What is 'The West'?
Ethan's October Response
The advancement into The West was a race for two things: gold and water. People who came to the west in the late and early 1800’s were mainly two types of people, farmers looking for open land and prospectors looking for gold. The reason that these two resources are so well known and important in the west is that pioneers coming out 1) needed them, and 2) didn’t have much of them. The big question is that why did they come to the west in the first place? Native Americans were already there, there wasn’t any good farming except in Oregon and western Washington, and the only three big places for gold were the Black Hills, California, and much later, Alaska. To me the answer is, the 1800’s US government. The US government was the one who tried, and did eradicate the Native Americans, the government was the one who took land they didn’t even own, and gave it to the pioneers, and the government was the one who teamed up with the public to try everything they could to increase settlement in the west.
The thing is, the gold ran out and water, as a resource, is being overused, and everyone knows it. Irrigation plans also bring increased salt to the crops in time to come, aquifers that took thousands of years to fill, are being drained in a century, and drained lakes will not refill if they are drained, at least not in 50 years. The two biggest users/victims of the water issue at the moment are Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which are probably the two most well known cities in the American Southwest. LA has done everything it can to keep it thriving this far, from legally stealing water rights from Owens Valley, to pumping millions of tons of water through the desert. Las Vegas has not been hit with major problems yet, but with the drought plaguing them, and most western cities for that matter, they are facing their own problems. The west is a wildly diverse and interesting landscape, but like all places, thoughts, and ideas, there is never a free lunch.
The advancement into The West was a race for two things: gold and water. People who came to the west in the late and early 1800’s were mainly two types of people, farmers looking for open land and prospectors looking for gold. The reason that these two resources are so well known and important in the west is that pioneers coming out 1) needed them, and 2) didn’t have much of them. The big question is that why did they come to the west in the first place? Native Americans were already there, there wasn’t any good farming except in Oregon and western Washington, and the only three big places for gold were the Black Hills, California, and much later, Alaska. To me the answer is, the 1800’s US government. The US government was the one who tried, and did eradicate the Native Americans, the government was the one who took land they didn’t even own, and gave it to the pioneers, and the government was the one who teamed up with the public to try everything they could to increase settlement in the west.
The thing is, the gold ran out and water, as a resource, is being overused, and everyone knows it. Irrigation plans also bring increased salt to the crops in time to come, aquifers that took thousands of years to fill, are being drained in a century, and drained lakes will not refill if they are drained, at least not in 50 years. The two biggest users/victims of the water issue at the moment are Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which are probably the two most well known cities in the American Southwest. LA has done everything it can to keep it thriving this far, from legally stealing water rights from Owens Valley, to pumping millions of tons of water through the desert. Las Vegas has not been hit with major problems yet, but with the drought plaguing them, and most western cities for that matter, they are facing their own problems. The west is a wildly diverse and interesting landscape, but like all places, thoughts, and ideas, there is never a free lunch.