William Ellsworth Smythe’s Draina of Reclamation

Abstract

S T E P H A N I E S A R V E R Gustavus Adolphus College William Ellsworth Smythe’s Drama of Reclamation i In The Conquest of Arid America (1900, 1905), William Ellsworth Smythe writes the history of American expansion as a national drama, whose final act will culminate with the massive irrigation of the American West.1 Smythe defines American history in terms of tropes, suggesting that we associate different stages of expansion with emblems: the Mayflower, which brought home-builders to New England, is the emblem for the first stage of history; the pack-horse, which carried home-builders into the Kentucky wilderness and the Ohio Valley, is the emblem for the second stage; and finally, the prairie schooner, which brought home­ builders into the West is the emblem of the third stage.2 Smythe focuses on isolated moments as a means of establishing a plot that corresponds to the three stages. United States history is a cavalcade. He tells us, “The first act in the drama of American settlement ended in the eastern foothills of the Alleghany mountains about 1770; the second, in the neighborhood of the Mississippi river about 1860, the third, midway on the plains of Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, about 1890.” He tells us, “The won­ derful drama of American colonization has reserved a fourth and crowning act, for which the scenery is arranged and the actors ready” (18). For Smythe, the history of the United States has been a drama. If the United States has faltered in fulfilling its destiny, he suggests, it is because the drama has been enacted on the wrong “stage”: the eastern United States. The Conquest represents the culmination of Smythe’s efforts to promote irrigation agriculture and the reclamation of desert lands, and documents the role he played in the transformation of popular notions about the feasibility of farming in arid America.3 This paper will consider 214 Western American Literature The Conquest of Arid America and explore the socio-environmental impli­ cations of Smythe’s rhetorical approach, which transforms the desert lands into a “stage” on which the drama of reclamation would be enacted. Smythe was born in Massachusetts in 1861 and followed a career in journalism that eventually led him to Nebraska. When the region experi­ enced a severe drought in 1890, he was in an ideal position to take up the banner for the irrigation crusade (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography). Realizing how Nebraska farmers could avoid future agricul­ tural disasters if they employed irrigation systems, Smythe prevailed upon his editor at the Omaha Bee to allow him to write a series of articles on irrigation—a move that was not without risk of public backlash. As Smythe explained in The Conquest, “it was then considered little less than a libel to say that irrigation was needed in that part of the country” (266). With these articles, Smythe began his career as a propagandist for the irrigation movement. In addition to promoting the irrigation cause in edi­ torials, he helped to form the National Irrigation Congress in 1891, and founded The Irrigation Age, which he edited until 1895. This journal chronicled efforts to garner government support for irrigation, offered advice about irrigation farming, and promoted irrigation colonies by fea­ turing glowing reports of their success. His work also found an audience in numerous popular eastern journals.4 Smythe called for government support of reclamation, which would make possible the formation of irrigation colonies that would transform the West into a perfect agrarian society. These colonies would be sustained by families practicing subsistence agriculture, and would include good schools, ordered streets, and a thriving but wholesome social life. Smythe argued that irrigation would support “common people” on small farms that would be a model of progress: “Irrigation will make its crops absolutely sure and enable its proprietor to cultivate it intensely and scientifically to the end that each acre shall produce the largest possible crop of the best possible quality” (“The Republic of Irrigation” 191). Moreover, Smythe believed, the subsistence-level farmer could remove himself from the larg­ er economic complex and thereby avoid risks of economic depressions.5 Smythe was...