between nature

and culture: agriculture.

He understood these desert basins in their global reach. In his work on the Salton

Sea, he noted that these features were found in all the world’s deserts. The flooding of the

Salton Sea during the 1890s and, especially, in 1905-7, made these desert basins an area

of rich research. Having seen the flooding first hand, MacDougal and others could look around desert lands and imagine the role of these floods in other ecosystems and at other times. They could also begin to read the role of broad climatic changes in forming past landscapes.596

Gregory and others in Australia were also thinking about deep time and

agricultural potential. Some Australians argued for flooding Lake Eyre with sea water.

Reaches of the basin are below sea level and cutting a canal seemed a viable way to bring

water to the desert. Similar ideas had been proposed for the Sahara and as flooding

594 Huntington, Pulse, 92. 595 John Walter Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia (London: John Murray, 1906). 596 Daniel MacDougal, The Salton Sea, 115-16. 257

proceeded in the Salton Sink, southern California. Of course the Australian canal would

have to be enormous and costly, and therefore generally impractical. It would also

introduce salt water into a lake troubled by the problems of salt concentrations. Yet

agricultural dreams have overcome many impracticalities.597 The parallel and recursive

qualities to work in south Australia, the Lop Basin, and the Sonoran Desert is perhaps

best understood as good scientific dialogue. It also represents how researchers were

flushing out a description of desert nature that was both general and based in the

comparison of specifics.598 There is no doubt that Sonoran Desert researchers like

MacDougal and Huntington were thinking comparatively with other regions. When

MacDougal wrote up his formal study of the Salton Sea, William Blake wrote the

introduction. He was among the first to describe the extinct sea in the Cahuilla Basin and

had a broad sense of these kinds of geological landscapes.599 When MacDougal worked

on the Salton Sea, Blake was a geologist at Tucson’s University of Arizona and a project

collaborator.

In the best tradition of Humboldtian geography and time, the studies of desert

basins, designed to see a specific places, had connections that spanned Asia, the

American West, and Australia. Scientists with global connections travelled into regions and tied those places to big stories of climate change and agriculture. One final story can

597 Gregory, Dead Heart, 346-49. 598 See William A Cannon’s use of Gregory’s work in Plant Habits and Habitats in the Arid Portions of South Australia (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921). 599 Blake noted that Captain A. R. Johnson, accompanying Kearney’s march to California wrote “At a no distant day, this place place which is now a dry desert, was once a permanent lake,” in H. T. Cory, The Imperial Valley and Salton Sink (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915), 4. 258

make the breadth of this vision clear. In his beautiful 1906 The Wonders of the Colorado

Desert, George Wharton James recounted a story from the nineteenth century when U.S. army surgeon J. P. Widney, stationed in Yuma, published a plan to re-flood the Salton

Sink. He viewed the plan as feasible and desirable because it might reduce temperatures and make wetter the local rainfall patterns. At the heart of his vision was the idea that the vast inland basin could somehow further a productive civilization. Widney wrote: “The inquiry naturally arises, ‘At what point has this desert been connected to the sea, and how has it been shut off?’” For Widney, the puzzle of the vanished sea was the puzzle of the whole region. In Arizona, native peoples toiled amid the ruins of ancient civilization and the “remains of old forests.” As he phrased it, the “remains of former vegetation and relics of dead races.” Flooding the desert offered the promise of rebuilding the world anew. In essence, replacing the desert with a sea could reset the clock of progress.600

Quite apart from these Fin de siècle musings, connections between the Sonoran and world deserts followed researchers across the globe and into their publications.

Desert Lab Roots and Global Visions

The labscape of the Desert Botanical Lab gave researchers the ability to export their analysis of the desert of Arizona led researchers to global deserts. A case in point was the work of William Cannon, first researcher at the Desert Botantical Lab. He was a young researcher when he began work at the Desert Botanical Lab in 1903.601 He rapidly published in major American journals on the subjects of transpiration, roots growth, life

600 George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Compay, 1906), 271-276; The Overland Monthly 10 (January, 1873), (San Francisco: John H. Carmany & Company, 1873): 44-50, quotes from 45 and 46. 601 See Kingsland, American Ecology. 259

zones in the desert and how plants manage resources in the desert. He thought cactus

especially valuable because they revealed adaptation to arid lands in their structure and his most important early work was the 1911 Root Habits of Desert Plants.602 Cannon, and

other Lab researchers like Burton Livingston, thought of the desert as an ideal environment for the study of plants. They felt the extreme qualities of the land served to

emphasize adaptations found more widely in flora.603 Cannon’s work led him out from

Tucson to study other arid regions of the world. In 1905 he took on the challenge of old

world deserts with his own finely honed Sonoran Desert knowledge. “It appeared at

once,” wrote Cannon, that contrary to descriptions from the Egyptian Sahara, the Sonoran

