The Great American Desert

"The conception of the Great Plains that had prevailed generally in this country during the first half of the nineteenth century did full justice to, if indeed it did not grossly exaggerate, the aridity which settlers encountered there after the Civil War.  The existence of an uninhabitable desert east of the Rocky Mountians had first been announced to the American public in 1810, when Zebulon M. Pike published the journal of his expediton across the plains to the upper Rio Grande Valley.  His assertion that the vast treeless plains were a sterile waste like the sandy deserts of Africa was an impressive warning to the prophets of continous westward advance of the agricultural frontier.  Americans were used to judging the fertility of new land by the kind of tress growing on it; a treeless area of any sort seemed so anomalous that settelrs were long reluctant to move out upon the fertile and well-watered prairies of Illinois."

-(Henry Nash Smith, 175)

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