UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Great American Desert: Arid Lands, Federal Exploration, and the Construction of a Continental United States DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History by Erik Lee Altenbernd Dissertation Committee: Professor David Igler, Chair Professor William Deverell Associate Professor Laura Mitchell © 2016 Erik Lee Altenbernd DEDICATION To Julie, Alex, Henry and Dolores For My father ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CIRRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: First Desert: Exploration of the Great Plains after the 27 Louisiana Purchase CHAPTER 2: Second Desert: Exploration of the Transrockies 68 West during the Era of Manifest Destiny CHAPTER 3: Mapping the Desert: Appraising Topography and Climate 110 after the Transcontinental Railroad CHAPTER 4: Mapping the Desert Sublime: The Colorado Plateau and 152 the Geological Aesthetics of the Modern American Desert CONCLUSION 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY 217 APPENDIX: Figures 245 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, David Igler. David’s unerring advice and unflagging support for a project as nebulous as “the desert” has been a stroke a great fortune. David’s caring and conscientious commitment to his students is second to none. I cannot thank him enough for his patience with short deadlines and half-baked prose. More than that, I also thank him and Cindy for providing me and my family with warm memories eating half-baked pies and finely smoked ribs under a gloaming Pasadena sky. Special thanks also go to Bill Deverell and Laura Mitchell. Bill, along with David, has served as a great mentor and inspiration. Bill’s western history seminar at the Huntington in 2010 proved foundational for me just as it did for everyone else in the class. That seminar, along with our walks and talks, provided an important baseline for everything that I have done since. I would also be remiss if I did not thank Bill one last time for giving me and Alex Young “the keys to the [high performance] car” that is the ICW back in 2012. Special thanks also to Laura for being a fine editor and teacher. Laura’s world history seminars, insightful commentary, incessant good cheer, and good choice in beer have shaped this project in a number of important and subtle ways. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial support offered by a number of different institutions. A year-long Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate Division at UC Irvine provided crucial support during the drafting phase of the project. Additional writing support came from a Summer Dissertation Fellowship from the UCI School of Humanities. Valuable research and travel support was provided by a Wilbur R. Jacobs and Andrew R. Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library, two summer research awards from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, a Graduate Individual Grant from the UCI Humanities Collective. Additional summer research and writing support was also provided by way of a Bea Baker Fellowship from the School of Humanities, a Charles and Anne Quilter Award from the UCI History Department, and the UCI Environment Institute’s Sustainability Science Team. I also want to extend special thanks to fellow doctoral students Aubrey Adams, Seth Archer, Dave Fouser, Jenn Staver, Eric Steiger, and Alex Young. Given the personal origins of this project, I also want thank my old friends from the Coachella Valley: Nick Bielik, Diana and Mike Clausen, Patrick Flores, Jamie Kimball, Rick Levy, and Mike Torres. Lastly, I cannot express enough my eternal thanks to those who helped and suffered the most during the doctoral process. My deepest love and gratitude is reserved for my wife, Julianne Altenbernd; my children, Alexandra and Henry Altenbernd; and my mother-in-law, Dolores McGuire. The product of childhood drives across Pearblossom Highway and the greater California desert, I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my xerophilic father, Donald Altenbernd. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Erik Lee Altenbernd 1999 B.A. in History, California State University, Northridge 2006 M.A. in History, California State University, Long Beach 2012 M.A. in History, University of California, Irvine 2016 Ph.D. in History, University of California, Irvine FIELDS OF STUDY U.S. History, World History, Environmental History PUBLICATIONS “Roundtable: The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History.” Editor and author (with Alex Trimble Young). Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2014). “Sisters in Sustainability: Municipal Partnerships for Social, Environmental and Economic Growth” (with Dustin McLarty, et al.) Sustainability Science (March 2014). “A Terrible Beauty: Settler Sovereignty and the State of Exception in HBO’s Deadwood” (with Alex Trimble Young). Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013). “A Terrible Beauty: Deadwood, Settler Colonial Violence, and the Post-9/11 State of Exception” (with Alex Young). In The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire, ed. Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Great American Desert: Arid Lands, Federal Exploration, and the Construction of a Continental United States By Erik Lee Altenbernd Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Irvine, 2016 Professor David Igler, Chair This dissertation examines how the Great American Desert of the pre-Civil War era ceased to be a desert and how the modern American desert became American. The project begins after the Louisiana Purchase with the advent of the Great American Desert, the historical geography that framed the Great Plains as an American Sahara and thus as a foreign land unfit for agricultural occupation. Modern historians and historical geographers have largely dismissed the Great American Desert as a geographic myth. This work takes a different approach. One of the central contentions here is that it is impossible to know precisely what nineteenth-century Americans meant when they used the word desert because they used the word desert in a variety of ways that do not conform to modern usage. Sometimes they used it reference to arid landscapes; other times they used it—without climatic specificity—to describe any tract of land deemed foreign, barren, waste, or unreclaimed (including forests and wetlands). All of which explains why roughly half of the conterminous United States—the Great Plains, eastern California, Oregon, and Washington, and much of everything in between—has, at time or another, been mapped or described as desert. vi An environmental and cultural history of US territorial exploration and expansion from Lewis and Clark to the operations of the U.S. Geological Survey at the end of the nineteenth century, the larger arc of the study plots how the old territorial regime of desert as foreign wasteland eventually gave way, or at least came to coincide, with a new territorial regime—a territorial regime that not only framed deserts as arid lands, but converted deserts from foreign into domestic territory through expressions of affection for the desert West. The principal aim here is not develop an operative definition of the word desert, or determine whether or not nineteenth- century Americans actually believed the Great Plains were comparable to the Great Desert of North Africa, but rather to track changes in the socio-cultural meaning of deserts in American territorial discourse and how those changes in meaning informed the larger project of American continentalism. vii INTRODUCTION Not long before his death, John Charles Frémont (1813-1890) weaved a collection of old and twice-told tales into a large 655-page memoir detailing the events of the first half of his life. The second half was to come later in a second volume. As one might expect, the tone of the tome is mostly triumphal and reads like a highly padded (and long-winded) resume of Frémont’s exploits as an army explorer during the heady days of Manifest Destiny and US territorial expansion before the Civil War. In many ways, Frémont’s career as an explorer was defined by the stark contrasts between the landscapes he explored—the well-watered and often forested ranges of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, and the depressed saline desert sinks of the Great Basin. The faulted and heaved geology of the West frames Frémont’s career not simply because it provided the setting of his rise to national prominence, but also because it provides a particularly apt metaphor for his entire professional life. Hampered by a “career-crippling disdain for authority” and an uncanny expertise at “transmuting opportunity into spectacular disaster,” Frémont’s public life was defined by a long, alternating chain of highs and lows, successes and failures, peaks and valleys. Unfortunately for Frémont, the trend line was not upward.1 All of Frémont’s rather impressive list of accomplishments—successful army officer, explorer, and writer; filibuster and Bear Flag Revolutionary; wartime governor and then US Senator from California; private railroad surveyor, company officer, and investor; 1856 Republican candidate for President; Civil War general; governor of the territory of Arizona—ended either in court- marital, resignation, ruin, or disgrace. Poor and nearly destitute after squandering a fortune wrought in California gold, and then being forced to resign from his unpopular and self-serving 1 Tom Chaffin, The Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 7-8; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), 137. 1 governorship of Arizona, Frémont assembled his memoir hoping it would emulate the commercial success of that of his onetime Civil War subordinate, Ulysses S. Grant. Sadly, it was not to be. Unlike Grant’s memoirs, which were a literary as well as commercial success, Frémont’s Memoirs of My Life, Volume I (1887) sank like a stone.