Desert’s “native plants are not poor in water-conducting tissue.”604 In the second year of

his research posting to Tucson’s Carnegie Desert Lab, Cannon was beginning to

challenge ideas about what shaped plant relations in arid lands and his research and

observations were realizing the lab’s promise as an engine for understanding arid land

flora. The German botanist Georg Volkens, working in Egypt in 1884-85, wrote with the

professorial authority of a colonial scientist when describing desert plants. That Cannon

was thinking about Volkens’ work is hardly surprising. European Powers were, like the

United States, busy describing their desert colonial lands. Yet Cannon, working on the

602 William Cannon, “Biological Relations of Certain Cacti,” American Naturalist 40, no. 469 (Jan., 1906), 27. 603 William Cannon, The Root Habits of Desert Plants (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1911), 10. 604 William A. Cannon, “On the Water-Conducting Systems of Some Desert Plants,” Botanical Gazette 39, no. 6 (June 1905), 397. 260

grounds of Desert Lab, could challenge these assertions from his rapidly accumulating basis of knowledge about the Sonoran Desert.605

For research subjects he had only to gather and monitor plants from the landscape surrounding the lab. From close study of the lab and its vicinity, Cannon produced a vivid account of the individual nature and ecological context of desert plants. The fullness of description was compelling. Water flows, root structure, the role temperature created a suite of interlocking explanations for desert life.606 What he found was that water mattered. Across a wide range of terrain, from the well-watered Santa Cruz River bottom, to the more arid slopes of Tumamoc Hill, typical species like the palo verde, cat claw acacia, ocotillo, creosote, and hackberry varied in size. Under irrigation they reacted with vigorous growth. Rather than exhibiting a poor ability to transport water, they reacted quickly to resources.607

The importance of Cannon’s work wasn’t only that he knew a great deal more about arid land root systems but also that he had produced this scientific expertise from his base in Tucson. This endemic knowledge acted as a countervailing force to other arid lands research around the world. This knowledge became important to researchers around the world608

605 Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1880-1900 (New York: Cambridge, 1990). 606 William Cannon, The Root Habits of Desert Plants, Carnegie Institution of Washington, no. 131 (1911). 607 Cannon, “Water-Conducting,” 399. 608 For example, The Government Botanist of the Education Department, Soudan Government, Khartoum, Soudan, r. G. G. Massey requested Carnegie Publications 113 Distribution and Movement of Desert Plants; No. 50 The Relation of Desert Plants to Soil Moisture and to Evaporation; No. 131 The Root Habits of Desert Plants; No. 178 261

Cannon published his Sonoran Desert-based Root Habits the same year he took his expertise to North Africa. Intentionally referencing Daniel MacDougal’s Botanical

Features of North American Deserts (1906), Cannon called his 1913 African summary

Botanical Features of the Algerian Sahara. His own interest was root development and he titled sections with headings like “Root-habits in the Ghardaia Region.” However, the work was much more broadly conceived. Half travelogue, half scientific description, he disaggregated the Saharan desert along the lines of research generated from the desert laboratory.609 “We are said,” Cannon boasted, “to be the second party of ‘Englishmen’

who had passed over the Ghardaia-Ouargla country in twenty-five years.”610 Staking claim to the originality of his trip, he set about narrating the 2 million square miles of

“extremely varied” desert of the Algerian Sahara. From this vast whole, Cannon focused on the desert between Laghouat and Ghardaia, a region he believed was ‘topographically representative’ of the whole. These features included a region of dayas or shallow depressions ranging in size from meters to kilometers. These common features of arid lands captured freshwater (when available) and therefore often held greater numbers of plants.611 Water entered the region through rainfall runnoff from the Saharan Atlas along

Botanical Features of the Algerian Sahara; No. 194 The Daily March of Transpiration in a Desert Perennial, MacDougal to Gilbert Feb 17, 1915, AZ 356, Box 3, Folder 4 “Walter M. Gilbert (Assist. Sec.) 1911-1916. 609 William Cannon, Botanical Features of the Algerian Sahara Carnegie Institution of Washington, no. 178 (1913). 610 Cannon, Algerian Sahara, 1, 611 Canon, Algerian Sahara, 3; These features are common to world deserts: “They are known by different names in different countries:--dongas in Australia, balte in Libya, vleis in South Africa, and chor or sor in the Kara Kum desert of central Asia,” C. W. Mitchell and S. G. Willimott, “Dayas of the Moroccan Sahara and other Arid Regions,” The Geographical Journal 140, no. 3 (Oct., 1974), 441, 441-453. It is worth noting that 262

oueds—sporatic river beds. Most terrain was either stony plains (hamada, where stones are absent the desert is called reg), chotts (dry salt plains), and sand mountains (ergs) reaching 1000 feet. Dunes were, however, infrequent.612 As with the Sonoran Desert, vegetation was found clustered along the oueds (arroyos, washes, rivers) where ground water approched the surface and sporadic rainfall concentrated as runoff.613 Reading the

Algerian desert became an exercise in pursuing research topics developed at the desert lab. Temperature, rainfall, elevation, surface water, subsurface water, topograhy, and plant composition were obvious paths into explaining the Algerian Desert.

