Last Free Land Rush

Last Free Land Rush

BY CARLTON CULMSEE

UTAH SEEMS NOT TO HAVE RECEIVED general recognition for initiating America's last expansive free land rush. Reed Smoot led the 1909 Congress to double the original 1862 homestead to 320 acres. Thus stimulated, the land-hungry pioneered millions of acres in a dozen states. Even the collapse of the movement was important in marking the end of the frontier as we usually visualize it. Furthermore, cultivation of large tracts apparently unsuitable for diversified farming helped bring the legend of the Great American Desert nearer actuality.

Response to the Enlarged Homestead Act dominated a major chapter of my family history. Some of us participated in the homestead effort for twenty-three years. Father's impetuosity ruled. Mother agreed happily. My sister El Vera, twelve, and I, eight, were consequently swept into the movement. Thus, inclusion of the personal appears necessary.

This twentieth-century land rush could be narrated in chronicles of hundreds of homestead communities, but such exhaustive compilations are not feasible here. Therefore, intensive focus on Nada may be justified, both for exemplifying features common to all settlements of like origin and to suggest need for alertness to identify distinctive aspects of communities scattered throughout the West.

My father receives extensive treatment in this account, partly because he obtained a post office for Nada and was postmaster during the life of the community. His cheerful optimism helped buoy up homesteaders' hopes through the decline from the early phase of comparative humidity into desert aridity. Also, he employed men for varying intervals and extended store credit to numerous families.

Father was paradoxical. He possessed an imaginative, enthusiastic nature fibered with iron tenacity of purpose. He was, for example, proud of having sung in the boys' choir of Stavanger, Norway, cathedral, but also a bit vain about having had successful fights with sailors on the waterfront. He was glad he had puritanical habits inculcated by pious parents, yet sheepish about a tendency to gamble in his teens. When shocked by a sharp reversal of fortune in gaming, he vowed never to gamble again and held to the pledge all his life. But as in the Nada venture, his impulsiveness could burst forth in plunges that were akin to gambling.

Anxiety over dangerously ill patients caused him to overwork and lose sleep. He had intervals of severe headache and nausea. He retired from medicine at fifty-three in 1912 and moved us to California.

After six months of travel and rest, my father rebounded in health and revived his boyhood dream of the frontier. He saw advertising placed in newspapers by a land-locating company. They excited him with fantastic tales of a virgin valley in Utah where he could gain possession of a ranch a mile long — free!

The San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad, completed a few years before, provided a link between hinterlands and the Pacific. Executives offered homeseekers encouragement: low excursion rates to see the Escalante land and tempting rates on "immigrant" or boxcars to haul pioneers' furniture and livestock. Brisk salesmen for the landlocators avoided using the word Desert with Escalante; it was Valley.

"The least we can do is look at it!" father declared, all aglow. "It'll cost next to nothing to do that." As always, mother supported his decision zestfully.

Such companies sprang up in most states with public domain open to homestead entry. But this Los Angeles organization enjoyed advantages. That new railroad was paramount. Management was eager to develop farming and business along the route.

Also the land-locators benefited from a rare wet phase of the precipitation cycle in springs of 1912-13. Grasses flourished in the Escalante. Wild horses frolicked on the benches, deer roamed the hills, pools sparkled in low places. Illusions of undiscovered amplitudes of soil, which looked fertile when dark with moisture, could be created.

Government surveyors had recently surveyed broad areas in Iron County. Homeseekers could consult the metal stakes, then immediately file on their chosen claims at Milford land office.

Moreover, southern California held thousands of prospective pioneers. Many had come west on waves of publicity Los Angeles, after a stagnation interval, had sent eastward. The new harbor near San Pedro, petroleum wells, and industrial expansion invited ships from afar. The new rail link promised the very progress we have since seen in southern California.

New arrivals, however, found the old Spanish ranchos and mission lands being divided and subdivided with ballooning prices. Most of the hopefuls lacked sufficient capital to profit from the boom. They were ripe to join a backlash to free land.

