On the Fourth of July in 1868, William Gilpin gave a speech in Denver, Colorado Territory. William Gilpin was the governor of the territory at the time. His speech portrayed the future of Colorado as one of limitless possibility. So limitless, in fact, that the laws of nature did not apply to Colorado.
You probably think I’m joking. I wish that I were.
Consider what Gilpin told his audience that day. Colorado receives bountiful rainfall. Its plains would support three cattle for every bison that formerly trod its blue grama and buffalo grass. Farmers in Colorado hardly even needed plows—underground water would do their work for them. And, once those crops sprouted, neither heat, nor cold, nor drought would disturb them. To top it off, the Rocky Mountains had an unlimited supply of precious metals.
If you’re wondering about the truth, here is what science would say. The average rainfall in Colorado is about 17 inches annually—not enough to grow crops successfully without irrigation in an average year. I’ve been told that the cattle-bison ratio supported by a given unit of land for grazing is about 1.15 to 1. And, well, if you believe claims three, four, and five, the rest of this post probably won’t make much sense to you.
The question we might ask, then, is why a territorial governor would make such outrageous and obviously false claims in a public speech. Why lie?
The American West in the 1800s
William Gilpin and his acolytes believed that the geographic center of the United States was also the future center of its population, economic production, and civilization itself. As he once stated: “The Plains are not deserts, but the opposite, and the cardinal basis for the future empire now erecting itself upon the North American continent.” The Great Plains, in Gilpin’s vision, would eventually be the home of 1,300,000,000 people. That’s 1.3 billion people on the Great Plains alone.
For another example of his thinking, follow this link for a map Gilpin constructed in 1873. It’s a map of the world, with an overlay of the isothermal zodiac and its axis of intensity. Honestly, I’m not even sure what that means without looking it up. But if you check out the map, you’ll see that the center line of the isothermal band goes through—surprise, surprise—Denver, Colorado.
Okay, after looking it up, it appears the isothermal zodiac was the idea of a German geographer named Alexander von Humboldt. His theory was that all the great empires of history had existed within a band centered on 40 degrees north latitude. And those empires moved westward over time. Denver, therefore, was the future center of the greatest empire in history. Probably.
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William Gilpin Wasn’t the Only One
I’ve written previously (read here) and mentioned some of the outrageous claims made by railroads in their efforts to promote Western settlement. (And sell the free land they’d received from the U.S. government to those settlers.) Let me share some of these gems with you now.
One stated that Montana went an entire year without a single case of illness—except for overeating, of course, because the land was so bountiful.
The Rock Island Railroad told readers: “Why emigrate to Kansas? Because it is the garden spot of the world. Because it will grow anything that any other country will grow, and with less work. Because it rains here more than in any other place, and at just the right time.”
The promotional book Where to Emigrate and Why informed its readers that “The Laramie Plains of Wyoming are as ready today for the plow and spade as the fertile prairies of Illinois.”
(A quick search revealed to me that the Laramie Plains are about 5,000 feet higher in elevation than Illinois, have a growing season 50 days shorter, and get one-third the rain in an average year.)
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Not Just Railroads or Governors
Not to be outdone, the Kansas Bureau of Immigration once claimed that in Kansas, summer lingers into November, and winter ends by February.
Even Harper’s Weekly, one of the famous national publications of the late 1800s, got into the act. In 1890 it stated, regarding the Dakotas: “There is no good reason why the new region should not be well settled within the next five or six years. Most of the land is fairly good. It is more or less impregnated with alkali, but with proper cultivation the alkali will disappear. At present the water contains so much alkali that it is unfit to drink, but cattle thrive upon it, and doubtless man will when he gets accustomed to it.”
The question I hope you have by now, then, is why did some people believe this stuff?
Why Did Americans Ignore Science So Often?
It’s a good question. Many Americans of the 1800s consistently showed a disdain for anything that contradicted their beliefs, no matter how clear and factual. We could never kill all the buffalo. Their numbers are infinite. The same with passenger pigeons. And trees in the forests, or the whales in the oceans.
Honestly, I don’t have the complete answer to this question, partly because not every American of the day would’ve answered it in the same way. Christianity, a faith in progress, or a desire to profit while the profit was there to be had were also true for some. Others lacked a simple lack of understanding of how nature worked. Still others had a fierce desire for reality to be what the person hoped was real.
But plenty of deliberate deception existed as well, as I just discussed. If you want more, though, read up on the phrase “rain follows the plow.” (Or, for your convenience, simply read my post about it with this link, where I discuss it.) You might be shocked at what people of the 1880s sometimes believed. Or, given recent events, perhaps the shock won’t be so very great, after all.
Wrapping up William Gilpin
Ignorance of scientific reality in America is not confined to the late 1800s, of course. And the people of that era kinda sorta had an excuse. Information was not so easy to come by back then. But some of the things I’ve written about are so blatant that a person shouldn’t have needed to look them up or go see things for themselves. Self-deception is, perhaps, the most powerful kind of deception.
Usually, the desire for profit was at the root of the deception. Railroads wanted the sell their government-subsidized land grants. Western politicians wanted more population because that meant more economic growth. It also meant larger markets, more power in Congress, and so forth. (And, like today, those politicians at times had personal investments in certain forms of economic growth.) Individuals wanted the West to be a paradise where wealth and ease was there for the taking.
And so, men like William Gilpin always had a ready audience for their claims. Not everyone believed, obviously. But plenty did. Which means that, when they moved west and learned the Laramie Plains were not like Illinois, they had partly themselves to blame.
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