When Americans from the Eastern seaboard first tried to make the lands west of the continent’s 98th Meridian bloom with wheat and corn and cotton, they followed a folk maxim: “Rain follows the plow.” The idea was that if the climate was too arid to grow crops, tilling the earth and planting trees would yield precipitation and humidify the atmosphere, bringing fecundity where there was none before. It was the 19th century version of “If you build it, they will come.”
The theory was wrong, and the results for many homesteading farmers was catastrophic. When it came to farming, the far West might as well have been a different planet from the East. It had not four seasons but two: wet and dry. Rain came in the winter, not the summer. Sometimes, for years, it barely came at all.
In the Eastern United States, 160 acres was plenty for a family farm. Legislators assumed it would be in the West, too, and parceled the land to farmers in 160-acre allotments through the 1862 Homestead Act. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Indeed, far vaster allotments remained wholly inadequate for land devoid of rivers, creeks or streams, as so much of the American West was. Without reliable and abundant rainfall, irrigation from these waterways was the only way the land could be productive for agriculture. Farmers who were wise or lucky enough to have obtained such land prospered; many of the less fortunate fell into destitution. Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a nation of prosperous, self-sufficient yeoman farmers was dashed upon the stubborn physical constraints of the arid west.
But where American farmers failed, for a time, Indians thrived. A couple of centuries of white settlement had pushed eastern tribes to the prairies of the west. There, they developed a new way of living on the Great Plains, one that adapted to the austere natural conditions of the region instead of pushing against it. This was made possible by the Europeans’ re-introduction of a creature the North American continent had been missing for half a million years: the horse.
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Author: Leighton Woodhouse
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