A Change in the Weather: Theories about Climate and Human Agency in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Over the course of the late nineteenth century, boosters, scientists, surveyors, and settlers debated whether human settlement could alter the climate and increase rainfall in the arid regions of the American West. Some argued that that the spread of agriculture and forest culture could alter atmospheric conditions and increase rainfall levels, turning the intermountain West and Great Plains into a garden. Sudden increases in rainfall seemed to confirm the belief that “rain follows the plow,” yet skeptics countered that Americans were being misled into thinking that human agency had improved the weather. Both sides in the debate used uncertainty and the concept of the “unknown” to make their cases. The surveyor Grove Karl Gilbert, for example, argued that climate patterns were outside human influence and remained in the “domain” of the “unknown.” Boosters like Richard Smith Elliott responded by developing a fluid geographical imaginary in which weather patterns and nature were somewhat mysterious and uncertain, but also willing to collaborate with settlers. By exploring the maps and writings produced over the course of the “rain follows the plow” debate, I will illustrate how late-nineteenth-century boosters and surveyors created and disseminated uncertainty. I also will connect the “rain follows the plow” debate to another type of uncertainty: the insecurity and doubt that lurked alongside Manifest Destiny and the seemingly inexorable project of Westward expansion. Late nineteenth-century beliefs about climate reveal that questions of agency, uncertainty, and humanity’s relationship to vast environmental forces were at the heart of the dawning of American modernity.