On November 15, 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike of the U.S. Army first spotted the mountain that would come to bear his name on his expedition to explore the lower regions of the newly acquired Louisiana territory. Zebulon and his team were to cross the plains and skirt the tenuous border with the Spanish territory in the Southwest while relaying descriptions of the terrain back to the civilized world. It was one of Pike’s descriptions, calling what we know as the Great Plains the “Great American Desert,” that would help build and perpetuate a myth that changed the course of American settlement for the next century.
Pike wrote in one of his dispatches that perhaps, one day, these vast deserts would be comparable to the great deserts of Africa. It’s important to distinguish the ever-changing nature of the word “desert” and that in Pike’s day it was common to refer to any place empty of foliage as a desert. The great plains, which are starkly treeless, no doubt would have fit the description. President Jefferson had publicly referred to the immense deserts of the Louisiana purchase, and so Pike was merely agreeing with the President’s assessment. By the 1830’s, maps were appearing with this large central portion of the country labeled as the “Great American Desert,” and the word “desert” began to take on it’s modern, sandy connotation. It would take a major event to convince Americans this was a worthwhile place to settle and not just vast rolling dunes.
As we know today, the great plains are home to much of America’s agriculture, and even the parts that aren’t used for farming house lush grasses and animal life. But it wasn’t until the 1890’s that Americans fully discovered just how fertile this “Great American Desert” could be. While on a scouting mission, workers for the U.S. Geological Survey discovered something astounding beneath the soils of the grassy hills and valleys. Dubbed the Ogallala Aquifer, this underground water deposit they’d found, mixed in with gravel and soil and other sediment, represented one of the largest subterranean aquifers ever discovered. As it reached from South Dakota all the way to Texas, this aquifer could, if harnessed, fuel a major agricultural belt of the United States. And it has.
It took some time for water pumping technology to catch up with demand, but by the 1920’s, farmers in Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Texas could dig shallow wells and pump out the water they sorely needed to grow their crops. The subsequent transformation of this area into an agricultural powerhouse is one of the reasons America has grown into the superpower it is today. Agriculture was, and still is, major economic generator for this country. And perhaps, had Lieutenant Pike chosen different phrasing, or had the word “desert” evolved to take on a more forgiving meaning, this agricultural revolution would have happened sooner. Regardless, it sits as an example of the power language has over how we see the world.