A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places. I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as far as the eye can reach--sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus, gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever will again. But what is that sound--_click_, _click_, _click_--that comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert. Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly, for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place, having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the _click_, _click_ of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an indomitable, conquering humanity.
Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that, and you will see a still stranger sight--a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm, weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the sand, with the water following in a broad brown band.
"Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for gold; see herders setting up windmills; see farmers boring holes for artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels, and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and your heart will throb with the pride of it--this splendid human energy and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future. Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts.