NEBRASKA AS THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT

The Great American Desert is a term used in the 19th century to describe the western part of the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains in North America.

The area is now usually referred to as the High Plains, and the original term is now sometimes used to describe the arid region of the Southwest, which includes parts of northern Mexico and the four deserts of North America.

The concept of "desert"

In colonial times, the term "desert" was often used to describe treeless or uninhabited lands whether they were arid or not. By the 19th century, the term had begun to take on its modern meaning. It was long thought that treeless lands were not good for agriculture; thus the term "desert" also had the connotation of "unfit for farming". While the High Plains are not a desert in the modern sense, in this older sense of the word they were. The region is mostly semi-arid grassland and steppe. Today much of the region supports agriculture through the use of aquifer water irrigation. But in the 19th century, the area's relative lack of water and wood made it seem unfit for farming and uninhabitable by an agriculturally-based people.

When the region was obtained by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Jefferson wrote of the "immense and trackless deserts" of the region. Zebulon Pike wrote "these vast plains of the western hemisphere, may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa". His map included a comment in the region, "not a stick of timber".^[2] In 1823, Stephen Long, a government surveyor and leader of the next official exploration expedition, produced a map labeling the area the Great American Desert. In the report that accompanied the map, the party's geographer, Edwin James, wrote of the region:

I do not hesitate in giving the opinion, that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence. Although tracts of fertile land considerably extensive are occasionally to be met with, yet the scarcity of wood and water, almost uniformly prevalent, will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country.^[2]

While many other travelers reported similar conditions and conclusions, there were problems in the interpretation and the use of the word "desert". By the 19th century, the word had begun to assume its modern sense, evoking images of sandy wastelands. Yet descriptions of the American High Plains almost always included comments about "Innumerable Herds of Buffaloes", which was written on Pike's map just above "not a stick of timber". The giant herds and teeming wildlife of the Great Plains were well-known by the time the term Great American Desert came into common use, undermining the idea of a wasteland; however, the relevant concept inherent in the reports of the region was that it could not be farmed, something the reports generally agreed on. By the middle of the 19th century, as settlers migrated across the plains to Oregon and California, the wasteland connotation of "desert" was seen to be false, but the sense of the region as uninhabitable remained until irrigation, railroad transportation, and barbed wire made up for the lack of surface water and wood.