Filmflam Frontier: Submarginal Land Development in Utah

FLIMFLAM FRONTIER: Submarginal Land Development in Utah

BY CARLTON F. CULMSEE

We invest the Frontier with robes of majesty. A leading interpreter of it terms it one of the "two grand themes of American history." Historians have analyzed it as a human tsunami rolling inexorably into the sunset. The mural painters have pictured it led by heroes many times lifesize, supermen in coonskin caps and fringed buckskins — giants in the earth with vision in their eyes.

Without discrediting those images, may I mention a frontier figure ignored more often than his influence justifies? That person is the Promoter, the gentleman who sells golden dreams for a fast buck. He does not always make it but he tries. Captain John Smith's promotional effusions even survive in college literature anthologies. The Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, first in Anglo-America, were promotions by commercial companies. The salesman, the advertiser, the boomer who was touched with foresight of a splendid future, and the chap who was little better than a bunco artist — all these types helped roll the tide of empire toward the Pacific. So let us briefly examine some trends and techniques among frontier boomers.

One striking fact is that these pioneers' slogans promised more as the lands became less promising. (There ought to be an economic law for this: the ardor of adjectives warms in inverse proportion to the attractiveness of the real estate being sold; or some such phrasing.) When the Promoter faced the problem of selling lands in the zone of chronic drought along the 98th meridian down the middle of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and on south, he became more than eloquent; he grew scriptural. The prairies had been "cleared of trees by the hand of God." There were no forests to fell and burn, no stumps to pull. (And precious little rainfall in the dry phase of the precipitation cycle fell on these lands.)

Now you know that this essay is about the Submarginal Frontier. Before you turn away, let me seize your lapel thus: activity on this Frontier has not been confined to the listless gestures of ne'er-do-wells, to the pitiful scrabbling of a few submarginal farmers. The wild lands actually settled on this Frontier since 1890, when the U.S. Office of the Census officially declared the Frontier at an end for all practical purposes, equal approximately the area of the Louisiana Purchase. Many people have poured fortunes into it. The losses in treasure, toil, hopes, and sanity on this Frontier are probably larger than those on the notoriously ruinous Mining Frontier. Since the 1870's, tens of thousands have thronged starry-eyed into the sub-humid West, to be repulsed after a year, a decade, or a generation. They were driven back by wind and drought or left beneath a sandy mound by their survivors. What is more, this Submarginal Frontier appears and disappears and reappears again in protean guises. Thus it is likely to be with us for a long time yet, as long perhaps as human ingenuity and the Promoter's cupidity persist.

There is a reason why my enthusiasm for this subject has a wry note in it: I was a beneficiary and a victim of one of these land booms pumped up by the Promoter's rhetoric. Because of ill health, my father retired from medical practice in Iowa and Nebraska to live near Los Angeles. Almost as soon as we arrived in southern California in 1913, an imaginative band of "frontiersmen" seized him. The gimmick was this: they would let my father in on a discovery they had made, a Last Frontier so virginal that it had not even been violated by a surveyor. They would undertake to survey it with a "wagon-wheel" device so that father could choose a homestead in the most favorable spot before the area was officially surveyed and opened for settlement. For these services they would charge only $1.00 an acre. They would take him and mother to see this lovely secluded valley; if he picked his homestead and paid the fees, they would not even charge for the trip and entertainment.

They plied father with folders filled with more fancy than fact. One I remember depicted a jovially beaming Uncle Sam proffering a rich farm to anyone who had the gumption to reach out and take it: a slab of deep black soil complete with a mansion embowered in trees, a big Dutch colonial barn, and flourishing fields of corn and wheat. So father and mother journeyed via the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad to the Escalante Valley in southern Utah with a select group of the gullible — men and women whose chief qualifications for subduing a desert were a pocketful of money and a headful of ignorance about deserts.

The "land-locating company" salesmen were fools for luck. That spring of 1913 fell in the wet phase of the cycle. After heavy winter snows and spring rains, the May air was cool and soft, the grass was tall and lush, and the flowers bloomed profusely. There were pools of water in the low places. Wild horses trotted down out of the hills to feast on the luxuriant vegetation and lend a note of authentic wilderness glamour. In the center of the valley were springs so hot you could boil eggs in them, and a log cabin bathhouse — a primitive spa with waters asserted to possess curative values. An aura of buried riches rose from nearby mines such as the legendary Hornsilver at Frisco.

Among the "prospects" junketing gaily to the Last Frontier were a few who had farming in their background, perhaps as boyhood experience. If such as these asked anything like searching questions of the salesmanguides, the latter answered that scientists of the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station had removed the last obstacles to bonanza farming in that region. Magical new ways to raise bounteous crops by dry farming methods had been discovered. The guides even passed around bottles filled with plump wheat kernels and photographs of fair fields of grain, alfalfa, and sugar beets as evidence.

As the surrey bumped over the faint trails through the brush and grass, the guide might burst forth in song befitting the courage and joy in his robust pioneer's heart. His favorite ditty was a paraphrase of a currently popular ballad which went, "Everybody's doin' it... Doin' what? ... Dry-farmin' it!"

Father and mother fell in love with the place. They chose a half-section (320 acres) by the railroad. Also they succumbed to the townsite speculation dodge which had reaped many a harvest of greenbacks on the High Plains and elsewhere in the past century. Here is the way it was operated on this occasion.