These descriptions didn’t stay closeted within academic works. MacDougal published an account of a trip to Libya in Harpers. This popular account focused attention on exotic subjects readers might like: camel behavior, Bedouin behavior and

Oases. But MacDougal was ever on the lookout for ways to educate and he discussed the movement of “golden” sand dunes that “under a westerly wind…take on a knife-edge sharpness” and remembered to place the oases within depressions for his readers—a reminder that these great oases required ground water. He also wanted to place U.S. deserts in context and make a plug for the Desert Lab. “Regions in southwestern America that convey the impression of extreme aridity are,” he wrote, actually, “rich in life, and

Mitchell and Willimott continued their comparative approach by including two dayas from Torrance County, New Mexico and Lamb County, Texas in the United States. 612 Cannon, Algerian Sahara, 4. Oued (pronounced wad) are also called wadi, kouri, or nahal. It usually means a sporadic or seasonal water way; Thomas Henry Kearney and Thomas Herbert Means, Agricultural Explorations in Algeria, U.S. Dept. Agr. Bur. Plant Industry Bulletin 80 (1905). 613 Cannon discusses roots, plants, and groundwater in Root Habits, 89-92. He doesn’t specifically make this connection but it is clear that having learned the nature of desert plants in Arizona, he applied these lessons in Algeria. 263

that part of Arizona contiguous to the domain of the Desert Lab bears as many species of

plants per square mile as the densest tropical rainforest.” The desert east of the Nile was

also rich in diversity, he continued, and, while their route through the Libyian Desert was

much more stark, even here animals and plants showed adaptations evident to a careful

observer.614

Huntington’s sense of climatic time prevaded the works of desert lab researchers.

In 1909, MacDougal argued that increasing evidence from Australia, Asia, and North

American and Northern and Southern Africa “tends to establish the conclustion that the

climate has undergone oscillations,” He argued the same point when looking at the

Libyian Desert.615 Likewise, while writing his version of the trip, Godfrey Sykes thought

it “probable” the Libyian desert had a wetter past.616 Cannon joined in with a discussion

of climate in Australia.617 Seeing climate as an actor in shaping past and present

landscapes provided a continuity between the Sonoran Desert and global arid lands.

Mapping World Cacti

Collecting and describing cacti also placed the Sonoran Desert in global context.

As discussed in chapter 3, collecting cacti did both scientific and cultural work.

Collecting relied upon collecting the plants themselves and collecting the stories of the

plants: their ecological setting, their discovery, their appearance in scientific literature.

614 Daniel MacDougal, “By Caravan through the Libyan Desert,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 127 (Sept., 1913), 493-97. 615 MacDougal, “The Origin of Desert Floras,” in Volney Spalding, Distribution and Movement of Desert Plants, 114; MacDougal, “Caravan,” 494. 616 Godfrey Sykes, “A Journey in the Libyan Desert,” Bul. Am. Geog. Soc. 44, no. 10 (1912), 721-22. 617 William Cannon, Plant Habits and Habitats in the Arid Portions of South Australia (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1921), 39. 264

An effort to definitively place cacti in global context also linked the local landscape to a

global story. The most profound effort to create a reference work for cacti began in 1904,

when interest in cactus led to an effort at creating an encyclopedic description of the

Cactaceae family. Heading the effort were Nathanial Lord Britton of the New York

Botanical Garden and Joseph Nelson Rose of the Smithsonian. Both had strong ties to the

Desert Lab and used Lab staff as a source for Sonoran Desert plants. Between 1911 and

1923, they travelled, collected, sorted, organized, and published an authoritative

taxonomy for the genus. The effort tied Arizona’s cactus lands to wild and horticultural

cactus across the Americas and into the cactus houses of Europe. The stories collected in

the act of organizing cactus linked local to global. However, the work was also rooted in

a specific place and set of experiences. The first volume opened with a frontispiece image

of an arborescent Opuntia fulgida and a massive saguaro (Carnegia giganteus) carrying the title: “Cactus Desert in Arizona.” Originally published by the Carnegie Institution of

Washington, The Cactus and Succulent Society of America reprinted it in 1931. Both publications demonstrate the centrality of the Sonoran Desert to the making the project.618

A quick perusal of Britton and Rose’s first volume (1919) demonstrates the vast

network of experts, botanical collections, and natural landscapes necessary for the work.

618 N. L. Britton and J. N. Rose, The Cactaceae: Descriptions and Illustrations of Plants of the Cactus Family Vol. 1 (Los Angeles: The Cactus and Succulent Society of America, 1931), Introduction. Although the work was broad in scope and professional in nature; it had its roots in Tucson and received amateur support. One indication of this support is that N. L. Britton was the honorary president for The Cactus and Succulent Society of America.

265

Expert collectors sent specimens from the Caribbean, South America, and North

America-Mexico, the U.S. and southern Canada. The researchers themselves covered

many of the important cactus regions of Mexico, the West Indies, the southern (Sonoran)

region of the U.S. and visited all major desert regions of South America, although, they

found four years were insufficient to cover the vast “cactus deserts” there. Beyond their own research they had correspondence with a long list of collectors and experts that fed them plants and information from Columbia, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico,

Guatemala, Cuba, Jamaica, and from the across the United States. Familiar names contributed: Charles Orcutt, D. T. MacDougal, Forrest Shreve, Francis Lloyd, S. B.

Parish, J. J. Thornber, T.D. A. Cockerell, Homer Shantz, and Frederick Coville. Dozens of other collectors also contributed.

Building a taxonomy required assessing specimens housed in the world’s botanical gardens. Britton and Rose worked with a national and international network of

botanic gardens and herbariums. American gardens included Missouri Botanical Garden,

Grey Herbarium (Harvard), Rocky Mountain Herbarium (Laramie, Wyoming), the

USDA collection, University of California (Berkeley), and the Field Museum of Natural

History. Rose went to Europe and studied at Kew (London), the British Museum of

Natural History, the herbarium of the Linnean Society, La Mortola, Italy (Sir Thomas

Hanbury’s collection), Public parks and gardens across Italy, Munich’s Royal Botanical

Museum and Royal Botanical Garden. He travelled to Halle to look at mammillarias at

Botanische Garten der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and to Erfurt,

Germany to see collections. The result of these efforts was to knit together widely 266

dispersed holdings and create a taxonomy of the Cactaceae. It was an adventure that spanned the Atlantic World but drew its inspiration from the earlier exchanges between

American centers of science and the southern deserts of the mid-nineteenth century or the relationship between the New York Botanical Garden and Desert Botanical Lab.

The work was full of stories: “Mr. H. Pittier informs us that this species is common in the open coastal forests along the Pacific side in Costa Rica [Pereskia nicoyana named for the Nicoya Peninsula].” “The specific name of this plant [Nopalea cochenillifera] was given because it is one of the species of cactus from which cochineal was obtained. Cochineal was long supposed to be a vegetable product; it was not until

1903 that, by the aid of the microscope it was definitely determined to be of insect origin,” they wrote. The story continues: It was an ancient industry; Spain understood its significance in 1518; Cortez had orders to retrieve it in 1523; its cultivation spread to the

Spanish empire. The Canary Islands sprouted massive nopalries [plantations of nopal] that produced six million pounds of dye in 1868. Some fields contained 50,000 plants.

The scale insect [Dactylopius coccus] was a big winner in the Columbian Exchange.

Stories came in lots of shapes. Some started with a history of the act of collecting—“sent from Mexico by Karwinsky”—then delved into efforts at description—

“Salm-Dyck thought it an Opuntia in 1850. Once it flowered under scientific observation

(1879) it shifted to the Nopalea karwinskiana of Britton and Rose. They based their description upon a specimen at the New York Botanical Garden. Other stories were more convoluted. The genus Opuntia grows “naturally from Massachusetts to British Columbia south to the Strait of Magellan.” The name Opuntia comes from a Greek town. Its 267

extensive range and diverse appearance led to many splitting and lumping efforts. Karl

Schumann found 131 species in 1898. Charles Antoine Lemaire (1800-1871), whose extensive publications on cacti from the 1830s on made him a noted expert, split some

West Indies Opuntia into Consolea. They had “a pronounced cylindric trunk…peculiar semaphore-like branches…and very small flowers.” Others from Bolivia and Argentina he wished to call Tephrocactus. Jacob Bigelow found Cactodendron with Whipple in

1856. It was a species of arborescent Opuntia. Britton and Rose pointed out that many of these names spoke for the same species. Beyond scientific names, Opuntia had many popular names: prickly pear, tuna, sucker, bull sucker, cane, cholla, tasajo, and others.619

In their four volumes, Britton and Rose managed to capture an expansive history of cacti as cultural phenomenon and scientific specimens. Stories piled up as histories of description; the housing of collections; and the landscapes of a hundred deserts. Their work provided a global vision to a family of plants and a widely used reference work for professional and amateur collectors wishing to fill out a collection or point to an authoritative description. In 1931, the California-based Cactus and Succulent Society reprinted the work. The need for the work was clear. The limited run printed by the

Carnegie Institution was failing to meet demand from professionals and amateurs alike.

In “The Plan for Completing ‘The Cactaceae’” the authors noted that “request have been received from every corner of the globe…[and] One issue of the Librarian Bulletin contained 60 requests from libraries endeavoring to find copies.” The Cactus Society was not acting alone. German societies and other European societies were trying to help raise

619 Britton and Rose, Cactaceae, Vol. 1, 13 Pereskia nicoyana, Nopalea cochenillifera 34, Nopalea karwinskiana 38 , Opuntia 42-44. 268

the money for the printing. The effort brought together a trans-Atlantic network of cactus

lovers who valued the global reach of Britton and Rose’s work and formed a support

network and market for their reference work.620

Desert agriculture

The relations between science and markets were also at the heart of desert

agriculture. Looking out over Bamako, on the Niger River in the French Sudan, Robert

Forbes wrote “the atmosphere of the place was instantly familiar” like “Tulsa, Oklahoma,

