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.

A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places. I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as far as the eye can reach—sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus, gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever will again. But what is that sound—click, click, click—that comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert. Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly, for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place, having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the click, click of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an indomitable, conquering humanity.

Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that, and you will see a still stranger sight—a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm, weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the sand, with the water following in a broad brown band.

"Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for gold; see herders setting up windmills; see farmers boring holes for artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels, and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and your heart will throb with the pride of it—this splendid human energy and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future. Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts.

Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards of a spring, and die there of thirst.

To him, in such cases, it is all as much of a desert and quite as dangerous as if there were not a human habitation within a thousand miles. But to the man who is reasonably schooled in the wisdom of trails and the signs of water, the desert has been robbed of nearly all its terrors. With proper care and preparation he may go anywhere without fear, although frequently not without acute discomfort and even suffering.

The desert still maintains its fastnesses in the West. There are some spots better entitled to the name than others, but each year these fastnesses are shrinking before the advance of human enterprise, as the water might rise over the land, leaving the high and difficult places to the last. So these islands are scattered through several States and Territories, mostly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah and Oregon, in the great valley lying between the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains, on the east, and the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and the Coast Range on the west. Chief among them are the Mohave Desert, in southeastern California, a territory as large as Switzerland; the Colorado and Gila deserts of southwestern Arizona and Southern California; the marvelous Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona; and the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. Opening northward from the Mohave Desert lies Death Valley, perhaps the most desolate and forbidding spot in America, though comparatively small in extent. Yet there are few places even in these desert strongholds that are wholly without life of one sort or another, and a large proportion of them could be reclaimed, if water were available. Even as it is, not one can bar human activity; railroads have been built directly across three of the worst of them; mines are being opened, and oil-wells driven; land is being reclaimed by irrigation; and even in the fastnesses of Death Valley there are many mining-camps and an extensive borax industry. In all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, where fire has followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which nature molds even the most unpromising material; the other is hideous, grotesque, pitiful, a reminder of the reckless wastefulness of man.

The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first, yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert for the long hot stretches of their open land.

Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon its power of resistance to thirst. One marvels at the consummate ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities, turning every capability to the conservation of such little water as there is. Everything in the desert has its own story of economy, patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks upon the men who dwell in its wastes.

Everywhere there are evidences of the terrible struggle for water—a struggle in which men who come to the desert must instantly engage: every wagon that crosses the desert carries its barrel of water; every man who sets out takes with him a canteen; every ranch has its windmill and its water-barrel. Water is the only thing that is not free. Stop at a desert well, and a sign offers water at ten cents or five cents a head for your horses.

Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and beautiful.

Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert, suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a deep, clear blue above—nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air—the stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy, a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the far-off echoing scream of some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl? The horses loom big and dark where they feed in the near distance; here and there on the top of a dry yucca-stalk an owl or a hawk sits outlined in black against the sky; otherwise there is nothing anywhere to break the long, smooth line of the horizon.

It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. "Few in these hot, dim, frictiony times," says John Muir, "are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money—or so little—they are no longer good themselves." But here in the desert there yet remain places of wildness and solitude and quiet; there is room here to turn without rubbing elbows, places where one may yet find refreshment.