When father and mother arrived at Nada signpost on the evening local train, a land-locator guide escorted them to a rambling temporary "hotel." This hostel had been erected to serve the 1912 wave of prospects who were attracted by recently surveyed tracts in southern Iron County. Now the structure accommodated a new surge of the landhungry to unsurveyed lands in northern Beaver County.

Within the paintless, rough shack my parents gloated over big bottles of plump wheat, rye, oat kernels. Ostensibly this abundance had sprung from Escalante soil. As a matter of fact, it had thriven in irrigated fields of Minersville, Utah, or of California's San Joaquin Valley. Photo-enlargements of luxuriant crops came from the same sources.

Folders on the exhibit table pictured a benign Uncle Sam holding out to every comer a deep slab of Mother Earth bearing lush grain and a Dutch Colonial cottage embowered in an orchard. This much was true: 320 acres of free land awaited each hardy homeseeker.

After attempting to sleep in a muslin-walled cubicle, my folks breakfasted at a plank table. They set off to inspect possible sites. The buckboard driver trebled as troubadour and drumbeater. As they jolted over brush-rough wheeltracks, he trolled a parody of a popular song: "Everybody's doin' it! Doin' what? — Dry-farmin' it!" He amplified sales talks the land-locators had given father when they located him in Los Angeles.

Those alchemists, the promoters, transmuted obstacles into gold. Land unsurveyed! That simply proved the pure virginity of this frontier you have found. Oh, no problem about nailing down a half-section. The company had hired a dutiful couple to do a wagon-wheel survey. Keen eye on compass, the husband steered his nags straight while his wife noted revolutions of a rag tied to a rear wheel. When she'd counted enough for a half-mile, she'd cry, "Whoa," and her mate would jump down to drive a stake. The hotel had an unofficial township map.

True, you couldn't file papers right away. But the company had solutions. To fend off claim-jumpers you could get the company employees to build a house of legal size. At a price, of course. And you could have a field tilled. These evidences of your good faith would stave off usurpers until you could move family and furniture, team and your good old milch cow to your splendid ranch. Think! — three miles around it.

My parents selected a claim across which the railroad angled. Of course the right-of-way took many acres from our "ranch." But the half-section was near Nada sidetrack, and father planned to build a community center, post office, store, a room for civic gatherings with a free library. This was to be more than a homestead — it was a townsite.

That night he received a vision of a second townsite. About 10 P.M., through the muslin partition, he and mother overheard two of the land-locator staff bemoaning the dilemma of a California friend. The latter owned school land, one of those sections set aside in each township for aid of future schools. After survey these sections were to be sold or otherwise used to help finance education. The section being discussed sotto voce was at Kerr sidetrack ten miles south of Nada, in that portion of Iron County already surveyed.

Kerr, the unseen speakers agreed vehemently, must soon supplant Lund four miles farther south as junction point between main line and the stage-freight road to Cedar City. That highway served not only county seat Parowan and Cedar City but also the huge Dixie country and glamorous scenic spectacles, Zion and Grand canyons and others. A branch line of the railroad was, they hinted, soon to be constructed.

But from Lund? Never! Why, Lund lay squalid in the bottom of an old lake bed, a godforsaken mudhole. Now take Kerr: it stood on a well-drained bench, a perfect site for the junction town-to-come.

Unfortunately for their friend Matson, who had recently bought the Kerr school land, he writhed in a temporary financial bind. He'd over-invested, and he must unload or face serious trouble. He must sell this townsite at a sacrifice.

Next morning the principal actor in the muslin-curtained dialogue did not approach father. That is not how it's done. Unobtrusively he made himself available, identified by voice. He quietly helped Dr. Culmsee make travel and other arrangements. He let father broach the deal.

