During the early 1840s, as the right to rule the continent found a slogan in manifest destiny, nothing was seen as a greater barrier to expansion than the region, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, known as the Great American Desert. As a rhetorical figure, it was nearly ubiquitous – shaping everything from the expedition reports of Zebulon Pike and Edwin James to the western narratives of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. The first serious challenge to this image was a report John Charles Frémont presented to Congress after leading an Army expedition to South Pass. Frémont knew that his report had to refute the empirical evidence for a Great Desert to strike it down it as a rhetorical barrier to emigration. Thus he developed a distinctive mode of description that focussed on “topographic geology” while utilizing an aesthetic of the picturesque. This allowed him to create a rocky specificity and contrast where once a grassy and arid uniformity had reigned supreme. In the process, he began to create a nexus between scenery and science that would make both more deliberate and exacting – and the American landscape as a whole more uniquely “western.” By the end of the report, Frémont's ardent impressions of the West were so multiple and intense that the Great American Desert suddenly seemed without significance as a place or a name.
Making the Great American Desert