El Centro, California or Tombstone, Arizona, in its palmy days.” By palmy days Forbes

meant a time of success, of growth, and opportunity.621 Whether he intended to or not, his

choices for comparable cities indicate a mental geography worth tracking. Tulsa, set on

the Arkansas River, had once been the re-established homeland of displaced Creek people. In the early 1900s it became a major producer of oil. In both incarnations, it was an archetypal colonial landscape with resource exploitation, speculation, land fraud, and dispossession.622 El Centro was a twentieth century creature born of the irrigation

schemes for using Colorado River water in the Imperial Valley, California. Situated 50

feet below sea level, the fields of El Centro gleamed green with the promise of a desert

agricultural utopia. Tombstone was of course a storied landscape in Arizona’s founding

620 Britton and Rose, Cactaceae, Vol. 2, “The Plan for Completing ‘The Cactaceae,’” 113. 621 OED, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/view/Entry/136498?redirectedFrom=P almy+days#eid32094103 8.28.12 622 Donald L. Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1998), Chapter 2 “The Osage Murders and Oil.” 269

mythology: scene of frontier violence and mining. Its history also fascinated Forbes for personal reasons. He moved to Tucson in 1894, when the American-Apache wars were still fresh in living memory. His wife, Georgie Hazel Scott, was born in Arizona

Territory. Her homesteading family history included violent interactions with Apache and deep roots in the Tucson area.623

If we play with Forbes’ words a little bit we will quickly think about the agricultural visions that palms inspired in the Sonoran Desert. Forbes arrived in Tucson to teach and practice chemistry and his job soon came to involve management of an

Arizona Agricultural Research Station project to acclimate date palms to the Territory.624

In 1898, Arizona’s Agricultural Research Stations began to import palms in an effort to find a marketable crop for lands too alkaline for other crops. Date palms (Phoenix dactylifera) were longtime components of established date palm groves in the cities and towns of Sonora and California, and scattered plants around southern Arizona. Joaquin

Carrillo of Tucson had a date palm planted before the civil war, there were some on the grounds of Yuma territorial prison, and some planted in Phoenix. Others grew at

Government Indian School, Phoenix and ranches in the Salt River valley. In 1898, the

U.S. Department of Agriculture began to import date suckers from North Africa.

From the point of view of the USDA, date palms looked like an ideal crop plant for alkali soils in the southwest. “The most intense heat, the most excessive dryness of

623 Charles C. Colley, The Century of Robert H. Forbes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 4. 624 For a recent excellent undergraduate paper on Arizona palms see Mary A McCarthy, “Date Palms in the Desert: Reimagining and Cooperating with Nature in Arid Arizona,” Arizona Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 1 https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/azjis/article/view/16003 270

air, the absence of all rainfall for months at a time during the growing season, and even

the hot, dry winds that blow in desert regions are not drawbacks,” wrote Walter Swingle

in 1904. Rather, these conditions were advantageous. Swingle and other experts found

motivation for their efforts in the expanding system of irrigated lands in the Salton Basin.

Canal building and water delivery from the Colorado began in 1891 to 125,000 acres.

Much of the land was too salty for most crops and Swingle believed a full twenty-five percent was ideal only for date palms. What looked like a problem was actually an opportunity. The hot land could provide a ‘natural’ monopoly for date producers since it was better suited for dates than any other portion of North America and potentially as good as any land in the Sahara.625

In 1890, the USDA began importing date suckers from North Africa. Plants went out for testing in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Tulare, California, Tempe, Arizona, and

Yuma on the Colorado River. Transplanting suckers should have assured good dates since known producers could provide genetic clones. Yet this first batch proved of low

quality. In 1898, Forbes convinced the University of Arizona to make a serious try at

establishing a viable and scientifically-based research grove at Tempe. They founded a

fifteen acre Experiment Station. Forbes became director of Territorial stations and Walter

Swingle headed to Africa to collect reliable palm suckers. The first batch was a

disappointment. Low quality and high attrition in Arizona drove Swingle back across the

625 Walter T. Swingle, “The Date Palm and its Utilization in the Southwestern States,” USDA, Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin no. 53 (1904), 11-13. 271

Atlantic. He went into French Algeria and gathered four hundred shoots. These plants arrived in 1900 and proved a basis for the date palm experiments.626

Everywhere he looked, Forbes saw parallels and opportunities tying Sonoran

Desert nature to Egyptian agriculture. Date palms were part of a growing arid lands agricultural presence in southern Arizona. He planted alfalfa from the oasis of Oued Rhir,

Algeria, Egyptian cotton, sorghum, wheat, and corn varietals from North Africa, and olives modeled on French colonial efforts in Africa. The Colorado was reminiscent of the

Nile. Making use of the landscape would require efforts similar to those practiced by the

British and the French. He hoped to make Yuma the center of a “New Egypt,” rich in the agricultural crops. Forbes sent Albert Vinson back to north Africa to hunt for crop opportunities. Vinson succeeded with reports on crops including figs and cacti.627 Forbes used old world desert agriculture to explain Sonoran Desert potential to himself and others: he planted the land with the idea that arid lands could be prosperous.