The upshot you have guessed. For a modest $10,000, father purchased Kerr. His new land had Kerr siding and signpost on it. Seductively the con man had waved the name Kerr as a magician's wand. It stood for William J. Kerr, fourth president of the Utah State Agricultural College. That institution virtually assured our success because its nationally known scientists had revealed tested methods to subdue just such a wilderness as the Escalante. Indeed, the current president, Dr. John A. Widtsoe, had himself authored masterful books on the new dry-farming. The college was revolutionizing farming in all the West. We could not fail!

Father did not feel he was gambling. To buy Kerr was simply to protect his Nada site. Think! — two townsites on the mainline of the SPLASL within ten miles of each other.

Were such con games common on the frontier? Although I've heard tales, I can document only the Kerr instance.

In pioneer effervescence, however, chicanery might thrive. Shrewd as men might ordinarily be, they were naive in this entirely new situation. Thrilling, to have federal guaranties of a free ranch — "It wears you out, just to walk around it!" Underground, a limitless lake lay waiting. The rare wet spring was a bunco job nature herself perpetrated.

Greedy haste to seize unsurveyed land led to bilking. "Improvements" that land-locators contracted to make to fend off claim-jumpers totaled large sums, yet were well-nigh worthless in most cases.

That legal-size house, costing $400-plus depending on various factors, proved uninhabitable, a rough box plumped down in the brush. Oh, 12-by-16, all right. Now consider how green lumber shrank, warped, cupped, especially the roof — "Cracks you could throw a cat through!" — from sun and wind. "Tilled field" meant a few slovenly furrows halfburying, not clearing, sage.

So crude was the wagon-wheel survey, some settlers found well and house on the wrong homestead, after the official survey was made.

May I encapsulate changes the desert forced on us? — long wasteage of energies and abilities in that appalling gray emptiness. Such costs proved free land expensive for any pioneering family that persisted.

Father predicted impossible progress. Contrasting remembered tales of Midwest frontier hardships with contemporary Iowa abundance, his imagination achieved swift transition from initial cruelty to affluence.

We were, in actuality, flung back a century. Roads, electricity, telephones, theaters? None. No library except our private one. Father outfaced ordeals as necessary concomitants of subduing brute nature. He drew hope from science, remaker of his youth, not medicines, but scientific dry-farming, then pump-well irrigation. Research heartened us.

What obtruded? In mindless obduracy, gales from southwest aridity worse than ours funneled up our dogleg crook of desert. They bared talons to rip crops and tear precious topsoil away.

From respected professional man and his cheerful, spirited wife — responsive to science, arts, history —my parents eroded to drudges of a settlement that, after a decade, diminished. Oh, they had anodynes. They enjoyed serving. They read books. But the wasteland took its toll.

At first, for homesteaders who departed, replacements arrived. We became promoters without profit. We circulated our own pamphlets of puffery. Mother wrote columns of "Nada Notes" by hundreds for newspapers, for obviously news was more effective than paid advertisements. Father put more and more money and labor, hired and his own, into the Experiment Farm. But newcomers decreased in numbers and quality. Most were dregs of the back-to-the-farm surge; braggarts, spineless and ineffectual.

Father immersed himself in chores as postmaster, storekeeper, assistant to experts from Logan. In summer they visited us every week or two. In emergencies father gave medical aid. He'd give first aid for a broken leg or a chopped foot, but never for pay. Scrupulously he refused to practice; he'd retired and had not sought Utah certification. He'd get the injured one to a Milford physician. He had a weak town to care for!

Because the Beaver-Iron line divided Nada children into groups smaller than the required twelve, we often could not have a school. Without pay, mother taught us and neighbor kids, although store-post office clerking frequently took her away. She had many eighteen-hour clays, or longer.

My sister El Vera must go away to high school. She chose Wasatch Academy, Mount Pleasant." She acquired secretarial skills enabling her to work in Salt Lake City and Denver. With inherent idealism, she finally began helping young drug addicts cope with their addiction. For this she returned to California to become a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County.

