Restoring the Paleo-West: Fossils, Coal, and Climate in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Historians have long understood the American West as a region shaped by aridity. Yet, by analyzing the novel imaginaries that emerged from the scientific and commercial interaction with fossils and coal in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals that the discovery of lush and lively paleo-environments also significantly influenced the history of this region. The physical geography and remnant resources generated over the course of geologic time in the American West decisively influenced western settlement and the advancement of American science in the late nineteenth century. Through government reports, scientists breathed new life into the ancient denizens and environments of the West. Where their contemporaries often saw an eternal desert, many scientists saw a malleable and ever-evolving environment pregnant with potential. Boosters subsequently absorbed the authority of these scientific ideas to lend credence to their plans to remake the region into an agricultural paradise using capital and coal-fueled technology. In some ways anticipating modern attempts to restore landscapes to their pre-anthropogenic states, some boosters drew on these vibrant scientific images and narratives of lush paleoenvironments to challenge the previously dominant perception of the American West as being arid and hostile to life. Scientific visions of formerly fertile lands were coupled with revolutionary coal-fueled technologies such as the transcontinental railroads, making vast human-induced climatological changes an empowering possibility to a nation driven to colonize its frontier.