In 1918, Forbes went to Egypt in the employ of the Société Sultanienne d’Agriculture as an effort to bring his Arizona desert agricultural expertise to the endeavor. He brought 800 types of plants from Arizona and the Southwest. For four years, Forbes imported and developed agricultural products in the Nile River valley and when his tour ended, he hired on with another development company working along the

Niger River. Forbes was able to translate his agricultural expertise onto French colonial landscapes because the practice of agriculture was similar in both regions.628 His

626 Collier, The Century, 17-19. 627 Collier, The Century, 20-23. 628 Collier, The Century, 43. 272

adventure on the Niger recaptured development schemes in the Colorado Desert and arid

lands of Arizona. In this new frontier, U.S. developed expertise went out to new colonial

landscapes in other exotic (to Forbes) settings. The familiarity of the places only

highlight the colonial aspects of Arizona’s agricultural landscape.

The colonial ties between the Sonoran Desert and the Niger River recall that

desert agricultural development was crucial to expanding national markets and

international markets. Forbes spend decades making Arizona agriculture a success and

was able to export this knowledge out to other colonial landscapes. The process of

acclimating plants across arid lands was common practice. From the 1860s forward,

Californian and Australia had extensive exchanges of plants and knowledge.629 The

exchange between arid lands was global.

The Joseph Wood Krutch Garden and the mysterious wandering boojum trees: A lesson in commemoration and commodification

At the center of the University of Arizona’s mall is a small desert garden commemorating Joseph Wood Krutch. A long-time Tucsonan and conservationist involved with Sonoran Desert nature, Krutch’s garden is a remnant of the more extensive desert gardens planted on the campus between 1891 and the 1930s. The garden is dense with plants meaningful to understanding the Sonoran Desert: ocotillo, cat claw acacia, organ pipe cactus, soaptree yucca, creosote, Englemann prickly pear, cardon, Indian fig, velvet mesquite, and of course saguaro among others. Sprouting from the middle is a lone whitish stalk rising thirty feet into the air. It is the last survivor of a set of Boojum plants

629 Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods. 273

transplanted in the 1920s from the Baja Penninsula. Fouquieria columnaris, the “torch

tree,” or cirio is often described as “a spiny upside-down carrot.”630 Its native range is the

central Baja Peninsula.631 These plants have a deep scientific history. In 1858 botanist

John Allan Veatch collected one on Cedros Island. Albert Kellogg described it the next

year. Other nineteenth century collectors included Charles Russell Orcutt, Townshend

Stith Brandegee, and George P. Miller.632 Twentieth century mentions were accordingly

more frequent with the University of Arizona’s Robert R. Humphrey becoming an expert

on the plants through work spanning at least 50 years.633 The pivotal moment in this

history of placing the boojums in the Joseph Wood Krutch garden took place in 1922

when Godfrey Sykes, spied one through his telescope and called out “Ho Ho, a Boojum,

Definitely a Boojum!”634 Collected and planted, they became the central attraction of the

Mexican Garden at the University (Fig. 29). Recounting the story of Sykes’ naming the

Boojum is one of the most familiar accounts used to convey the ties between the

630 For an account of garden see Tamara McClung at http://arboretum.arizona.edu/krutch- garden (retrieved 10.31.12); Elizabeth Davison describes it so, http://arboretum.arizona.edu/boojum (retrieved 10.31.12); She may have been referencing Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1961 description in The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1961); See also Robert R. Humphrey’s “Ho Ho, a Boojum, Definitely a Boojum!” Journal of the Southwest 31, no. 3 (Autumn, 1989): 378-415. 631 McGinnies, Discovering the Desert, 205 after Robert R. Humphrey, The Boojum and it Home (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974). 632 Frank Hall Knowlton, “The Torch Tree,” Plant World 2, no. 2 (Oct., 1898): 12-14; see also the Harvard University Herbarium database http://kiki.huh.harvard.edu/databases/botanist_index.html (retrieved 10.31.12). 633 Robert R. Humphrey, The Boojum and its Home (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974). Such a nice title and a reference to Forrest Shreve’s 1931 The Cactus and its Home. 634 Humphrey, “Ho Ho,” 384, drawn from his larger work and citing Sykes’ son Glenton Sykes. 274

scientific community of Tucson and the Sonoran Desert. It is a playful account, rich with the character of Sykes, and the sense of discovery and adventure that scientists were calling into existence a meaningful story of place. It is a creation myth. Sykes is a culture hero for people who study the Sonoran Desert. An adventurous and learned person, he is remembered for both the unassuming manner in which he undertook nearly mythical exploits and his research on Sonoran Desert topics. The Boojums recall both the man and the era when Tucson scientist crafted the Sonoran Desert and their labor placed Tucson at its center.

In 2012, one original Boojum remains. It stands partially obscured next to a spreading cat claw acacia. Beneath it, amid the brush and cacti, the grounds staff has been planting a new generation of Boojums—two to four feet tall, I first noticed these adolescent plants about the time that one of the large Boojums was falling from decay.

Periodical I returned to look at them. I counted five one day by picking a careful path through spiny things. The next time I passed by some were missing. After that, I began to keep better track and found that they seemed to come and go. A few weeks ago, I found only two. The answer was quite simple, grounds staff were re-arranging them. Two boojums appeared next to the old Robert Forbes Agriculture building like lawn art. These plants are cultural commodities and decoration. Easily (I guess) transplanted, they are spiny decorations and commodities of place. They are expensive, slow growing and controlled through treaty and thus valuable.635 Of course, the boojum plants are part of a

635 The boojum or Fouquieria columnaris is controlled under CITES, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, 275

collection that makes up the University of Arizona’s outdoor botanic garden and they are therefore bit players in a larger work.

The meaning of these actions is somewhat more profound than simply the transplanting of garden plants. The boojum and Joseph Wood Krutch garden commemorate a way of seeing the Sonoran Desert as integrated into the university mission and Tucson culture. They mark three distinct historical moments in this construction: creation of the cactus garden, an era of heroic scientific work at integrating the Sonoran Desert, and a burst of popularization of consuming the desert: Toumey,

Sykes, Krutch. Yet the garden is a mere remnant of the desert campus of the 1930s. The boojum are also problematic. They evoked this moment in time when Tucson imagined itself the center of a region knit together by scientific descriptions and beguiling nature.

The plants are, of course, exotic, and they require care. They need to mean something to justify that care. Plants like the boojum or saguaro are highly transportable. Use of them to describe a place is therefore somewhat suspect. In 1930, because private and commercial collectors were taking so many cactus and other desert plants, Arizona had to pass a law against harvesting cactus from state land. Saguaro became protected species safe from developers’ graders. Saguaro became the hallmark of the Arizona desert.

However, it also became a commodity of place that followed lines of commerce as well as ecology. Saguaro grace southern California: trophies planted to convey place. They prove the transportability of meaning and the placelessness of commodities. What is true for saguaro is true of boojums and other plants. http://www.cites.org/eng/resources/pub/checklist08/Annotated_CITES_Appendices_and_ reservations.pdf 276

Other efforts at establishing place are equally fraught with contradictions. In a

reflective and perceptive 1970s moment, long time arid lands researcher William

McGinnies noted that Arizona’s portion of the Sonoran Desert was the best known since

it was the most intensively studied.636 This honest reflection, gained in no small part

through his own effort to understand the Sonoran Desert, points to the power of research

agendas: they illuminate and provide the material necessary to tell a convincing story.

From James Toumey to William McGinnies, researchers had crafted a detailed and convincing natural history of the Sonoran Desert. Its exceptionally rich environment was, in a sense, the result of an exceptionally rich research agenda driven by interests ranging from love of place, to the pursuit of pure science, and the necessities of commercial exploitation. Yet, efforts to research the Sonoran Desert were always part of colonial processes. How could they not be? The roots of Sonoran Desert science grew from within the context of colonial conquest and took root within systems of value bound up in global imperial imperatives. The boundary and railroad surveys were exploration and empire.637

The establishment of the University of Arizona had a core purpose of facilitating

agriculture in arid lands; an effort designed at heart to conquer the land through

settlement.638 The Desert Botanical Lab was similar to, and drew inspiration from, a

global network of European research labs designed to assist in European colonialism. Its

purpose was to understand the arid west, a nationalist research agenda, and the nature of

636 William McGinnies et. al., eds. Deserts of the World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1968), 6-7. 637 Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire. 638 See Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 277

aridity: a transportable commodity useful in far flung arid landscapes like West Africa,

Western Asia, the Mediterranean rim, Southern Africa, the Thar Desert of western India

and Pakistan, and Australia’s vast and diverse arid reaches. Research developed in

Tucson was thus both colonial setting and imperial school; studying Arizona assisted US

domination and provided the tools necessary to look out at global arid lands. The

expertise gained by U.S. scientists in the Sonoran Desert became the basis for a

comparative model useful in generalizing about the world’s deserts in the first half of the

twentieth century. By the 1950s, Sonoran Desert research has so thoroughly entered the

American lexicon that it made the rest of the world legible along its own terms.639

In Tucson lore, important men of science step from the train. Robert Forbes

stepped off, hopped the cattle fence around the University of Arizona and began to build

a flourishing agricultural program that led him to French Mali and back to the Arizona

Legislature.640 Likewise, Forest Shreve stepped from West Indies Jamaica into the dust of

Tucson, liked what he found and helped fashion American arid land studies and desert ecology. Almost from the moment that the train linked Tucson to the east, scientists stepped on and off the Southern Pacific with designs for the study of nature. Scientists played an unusually important civic role in Tucson because in the early decades of the

Twentieth Century, Tucson was an entrepot to an American colony: Arizona. Sure,

Hispanic Tucson is as old as the declaration of Independence, and the banks of the Santa

639 In 1954, four years after his death, Forrest Shreve and Ira Wiggins’s definitive world on the Sonoran Desert came out. The research had been done in the 1930s but Wiggins worked long additional hours finished floras for the region. 640 Charles C. Colley, The Century of Robert H. Forbes (Tucson: The Arizona History Society, 1977); Janice Bowers, A Sense of Place. 278

Cruz around Tumamoc Hill has an ancient and nearly continuous human presence, yet the region was, in many ways, more colonial than territorial. This is a history in the shape of a puzzle: How to understand the incorporation of the Sonoran Desert into the American nation state. It is a history about a colonial landscape predicated on extractive resources and agricultural improvement at the moment that the anxieties of all these changes began to leave a bitter taste. Scientists play an unusually prominent role in this story because were active participants in defining the Sonoran Desert as an understandable place. They helped ‘transcribe’ the Sonoran Desert for America. They named plants, animals, peoples, uncovered human, natural, and cosmic histories, and smoothed the way for

American inhabitation by underwriting the agricultural transformation of southern

Arizona with stories of natural environments fit for irrigation and conquest. They established laboratories to acclimate crops to arid lands, or make arid lands productive with waterworks. Make no mistake, Arizona was a colonial space. Since the middle of the Civil War, it was a stand-alone territory that, once populous enough, could become a state. Thus, boosters could imagine it America. But America’s national geography in the nineteenth and early twentieth century flowed along racial lines, and Arizona, Hispanic and Native American, skirted the edge of white comfort. Remaking the sense of place meant filling the land with stories about nature, and human nature. The process was a pre-condition for Arizona’s inclusion into the American national body. It had to remake and interpret the Sonoran Desert as distinct from Mexico and it had to organize desert spaces into familiar productive categories.

279

APPENDIX A: FIGURES AND MAPS

Figure 1: A contemporary vision of the Sonoran Desert, Courtesy Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. 280

Figure 2: Image of Apache and Saguaro, William Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, 1848. 281

Figure 3: Pimeriá Alta, detail from Daniel Lizzar, 1833. Courtesy University of Texas, Arlington.

Figure 4: Daniel Lizzar, Mexico and Guatamala, depicting New Spain on the eve of Mexican Independence. Courtesy UT Arlington.

282

Figure 5: Detail from Alexander Von Humboldt's A Map of New Spain, 1810. Courtesy Special Collections Division, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.

Figure 6: Emory's pre-expedition map intentionally blank. Courtesy University of Texas Arlington.

283

Figure 7: Luxuriant Plants from William Emory's Notes, 1848.

284

Figure 8: John Russell Bartlett's Casas Grandes, from his 1852 Personal Narrative.

Figure 9: Gila River Watershed, Kmusser, Wikimedia Commons, 2007. 285

Figure 10: Ad in The West American Scientist, Volume 1, No. 1 (Dec. 1884).

Figure 11: Homer Shantz, A variation on Toumey's garden at the University of Arizona circa 1930. Courtesy UAiR.

286

Figure 12: A hothouse cactus collection in Central Park, no date, courtesy Library of Congress.

287

Figure 13: Frontpiece to Forrest Shreve and Ira Wiggins, Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1964). Courtesy Stanford University Press.

288

Figure 14: Godfrey Sykes Map in MacDougal and Sykes, “Desert Basins,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, December 1907).

289

Figure 15: MacDougal demonstrating water harvesting from a barrel cactus. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Figure 16: Joseph Christmas Ives' 1857 map gives a good impression of the Colorado River at the time.

290

Figure 17: Homer Shantz in University Cactus Garden (future Saguaro National Park), 1930. Courtesy UAiR.

Figure 18: William Hornaday, Camp-fires on Desert and Lava, 1908.

291

Figure 19: Sketching and Agave shottii, UA cactus garden. Circa 1932, Courtesy UAiR. Figure 20. “Powell’s Cactus Garden,” SAGU257, Box 1, Folder 11, Part III, WACC.

292

Figure 31: Tucson Mountain Park, Richard D. Sias, SAGU275, Series 4, Box 4, WACC.

Figure 22: Phoenix Garden Club, 1933, University Cactus Garden. Courtesy University of Arizona.

293

Figure 23: Forrest Shreve vegetation zones from Vegetation of a Desert Mountain Range, 1915. Courtesy Carnegie Institute of Science.

Figure 24: Removing Sagauro-1 MS1255 Folder 489a Courtesy AHS.

294

Figure 25: Removing Saguaros-2, MS1255, Folder 489a. Courtesy AHS.

Figure 26: Removing Saguaros-3, MS1255, Folder 489a. Courtesy AHS.

295

Figure 27: Marvin Frost (Camera) MS1255, Folder 489a, Courtesy AHS.

Figure 28: Godfrey Sykes map of Algeria from William Cannon, Botanical Features of the Algerian Sahara, 1913. Courtesy Carnegie Institute of Science. 296

Figure 29: Cardon and Boojum, Homer Shantz, 1932, Courtesy UAiR.

297

REFERENCES