Being only eight when we arrived in Nada, I felt a deep loyalty to my parents and their dream. I must go to Cedar City for high school, but I'd return when I could. After graduation I taught in one-room desert schools three years so that I could often lend father a hand. I persuaded him to buy a modest-sized flock of sheep, which I herded and sheared. I studied correspondence courses, wrote free-lance articles. At twenty-one I filed on a homestead others had twice abandoned, in a dry tentacle of Lake Bonneville's ghost. Three years, and I'd met requirements for ownership. I proved up.

Eventually I too left to attend college. Later I joined the BYU faculty, married an LDS girl, and was baptized. Adding administration to teaching, I'd go home less often.

Father held to his hope. At three score and ten he proved to watchers and himself that he had been, in a measure, right. (I explain later.) But at last father's life flickered out. I brought mother to Provo. Nada's sorry little saga was ended.

Our free land cost us more than Iowa farms. Yet, depressed thirties forced us to abandon it all without selling an acre. Kerr was a comparative bargain. But we left it too as a total loss.

We twentieth-century invaders of the Escalante viewed Mormons with scorn. Those backward fanatics (we scoffed) had been too foggyheaded to see a splendid frontier right under their noses. Look at their little fields clustered like suckling shoats at creeks running out of canyons ! See how the Mormons dipped culinary water out of corral-polluted irrigation ditches. (That was true in villages early in this century. We Gentiles each had a well out there in the Escalante.)

Latter-day Saints in Beaver, Minersville, Parowan, Cedar City, and Panguitch returned our contempt redoubled. Having grazed the desert in winter for decades, they deemed us mad to turn under thousands of good range acres for "fields" doomed to failure before wind and drought. They had not only religious truth but common sense. Pioneers? They sneered at our pretensions. We were mere self-deceived Johnnies-come-lately and mistakenly, no descendants of Brigham's 1847 wagon train, nor of Mormon Battalion members, nor handcart pioneers.

We homesteaders, mostly midwesterners from humid climes after brief stays in California, expected rain to raise our crops. And, as noted, we rejoiced in an unusually moist spring in 1913. Furthermore, literature on dry-farming experiments systematized by Dr. John A. W T idtsoe and USAC agricultural experiment aides had come to our eager eyes.

Here then was an ephemeral Gentile community contrasting with stable LDS settlements.

A jackstraw jumble of figures, some overlapping or conflicting, obviously contain significance. But knots of confusion obtrude. Some homesteads were, for example, abandoned and filed on by later hopefuls so that one can become confused by certain types of statistics. As previously noted, the half-section to which I earned title had been twice abandoned. So without apology, I use results of personal observation and experience in hope of throwing light of analogy on other free land booms.

Nada could be no Mormon village compacted around church, school, and irrigation system. Homestead law required each individual or family to live on its holding a mile long and a half mile wide. So we straggled over some two hundred square miles of sand, sagebrush, and greasewood in a crook of the Escalante, where winds were funneled between desert hills. There were no roads, no telephones, no electricity. What held the settlement together was a need for minimal postal and supply services, and extravagant frontier optimism.

Father hired two itinerant carpenters kicked off a freight train at Thermo water tank. They helped him build a spacious story-and-a-half frame structure to house Nada post office and general store with our family living quarters at the rear. Paralleling the store was a large room in which we offered a private libary and a large space available for community meetings. Thus Nada gained a community center of sorts.

Father initiated an instant post office: a hundred pigeon holes behind a roll-top desk. While red tape unrolled in Washington, D.C., at response to his application, he drove a surrey twenty-eight miles daily to and from Lund to post letters, pick up mail, and run errands for dozens of homesteaders. Over a bumpy wheel track, from June 1913 to March 1914, he devoted most of his time to these unofficial services plus negotiations with the U.S. postal department. Finally came a map with "Nada" printed prominently next to the Iron-Beaver County line, a rubber stamp for cancelling postage stamps, a quart of malodorous ink, a gross of scratchy penpoints, and other necessaries of a primitive U.S. post office. With small population, Nada rated only a fourth class status, which meant no salary.

With the meeting room father had provided as encouragement, Nada Commercial Club was born. George Lewis was voted president for his engaging personality, enthusiasm, and several brothers. Although the land-locators had locked up their hotel and ceased to exploit the Escalante, the club wished to continue to stimulate colonization. Lewis and his family gave positive assistance. George's brother Andrew, with a crippled leg, was assigned to drive a team and buggy temporarily provided by George.

A couple who'd located near us tore down their grandiose sign, "Grande View Ranche," and signed over their 12-by-l 6 shack to father for their grocery bill. He had the shanty reroofed and insulated against winter chill and then moved to a site beside the post office. It housed Andrew, the driver. He met morning and evening local trains for months and would convey land-seekers to the store-post office.

There my mother showed visitors township maps she'd made and kept up to date with occupied and open half-sections indicated. She would feed prospects and, if it was evening, provide them with beds upstairs. If it was morning, Andy would haul them about to see available claims. In the evening he would enable them to catch the local to Milford land office to file papers on chosen homesteads or return home disillusioned.

Indicative of the buoyant spirit was loud approval when a salesman, at the store on business, quipped: "Salt Lake's too close to Nada ever to amount to anything!" Nobody took the remark seriously, but nobody rejected it, for it reflected our ebullience. We lived in what the landlocators had assured us would be the New World Eden.

For the private-public library, father obtained Widtsoe's dry-farm writings and other literature from Logan. As base for an experiment farm he donated ten acres across the SPLASL track. Giving the land was a gesture, because we were land-poor. But he went further. Observing instructions from the Logan station, he hired men to dig a trench around the farm and install a rabbit-proof woven-wire fence with barbed wire above and below.

At that time, Widtsoe, with five aides from the agricultural college, of which he was then president, arrived on the evening local. After inspecting the farm and our valley, the experts agreed that the desert was indeed dry. Over dinner they tactfully suggested that, in addition to dryfarm experiments, we have an adequate well dug and a powerful engine and pump installed for irrigation. They promised to lend us engineers and other advisers.

As agreed, experts came every week or two. Mother provided meals and beds for the day or two they stayed. But more was entailed, and father's temperament let him in for it. So father employed a crew of men to dig a yawning sump of a well twenty feet to the first aquifer — we had no well-drilling equipment then — and case out the virtual quicksand in which the water lay. He installed a big Fairbanks Morse gasoline engine and a centrifugal pump. After varied vexations, we succeeded in obtaining a creek of cold clear water.

Too icy! our irrigation expert Walter W. McLaughlin declared. He urged impounding it a day or two for absorption of solar heat. Father hired a man with a team and fresno scraper to heap earth banks for a reservoir of generous size. Water accumulated during a day of pumping, however, seeped away at night.

Professor McLaughlin now quoted the social theorist Fourier to the effect that children love to play in mud. We hauled in many loads of adobe clay, and I as a lad of nine puddled to make what the adviser hoped would be a relatively impermeable layer. For several days I covered the reservoir walls and myself with goo. Overnight the water disappeared as before.

With post office and experiment farm, father had a well-nigh fulltime job. His deep-grained conscientiousness and desire to aid farming in the desert took much of his remaining money and time.

In 1914 Commercial Club president Lewis persuaded Gov. William Spry to come to address us. As a colleague of Sen. Reed Smoot, Spry liked to foster the Enlarged Homestead Act. From a platform the club decked with flags, the governor praised our efforts and applauded our enterprise. He lauded Reed Smoot's vision in recognizing the need of the land-hungry, in semiarid regions, to have larger acreage for a family farm.

