“Rain follows the Plow.” It’s a sentence that seems so ridiculous to modern people that we wonder how anyone ever believed it. But in America in the late 19th century, this was gospel truth to some people. Rain follows the plow.
The idea behind rain follows the plow was simple and powerful. Proponents needed a way to convince Americans to move westward. When the Civil War began in 1861, recall, most of the present states of the western Great Plains and Rocky Mountains were not states yet. They remained in the territorial or unorganized stage of development, politically speaking.
Several reasons existed for this. Native Americans inhabited most of this land, for one thing. But another big problem was that people thought that the western Great Plains were a big desert. Some maps even labeled it the “Great American Desert.” Promoters of western settlement needed something powerful to counteract this belief. Enter rain follows the plow.
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Rain Follows the Plow Definition
The theory was the work of a professor at the University of Nebraska. Samuel Aughey was a big supporter of immigration to Nebraska. It seems that, all in all, the late 1870s and early 1880s were a time of greater than normal rainfall on the Great Plains. Aughey had an explanation for why.
He believed human activity was the reason. By breaking the prairie sod, humans released the moisture in the ground into the atmosphere. In his view, the more farmers moved to and farmed the Great Plains, the more moisture they would release, and the more rain would fall. This would, in time, eliminate the Great American Desert and replace it with fertile, well-watered farms. Droughts would end.
Writer Charles Dana Wilber read Aughey’s work and popularized it. He was the one who condensed Aughey’s theory into the simple phrase, “rain follows the plow.” Wilber wrote that the plow “is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden.”
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Rain Follows the Plow Significance
This simple phrase proved appealing on many levels. It seemed scientific. A college professor had come up with it, right? But the appeal went much deeper. Americans who believed their country divinely destined for greatness (click here to read more about the theory of Manifest Destiny if you’ve not heard of it before) took up Wilber’s phrase and shouted it for all to hear.
The theory meshed with other national myths in America, too. Plowing was hard work, but the hard work would reward both the individual and the nation. Everyone would win.
That wasn’t all. Rain follows the plow provided yet another excuse and justification for confining Native Americans to reservations. They’d lived on the Great Plains for centuries but weren’t using the land to its fullest potential. They stood in the way of progress and prosperity. Better to push them aside and let American farmers work the land so that it would blossom. That’s how many at the time viewed the situation, at least, as awful as it sounds today.
Railroads (they do seem a common villain in 19th century history despite their benefits, don’t they?) took up the idea. When Aughey spoke to audiences about his theory, they copied down his words. The railroads then printed these words onto pamphlets. Railroad agents took these pamphlets with them to Europe when they traveled abroad to recruit Europeans to immigrate to America and purchase the land the railroads were selling.
What Ended the Theory?
Nature itself had the final say. For all the good weather of the late 1870s and early 1880s on the Great Plains, the 1890s were the opposite. Drought came to the Great Plains in that decade, making rain follows the plow seem absurd. As Hamlin Garland wrote of characters living in the Dakotas in A Son of the Middle Border, “The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light.”
According to rain follows the plow, this should’ve been impossible. Plowing would begin a sweep of upward progress. But, it didn’t. People suffered as a result.
The theory seemed perfect in 1880. It spoke to all the myths, desires, and hopes that Americans held dear. But nature was the final arbiter, as it usually is.
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