Abstract
earliest appraisals of the Southwest were far from admiration. first US account was by Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike following his expedition of 1806 and 1807. He spoke in general terms of the barren and parched soil. The one good purpose served by these vast eastern plains was to stem the westward migration and leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country. Speaking specifically of New Mexico he said that except for the Rio Grande and its tributaries, all the rest of the country presents to the eye a barren wild of poor land, scarcely to be improved by culture, and appears only capable of producing a scanty subsistence of the animals that live on a few succulent plants and herbage. Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, a US Senator from Texas petitioned Congress to force Mexico to take back New Mexico and Arizona. That prompted the Governor of New Mexico under Mexico's rule, Manual Armijo, to coin the phrase, Poor New Mexico, so far from heaven, so close to Texas. Even the more modern-day cowboy philosopher Will Rogers commented that the Rio Grande was the only river he ever saw that needed irrigating.
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