While father and mother waited at Nada the night before their return to Los Angeles to get the family, they lay abed in the company's "hotel," the only other building besides the railroad section houses. The hotel was a shell of unpainted pine boards, the "rooms" divided off with calico partitions. Father and mother were privileged to hear a confidential conversation, low-voiced but not too low, through the calico curtains. One of the men disclosed that he had just learned of a decision to establish a town 10 miles south, at a sidetrack named Kerr. Thiswas in a tract already surveyed, and he knew of a piece of "school land" which the owner was being forced by financial reverses to sell cheap. Anybody who bought it would be lucky — the speaker said in his stage whisper that he would buy it himself but he was already deep in debt for land in that same tract. The property would be in the heart of the city to be built there.

Next morning father was beckoned aside and offered a chance at the Kerr land. He believed his Nada land would also be part of a townsite; so if he purchased the Kerr land he would have two strings to his bow; he would have property in two townsites within 10 miles of each other on the railroad. How could he lose —after all, $10.00 an acre! So he bought the 320 acres at Kerr.

Later when lather s lather took up a homestead at Nada, and then I took up one, too, we were rich in poor land. Our resources were sunk in the Escalante soil, our future pledged to strenuous efforts to make the venture a success. But that was later.

To return to 1913, the spring rains stopped. Almost every afternoon fat, black clouds rose over Blue Mountain to the west of our ranch, lightning flared, and thunder muttered promises. Once in a while a veritable shower pelted us, but usually the clouds drifted aloofly over, giving us nothing but a temporary cooling shadow. Things dried up. Winds howled through that funnel where we lived between two broader reaches of valley. Dust and sand rose in clouds from the fields where the settlers had "railed" or grubbed off the brush and turned over land that had been "right side up in the first place."

But if we had doubts, father and mother recalled stories of pioneer adversities in the Middle West — prairie fires and grasshopper raids, blizzards in winter, and, yes, even drought sometimes in summer! Father's health improved in that dry climate. In fact we all felt good. Although some homesteaders abandoned their land, others took their places, and cooperatively we kept up our spirits by magnifying our meager successes with hardy crops.

Our family was more dogged than most. We stayed on and on, to see several booms of different character rise and subside on the Submarginal Frontier. The Dry-farming Era was more or less successful during the wet phase of the cycle, and has, of course, continued to produce results in areas adapted to it. But our hopes died out completely in Escalante Valley when the really dry years, with only four or five inches of precipitation, came down upon us, windy and hot and thirsty.

Next came the Pumping Era, sound in principle for limited areas, but inflated out of all proportion to its possibilities by the "fable of the underground lake." Promoters filled new prospects with this fairy tale and led them to semi-arid and arid valleys in many parts of the West. This was the usual story: land would be taken up, wells sunk, and pumps installed; crops usually were raised wherever sufficient water was applied. Sometimes the cost of fuel was prohibitive, and the venture was unprofitable. Sometimes too many wells were sunk, the water table dropped, and all farmers in that area suffered.

That "fable of the illimitable underground lake" is as persistent and impish as the dust devils that rise and whirl across the deserts. For more than a third of a century I have heard the tale — "the huge, inexhaustible lake underlying all this valley." I was astounded to read last spring in a Salt Lake newspaper an announcement attributed to an official who was quoted as declaring that a vast body of water underlies many parts of the state. This is what the second wave of settlers believed.

It is a myth. Oh, some water percolates through sand and gravel down there, true. But the implications of a cavern measureless to man and brimming with water which will be ever renewed from some unfailing secret fount — this has no factual basis in our desert valleys. The water in those spaces among the sand and gravel particles is definitely limited and will always be limited by the precipitation that falls in that drainage basin. A certain number of wells can be pumped; beyond that number, the drilling and pumping threaten disaster. After several dry seasons, though pumping for irrigation had been given up in our area, the water table declined even in our culinary wells. Furthermore, the legendary underground lake in some of our desert valleys is as waterless as any mirage. Many of the areas are underlain, not with water-filled beds of sand and gravel, but with bedrock.

The new epoch on the Submarginal Frontier parallels the rise of the city to dominance in American life. The Promoter now enjoys a real advantage over his older counterpart. Instead of attempting to disguise the desert, the Promoter urges upon city dwellers the delights of the desert. This phase received powerful stimulus from the success of desert resorts in Arizona, New Mexico, and California, for health, divorce, gambling, and other reasons in Nevada.

Judging from advertisements in Esquire and other magazines, there must be hordes of people who long to leave the swarming anthills of cities, with exhaust fumes and smog and regulations governing almost every aspect of existence, for the pure dry air, salubrious sunshine, and freedom of the deserts. City children probably visualize themselves galloping over the barrens and shooting with gay abandon, like television "western" heroes.

Although the newer promoters do not have to soft pedal the desert motif, but actually exploit it, they like to bolster the appeal of sand and sun with the promise of some other attractions. One advertisement locates the ranchos to be sold (these are available in sizes from one acre up) as "Just halfway between Colorful Albuquerque and Fabulous Hollywood." The signs one sees on parched, dusty tracts in the Escalante Desert (the word desert, indignantly denied a place in our family vocabulary for decades, appears proudly now on the Promoters' maps), and other choice areas of heat and drought show a fondness for such appellations as Paradise Acres and Happiness Hollow. Spanish phrases are still salable in the Southwest, as California real estate men found long ago. One piece of barren land is called Ranchos Felicidad.

One of the appeals of the far deserts is the presumed safety from nuclear destruction in event of war. Some persons say they are buying desert lands in Utah partly because they think they could escape to these havens if their California seaport cities are attacked. Unfortunately, the predilection of the military for locating their installations in forbidding and uncomfortable wastelands reduces the safety appeal.

What new motivation will loom large in public imagination to be seized by the promoter of the Submarginal Frontier, the future will disclose. But there may always be opportunities for the person quick of imagination and dwarfed of conscience to exploit. For the Submarginal Frontier has lured several waves of eager pioneers since 1862 and has hurled most of them back to make room for others.

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