Besides the postmastership, father took another unpaid but pleasurable task: volunteer weather observer. Government meteorologist J. Cecil Alter early enlisted him to make daily records and reports of cloud cover, precipitation, and wind velocity. Alter furnished simple instruments. Father relished frequent mail contacts with Alter, a genial manysided gentleman. We came to know of Alter's activities with the Utah State Historical Society and his authorship of Early Utah Journalism and other works. Father's weather reports may constitute the most substantial chapter of Nada history. Archives must contain decades of his records, the only such trove for an immense area.

Those records could pinpoint accurately the year and amount of the one cloudburst we enjoyed in the quarter-century. To my memory, 2.51 inches fell in an hour or less; 1914, I think. Father almost burst with pride at this evidence of abundant rainfall. He built me a tiny catboat to sail on the "lakes" impounded by the SPLASL grade. Thus I learned rudiments of small boat handling. I had plenty of wind!

As postmaster, father had a most tenuous connection with the Army Air Corps when that service flew the airmail in the mid-twenties. Representatives received his permission to mark an emergency landing strip on one of our unused fields south of the store. At least one biplane landed for motor adjustments.

Homesteaders tried diverse expedients to outwit the grudging land. Earliest perhaps was the wild horse trap at Thermo Hot Springs where wild animals long had drunk from pungent waters. Adventurers whose names I cannot ascertain erected a stockade of half-decayed crossties discarded by the "Pedro." Some mustangs were lured in and sold.

Four miles south of Nada, a Californian named Don Lash found a clay bed he pronounced superlative for bricks. A string of huts cobbled up of old corrugated iron and half-rotted ties gave forth bricks of dubious quality. Possibly insufficiently fired, they eroded rapidly.

Father and others experimented with seeds extravagantly extolled in luridly illustrated catalogs. One variety did arouse astonishment, the Himalayan Wonder Bean. We wondered how a short growing season could mature such gigantic beans: two to three feet long and hard as petrified wood. We amazed viewers at county fairs. Neither human being nor animal could dent the horny exterior. I never saw the gem coffered within.

One man used replaced railroad ties to roof a long cellar for growing mushrooms. We admired the mound of earth heaped on the ties, but we never saw mushrooms emerge.

Swarms of voracious jackrabbits impelled two young men to combine community service and moneymaking. "Young Johnnie" Dinwiddie and Clyde Bangle, Ozarkian of the whiplash pitching arm, bought a mile of woven wire. They made two wings of a V, with a trap-corral at the base. Boosting from the Commercial Club helped them muster a score or more of us on Sundays when the Methodist minister did not drive out to the schoolhouse to preach. Whooping and beating on pans, we fanned out to drive rabbits toward the trap. The entrepreneurs collected a five-cent bounty from county funds for each pair of ears, and we had the grim joy of clubbing to death some of our crop enemies. When we saw the hordes thinning in one area, the promoters laboriously took down the mile of wire and moved it to another location. Largest total: 426. Mother's "Nada Notes," published weekly in the Beaver County News, recorded one more profitable drive. That time the prey fled back between us drovers in a strangely desperate way. We had driven seven coyote pups into the corral! At $5.00 a scalp, the promoters received $35.00 in bounty plus $14.50 in rabbit ears.

Steadiest income was from the section gang, track maintenance workers based at Nada siding on the "Pedro," later the Union Pacific. Sometimes the entire crew came from homesteads.

Nada reached its population peak just before World War I. The draft took several of our bachelors away. Richard Keith died in France a bare month after leaving for training. Most of the others, "After they'd seen Paree," relinquished their claims to take jobs elsewhere.

About 1920 father discontinued efforts to operate the experiment farm in cooperation with Logan. But in his waning sixties he amazed the remaining homesteaders by "putting it all together" to triumph over the desert. Not a towering success but a modest victory accomplished with his hand labor, supplemented by occasional hired help.

Indispensable to his success was a windbreak. He planted Tamarix slips that, with frequent watering when they were young, finally gave him a wind-resistant hedge six to ten feet high around some acres of gently sloping sandy loam. Another factor was his utilizing the fierce wind. Instead of merely submitting his crops to sand-toothed gales, he used wind to pump water virtually without cost. But he had to have a new well favorably situated atop a small rise.

