Up to this point the population consisted of the strongest and most enterprising American manhood, for the weaklings do not undertake the chances and hardships of pioneering. With this drift of population, however, there has appeared a large number of invalids, mostly with pulmonary complaints, from every part of America. Many of them have been promptly cured, and have engaged in business or taken up farms in the valleys or ranches on the plains. A considerable proportion of them are people of education, culture, refinement and often of wealth. Much of the money of the region, as in Southern California, has been, brought in and invested by health-seekers. This class has added much to the social and religious development, and it includes some of the leading spirits in politics. As yet there has been very little immigration of Italians, Russians, or the lower class of Irish, most of whom are by preference city-dwellers.
It will be seen, therefore, that the Southwest is peopled with the very best Americans, segregated by the eternal law of evolutionary selection, with almost no substratum of the low-caste European foreigner to lower the level of civilization. With such a start, and such a commingling of Americans from all parts of the Union, the man from Boston rubbing elbows with the Atlanta man, and Kansas working side by side with Mississippi, it would seem that, the region may one day produce the standard American type. It has already manifested its capacity for type-production in the cow-boy, now being rapidly merged in the new Southwesterner, a type as distinct and as uniquely American as the New England Yankee or the Virginia colonel.
THE DESERT
By Ray Stannard Baker
To science there is no poison; to botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
After all, there is no desert. Within the memory of comparatively young men a third of the territory of the United States beyond the Mississippi bore the name of the "Great American Desert." It was a region vast beyond accurate human conception, in extent as great as half of Europe, midribbed with the stupendous, shaggy bulk of the Rocky Mountains, from which it descended in both directions in illimitable rolling plains and rugged mesas, rising here to the height of snow-crowned mountains, and falling there to the ancient salty beds of lost seas, lower than the level of the ocean. It was rutted by chasms and washes, the channels of rivers that thundered with a passion of water for a single month in the year, and were ash-dry for the other eleven. Some stretched eastward toward the Mississippi, some southward toward the Gulf, and some westward toward the Pacific. It was an empire of wild grandeur, of majestic heights and appalling depths, of silent waste places, of barbaric beauty of coloring, of volcanoes and the titanic work of volcanoes, of fierce wild beasts and wilder men; but it was a desert. Here, for months at a time, no rain came to moisten the parched earth, and there were few clouds to obscure the heat of a blazing sun. The earth became dust and ashes, all but uninhabited and impassable, here grown up to cactus and greasewood and sage, here to gray grass, here to nothing—a place where animals dropped in their tracks from heat and thirst, and shriveled there, undecaying, until their ragged hides crumpled like parchment over their gaunt skeletons. Many a pioneer bound for the El Dorado of California felt the tooth of the desert, and left his bones to whiten on the trail as a dreadful evidence of the rigor of these waste places. This was the Great American Desert, the irreclaimable waste of fifty years ago, the dread-spot of the continent. To-day you may seek it in vain.
When reduced to its essence, the work of every great explorer and pioneer in the West has consisted in showing that the desert was no desert. It was a cramped and mendicant imagination and a weak faith in humanity that first called it a desert, and it has required the life of many a bold man to dispel that error. The pioneer cow-man came in and saw the dry bunch-grass of the plains. "This is no desert," he said; "this is pasture-land," and straightway thirty million cattle were feeding on the ranges. A colony of Mormons, driven to the wilderness by persecution, saw, with the faith of a Moses, green fields blooming where the cactus grew, and in a few years a great city had risen in the midst of a fertile valley, and a new commonwealth had been born. A Powell came and disclosed the possibilities of the desert when watered from rivers that had long run to waste, and a hundred valleys began to bloom, and millions of acres of barren desert to grow the richest crops on the continent. Miners came, found gold and silver and copper in the hills, and built a thousand camps; the railroads divided the great desert with a maze of steel trails until it was a veritable patchwork of civilization; and timid tourists came and camped, and went away better and braver. To-day several million Americans are living in the desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time, and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green hills of New England.