Cadillac Desert Read Online Free PDF

We were crossing the Great Basin, the arid heart of the American West. The pilot announced that the next glow of civilization would be Reno, some six hundred miles away. I remembered two things about Reno. The annual precipitation there is seven inches, an amount that Florida and Louisiana and Virginia have received in a day. But even though gambling and prostitution are legal around Reno, water metering, out of principle, was for a long time against the law.
     
     
     

     
    CHAPTER ONE

 
    A Country of Illusion
     
    T he American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. In 1539, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a nobleman who had married rich and been appointed governor of Guadalajara by the Spanish king, set out on horseback from Mexico with a couple of hundred men, driving into the uncharted north. Coronado was a far kinder conquistador than his ruthless contemporaries Pizarro and De Soto, but he was equally obsessed with gold. His objective was a place called Cibola, seven cities where, legend had it, houses and streets were veneered with gold and silver. All he found, somewhere in northwestern Arizona, were some savage people living in earthen hovels, perhaps descendants of the great Hohokam culture, which had thrived in central Arizona until about 1400, when it mysteriously disappeared. Crestfallen, but afraid of disgracing the Spanish crown, Coronado pushed on. Tusayan, Cicuye, Tiguex, Quivira—no gold. His fruitless expedition took him from the baking desert canyons of south-central Arizona up to the cool ponderosa highlands of the Mogollon Rim, then down again into the vast, flat, treeless plains of West Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas. He returned, miraculously, a couple of years later, having lost half his men and some of his sanity when his horse stepped on his skull as he was exercising it. Since the climate of the American West is often compared, by those who don’t know better, with that of Spain, it is instructive to quote part of the letter Coronado wrote to Viceroy Mendoza as he was recovering along the Rio Grande:
     
    After traveling seventy-seven days from Tiguex over these barren lands, our Lord willed that I should arrive in the province called Quivira [Kansas], to which the guides El Turco and the other savage were taking me. They had pictured it as having stone houses many stories high; not only are there none of stone, but, on the contrary, they are of grass, and the people are savage like all I have seen and passed up to that place. They have no woven fabrics, nor cotton with which to make them. All they have is tanned skins of the cattle they kill, for the herds are near the place where they live, a fair-sized river. [The Indian guides’ reward for their misleading travelogue was to be garroted to death.] ...
     
    The natives gave me a piece of copper which an Indian chief wore suspended from his neck. I am sending it to the viceroy of New Spain, for I have not seen any other metal.... I have done everything within my power to serve you, as your faithful sergeant and vassal, and to discover some country where God our Lord might be served by extending your royal patrimony.... The best country I have discovered is this Tiguex River [the Rio Grande] and the settlement where I am now camping. But they are not suitable for colonizing, for, besides being four hundred leagues from the North Sea and more than two hundred from the South Sea, thus prohibiting all intercourse, the land is so cold, as I have informed Your Majesty, that it seems impossible for anyone to spend the winter here, since there is no firewood, nor any clothing with which the men may keep themselves warm, except the skins which the natives wear....
     
    The greatest irony of Coronado’s adventure was that he must have passed within a few miles of the gold and silver lodes at Tombstone and