He hired "Old Johnnie" Dinwiddie, father of the rabbit-drover, to drill it. Johnnie had somehow acquired a manually operated outfit. It required lots of elbow grease, but it worked. Between sessions of college, I assisted.

We cased out the first aquifer because the water flowed in quicksand so fine it seeped through any hole to clog pipes and pumps. Below the quicksand we encountered an alternation of hardpan and gummy, greasy clay almost as obstinate as the hardpan. For days we pushed against the bar that drove the auger, toiling 'round and 'round like oxen. We wired increasing weight on the bar with baling wire. Suddenly the bit jarred, jerked. We had ground through into coarse gravel and cold pure water that actually rose in the casing! Not a gusher but most of the way up through the intervening hardpan and clay. With an oversized windmill, we could overcome the twenty-one-foot depth, and overnight we could fill our sizable cement-lined reservoir.

Behind its shield of Tamarix, the sandy loam produced as though eager to do so. Looking back, since I was gone at school much of the time, I see his achievement as though he had used magic: raspberries red and black, and of course gooseberries; radishes, lettuce, carrots; and in the fall, cantaloupes, watermelons, and squash. Beaming with pride, father brought in the unaccustomed yield of the desert as each variety came to fruitage. All had drunk from the little streams discharged from the reservoir.

Mischievously, father and mother led me back to a back shelf in the dugout to reveal small bottles of wine, purple mulberry and scarlet raspberry. Prohibition had just been voted down. But the irony was, neither drank. "Why, you're good Mormons!" several visitors said to this abstemious Gentile couple. But as in the Whiskey Rebellion in remote Pennsylvania long ago, my parents had no way to ship out surpluses in perishables, and the wine was a useful "conservation" device. They gave the bottles to friends who did drink.

Then at seventy-six, father fell before a massive stroke. His little oasis crumbled. Nada post office ended after twenty-three diligent years. Of all the flares of twentieth-century free land optimism, this must have endured longer than most that were originally doomed.

What remains of the free land rush beginning in 1909 and dwindling from, say, 1920 to FDR's withdrawals of extensive tracts from homestead entry in the early thirties?

Scars — hundreds of square miles of waste areas — where homesteaders turned over soil that was "rightside up in the first place," oncevaluable grazing land destroyed, when brush and bunchgrass were railed and burned and the naked soil tilled so that winds could carry off topsoil accumulated since time began. Nadas in the Escalante, in Skull Valley, in Buckhorn Flats. Add stricken acres on the lee sides of fields.

Admittedly, there are many dry-farms — mostly uninhabited except for periods of tilling and harvesting: Promontory Points and Park Valleys, lake terraces and low hills in hundreds of places, cropped in alternate years to use meager moisture with care.

And there are pump-well irrigated lands, such as north of Enterprise at the south end of Lake Bonneville's bed, around Phoenix, Arizona, and in parts of southern California. Dwellers of those areas were periodically exhilarated by the myth of "vast inexhaustible underground lakes." Inexhaustible is nonsense. Quickly reached is a limit, after which the water table declines because the "lakes" cease to be adequately recharged by precipitation within the drainage basin.

Thus portions of the desert have been profitably reclaimed. But maps show the producing areas are mere freckles on the vast sunburned face of public domain. Dustbowl fiction of the depressed thirties illustrated how the desert was expanding, even somewhat east of the traditional bounds of the Great American Desert. Overgrazing has impaired the fragile ecology of semiarid and arid lands more slowly, but inevitably it helps make wasteland of increasing thousands of square miles.

Dust, emissary borne on the wind, filtered into the national capitol to lobby for regulatory laws. Most of them have been ineffectual.

And of course my mind reverts to windrows of sand sifting among dead Tamarix trunks, gnarled remnants of the twigs father and I planted for the windbreak in the twenties. Desert has reconquered his hard-won province.

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