A Journey To The Desert's Edge, Part One

Note: this is the first in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular

To know where the desert's edge is means we must first define a desert...

Not an easy task when we realize that, although scientists use the term, it has no universally accepted definition.  Modern concepts of a desert can be traced back little farther than the late 19th century when climatologists turned their attention to understanding the dry regions of the earth... 

Defining a desert and creating a rough map of its location becomes important in places like the Concho Valley that spread across stretches of central and southwestern Texas larger than a combined Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Economic consequences bedevil the dry country.  Limits on farming and ranching, even population size in the few cities and towns, boil down to how much water is to be had.  Undesirable personal consequences can travel to those who call a desert a desert.  In the 1920s, geographer Griffith Taylor became unemployable in his native Australia after business interests seeking foreign investors pressured politicians to ban his textbook from public schools.  Doc Taylor's mistake was to not realize he was mistaken when he wrote the better part of Oz was arid or semiarid desert...



4 L Ranch, North of San Angelo



Sometimes these prophets of reality are simply ignored.  Here, we present the case of Major John Wesley Powell for your consideration.  The Civil War veteran (and geologist and ethnologist) conducted explorations of the American West.  In 1879, he published his Report on the arid lands of the United States in which he argued that approximately 2% of the land west of the 100th meridian was suitable for farming if properly irrigated with water from nearby rivers.  The other 98% could sustain low-intensity grazing in many places, if carefully monitored, but should be treated as generally unsuitable for most economic activities unless valuable minerals were present... 

Powell's notions may have been based on very careful observations but they ran contrary to the interests of the railroad companies wishing to encourage settlement along their routes.  Congress sided with campaign donors.  Ultimately, the nation as a whole paid the terrible price of ignoring its second director of the US Geological Survey when poor farming practices in the Midwest triggered the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s...

The railroads did have bad science on their side.  Lawyer turned preacher turned agricultural statistician Cyrus Thomas also dabbled in the new science of climatology at the same time Powell argued for limited land use in the dry western half of the country.  Appointed Chief Entomologist for the State of Illinois in 1879,  Thomas assured the railroad interests and settlers that science had proven "rain follows the plow."  In other words, increased population and cultivation of the Great Plains could only lead to increased precipitation and bumper crops.  In his incarnation as an archeologist, Thomas also hit the scientific bulls-eye when he proved the Native American mounds in the central and southern United States had been built after Columbus discovered the New World...

It didn't help matters that Thomas' theory was vigorously advocated by Horace Greeley, now famous to high school history students for advising young men to Go West.  The editor of the New York Tribune was then one of the most influential newsmen in the country and a fascinating character who championed agrarian reform, vegetarianism, and socialism.  He was also the only Presidential candidate to die between the national election and counting of the electoral votes...

Cyrus Tomas (arrow) during 1871 Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone area

Those Great Plains that Thomas envisioned as lush farmland extend south into the Lone Star State.  Prior to the Civil War, few settlers of European descent occupied the vast western half of Texas.  The Concho Valley hosted Spanish explorers in the 1500s and 1600s as they quested for gold, pearls, and a mystical woman in blue.  The United States Army sent expeditions in the 1840s to map routes from San Antonio to San Francisco.  A few years before the outbreak of hostilities between North and South, the Butterfield Overland Mail crossed the Concho and Pecos Rivers of southwestern Texas on the way to the treasures of California...

But it was the Civil War that changed barren desolation into opportunities for rebuilding lives.  Single men, married couples, entire families-- many from the broken Confederacy-- moved westward to recreate an agrarian lifestyle in a dry and hard land of few rivers and questionable value for plows or cows.  The military stationed soldiers, many of them black, to protect sturdy souls whose cattle overgrazed sparse desert grasslands near the Rios Pecos and Concho and whose tillers eviscerated a fragile ecological balance achieved after centuries of aridity.  Indians and buffalo disappeared...

Nature conspired with herself to confound settler and scientist alike with the country surrounding the town of Santa Angela, a den of thieves and cutthroats and gamblers and ladies of negotiable virtue, which had grown up around a frontier outpost called Fort Concho.  As the Texas Handbook Online notes, the future Tom Green County outside the city limits of the future city of San Angelo belongs to two distinct physiographic regions.  The central, eastern, and southeastern sections of the county are part of the Lower Osage Plains while the northern, western, and southwest belong to the Edwards Plateau...



West of Angelo



As with the geology of the area, Nature divided Tom Green County (which has an annual average county precipitation of 18.2") into two distinct rainfall regions best be described as agonizingly dry and hellishly dry.  East of San Angelo, fools who farm without irrigation see annual average rains approaching 22".  West of town, ranchers expect less...

Texas precipitation zones

Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary describes a desert as "arid barren land; esp. a tract incapable of supporting any considerable population without an artificial water supply."  As we shall see later in this series of essays about the dry country, most scientists see deserts as places where the potential for water loss through evaporation and plant transpiration almost always exceeds the actual amount of water available through rain or snow...  

Every morning brings another reminder of the dryness of this part of southwest Texas when I pick up the local newspaper.  A small bright red rooster crows on the front page, just to the right of the words "San Angelo Standard Times."  Sometimes he is five or six times his normal size, standing next to a little box with an "Area Rainfall Totals" headline...

General Rainz, a West Texas tradition since 1910

The rooster is named General Rainz.  He first appeared on the front page in 1910 after publisher J G Murphy's wife commented her husband made noises resembling those produced by a pugnacious rooster every time it rained.  Inspired by his lady love's casual remark, Murphy decided the noisy hen-chaser would grace Page One following any note-worthy local rainfalls... 

Neither Murphy nor his bird made much of a ruckus during the General's first year as a West Texas media darling.  1910 saw 10.24 inches of falling liquid...   

Note: Texas Precipitation Map developed by the Spatial Climate Analysis Service of the University of Oregon and is used here for non-commercial purposes.  Portrait of Cyrus Thomas during Hayden Expedition from archives of Southern Illinois University.  General Rainz illustration from February 14, 2012, edition of the San Angelo Standard Times, a Scripps-Howard publication.  All other images photographed and copyright by Louis R Nugent