Cadillac Desert

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water | Introduction


Historians of the West have typically focused on events that opened the great landscape of the American Desert to settlers. Such events included the Lewis and Clark Expedition, wars with the Indians of the Great Plains, and the Homestead Act of 1862. New historians of the American West have been employing a political environmentalism to develop an environmental history, which has led to a number of revisionist approaches to American West narratives.

Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert is such a revisionist history. His focus on the creation of infrastructure to support Western settlement exposes a history, not of rugged individualism and romantic cowboys, but of the construction of a heavily subsidized and tremendously expensive ‘‘hydraulic society,’’ founded on and maintained by the greed and competitiveness that is behind the American Dream. Reisner examines the West’s ecologically dangerous, and ultimately harmful, dependence on dams and aqueducts, as Americans pursue the ideal of taming the Great American Desert. The author focuses on the relentless building of dams and irrigation systems, as well as the corruption behind these developments, to show how the American need to control the environment has affected (and still does affect) the ecological welfare of national resources. Reisner also describes the rivalry between two governmental powers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engi neers, in their attempts to transform the nature of the American West.

The year it was published, Reisner’s book became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999, Cadillac Desert was placed sixty-first on the Modern Library list of the most notable nonfiction English books of the twentieth century. Reisner’s book has inspired an entire generation of historians and historically aware environmental activists.
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water Summary

Cadillac Desert begins with the author’s description of the American West as ‘‘a civilization whose success was achieved on the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist’’—or, as he calls it in the first chapter, ‘‘A Semidesert with a Desert Heart.’’ Reisner introduces the environmentalist agenda through which he explores the history of development in the West, following its major influences individually through time rather than chronologically.

Discovering and Pioneering the American West
The book’s opening chapters describe the discovery of the American West by the Europeans; the first Spanish explorers searching for El Dorado found the continent hostile and unusable. After the United States purchased the land, they sent in survey expeditions to research and evaluate it. The 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition resulted in an uneasy ambivalence toward the West: every ‘‘fertile prairie’’ stood in stark contrast to a ‘‘forbidding plain.’’

Nevertheless, the perception of the West as ‘‘the Great American Desert’’ drastically changed by the late nineteenth century. John Wesley Powell, after a scientific expedition down the Colorado River in 1869, put forth a program for settlement that imitated the pseudo-socialism of the successful Mormon irrigation systems in Utah. Powell’s advice was ignored. By 1876, Powell could already see the results: ‘‘Speculation. Water monopoly. Land monopoly. Erosion. Corruption. Catastrophe.’’

The warnings of experienced Westerners were ignored as the American West attained the definition of an untouched frontier full of promise. Soon, the settlements began to change the landscape, challenging the harsh desert conditions with the belief that ‘‘rain follows the plow.’’ This slogan was the lead of a promotional campaign with the political goal of making the West more appealing and of encouraging relocation of settlers from Europe and the East. The government sold them land cheaply, and according to the original Homestead Act from 1862, 160 acres was ‘‘the ideal acreage for a Jeffersonian utopia of small farmers.’’