142 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



margins of. the few streams and let their long horned cattle 

 grase the country around. However, these Spanish never 

 brought in or raised enough cattle to make very much differ' 

 ence to the range so far as the amount or quality of the grass 

 was concerned. 



When in the early part of the nineteenth century the 

 Americans became interested in the Louisiana Purchase, which 

 they had bought from France, explorers like Lewis and Clark 

 were sent out to investigate the plains region. Other explorers 

 like Zebulon M. Pike cut south of the Louisiana Purchase line 

 into what was then Mexico. Captain Pike was arrested by the 

 Mexican government for trespassing, but he managed to get 

 an account of what he saw to the officials at Washington. 3 



After traveling over the same country that Coronado in 

 1540 had called a "most wicked way," 4 Pike wrote, "These vast 

 plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as cele' 

 brated as the sandy deserts of Africa; for I saw in my route, 

 in various places, tracts of many acres where the wind had 

 thrown up the sand in all the fanciful forms of the ocean's 

 rolling wave, and on which not a speck of vegetable matter 

 existed." 5 



A generation later, Horace Greeley made a journey through 

 this same part of the West, and he wrote back to the East, 

 "I judge that the desert is steadily enlarging its borders and 

 at the same time intensifying its barrenness." 6 



AMERICA DISCOVERS THE RANGE 



It was accounts of the West like this, and particularly the 

 Southwest, that started the belief in the Great American Des' 

 ert. Indeed, many people thought that the whole region of the 

 Great Plains, which runs west of the one hundredth meridian 



3 Faulkner, op. tit., p. 216. 



4 Old South Leaflets, Vol. I, p. 5. 



6 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 155. 

 6 Ibid., p. 159. 



