In the last few years, powerful people have proposed building new cities from scratch in the US West. The odds are stacked against their success, but it's worth viewing them as the latest in a series of manifestations of an old ideal. The frontier, for centuries, has been the site where American society reinvented itself--and where people could make an easy buck. A brand-new megacity of millions may not strike many as representative of frontier life, but the privations of the intrepid pioneer were always intended to culminate in urban development.

There is tension between city and country life, of course, just as there is tension between the modest virtue of the yeoman farmer and the opportunism of a land speculator. This is precisely the point. "Free land" has always been the element that neutralizes those tensions, that smoothes them into different points on a great wave rather than oppositional forces. When free land becomes scarce, political and economic competition flares up. These megacity proposals are trying to revive the promise of free land, to bypass the inevitable conflicts that come from the reality of finite resources. The frontier, in the twenty-first century like the nineteenth century, is a safety valve for those conflicts.

Of the three proposals that I'm aware of, only one involves the use of federal land. Donald Trump, in March of 2023, floated the idea of granting up to ten charters for "freedom cities" on federal land. Trump did not specify that these would be built in the West, but the scarcity of federal land in the East virtually guarantees that they would be. These brand new cities would "reopen the frontier," in Trump's words. California Forever, a proposed development in Solano County, would be built on private land. Telosa, a futuristic megacity of 5 million people, would also be built on private land, though the scale suggests that the plans either require a sale, somehow, of federal land, or that the plan is as half-baked and careless as it sounds. (A city of 5 million people would exceed the combined populations of Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.) Either way, the latter two proposals seem like spiritual descendants of 1894's Carey Act, in which the federal government transferred land to Western states in the hopes of spurring a partnership between state governments and private investment for desert reclamation. The Carey Act was largely a failure, and its inability to sufficiently reclaim Western land at a desired scale paved the way for 1902's Reclamation Act.

All of the proposals are fanciful. Trump said that residents of the freedom cities will travel by flying car. Yet, while the chances of this particular proposal actually coming to fruition are very small, this idea arguably has the best chance of succeeding. It would involve a grant of federal land and also implies federal investment. Realistically, there is no other way for significant developments of Western federal land to occur. (Utah senator Mike Lee has also proposed a transfer of federal land to Western states with the provision that they be used primarily to build housing--not quite a megacity plan, but similarly difficult to execute.) After over a century of development, Western development has pushed farther into increasingly marginal lands. Even in the 1890s, there was very little incentive for private capital to fund an ambitious desert boondoggle.

California Forever seems to be the most straightforward about its goal of making money. Telosa, by contrast, claims to be a grand experiment at realizing something called "equitism." Taking inspiration from nineteenth-century political theorist Henry George, Telosa would help its millions of residents bootstrap themselves into wealth through land ownership and some sort of subsequent, collective financial investment. The proponent, billionaire investor Marc Lore, continues in a very American tradition: viewing free land as the antidote to society's ills. If history is any guide, he would also continue in a different American tradition: using a quasi-utopian vision to fleece a bunch of people (though, of course, he claims he is not doing this for the money).

Two views of the West have long existed in tension with each other. In one view, it was a resource colony for the country--a great storehouse of furs, cattle, gold, silver, coal, timber, etc. This is the view that has long engendered resentment among Westerners, who cherish their independence, and which also offends the broader national ideology that ours is a nation of frontiersman rather than one of rigid, hierarchical institutions. As lawmakers began disposing of the public domain, their rhetoric communicated an intention to thwart speculation in order to give the humble yeoman farmer an opportunity to chart his own destiny.

Yet this version of the West--where remote, moneyed interests could extract resources to make themselves wealthier--was the reality in most cases. Of the 500 million acres of land that the federal government doled out from the passage of the 1862 Homestead Act through the end of the century, about 80 million went to homesteaders. By comparison, the railroads got 225 million acres. If the West was a storehouse, it consisted almost entirely of doors, to use historian Richard White's metaphor. When a piece of legislation to create one door was not satisfactory, Congress responded by creating another door. Fraud and abuse plagued the implementation of the Homestead Act, but Congress merely created new ways for people to fraudulently access the West.

Part of this can be chalked up to the federal government's reactive method of dealing with the realities of Western resource usage. White points out that the principle that guided the Homestead Act and other legislation was preemption. The frontier had long been the province of squatters and others who were using the land outside of the bounds of the law. The 1841 Preemption Act officially recognized the land claims that squatters had made since the end of the 18th century, and subsequent legislation honored extralegal practices in mining, timber, and grazing. In the nineteenth century, the best way to get the right to use something in the US West was to simply start using it.

Despite policymakers' rhetorical positioning against land speculation, the system largely would not have worked without it, as Richard White observes. The system of railroad land grants depended on it, for one. The government granted land to the railroads in alternating sections along their rights of way, in a checkerboard pattern. The open sections were reserved for homesteaders, with the logic that land close to a railroad would be more valuable and would be filled in faster. As the land rose in value, the railroads would sell their parcels. Even farmers, or at least the ones who were able to prove up their claims, engaged in speculation. Once a farmer had a title, he could take out a mortgage, leveraging it toward equipment or more property. Groups of farmers colluded to formed "claims clubs" to access more land for cheap. Seen this way, the goal was closer to letting the little guy in on the game rather than preventing speculation outright. (Utah was and is a bit of a different story. The communitarian values of the early LDS church meant that land was developed under the direction of the church president, and the ownership of private land (as Utah Territory was federal land) wasn't legal until 1869. By the time Utah became a state in 1896, however, it had largely assimilated into capitalist modes of private ownership, though vestiges of the Mormon communal project still remain.)

The expectation that the yeoman farmer was more interested in self-sufficiency rather than profit is the "agrarian myth" that drove nineteenth-century land policy, according to historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter attributes the generation and promotion of this myth to the educated classes, later taken up as "part of the country's political folklore and its nationalist ideology." Thomas Jefferson, the foremost proponent of the agrarian ideal, was not a farmer, after all. He was an aristocratic landowner who held people in captivity and forced them to cultivate his fields under the threat of violence. By the late nineteenth century, a group of land speculators and politicians known as boosters utilized the agrarian myth to promote federal investment in western settlement.

In its most idealistic formulation, settlement of the frontier was always supposed to occur in progressive stages. John Mason Peck wrote in 1836 in his New Guide for Emigrants to the West that western settlement happens like "waves of the ocean" through three classes of people: the pioneer, the farmer, and finally the "men of capital and enterprise." The pioneer depends on wild forage crops, hunting, and crude gardening. He stays "till the range is somewhat subdued" or "till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law [referring to 1830s legislation that allowed squatting before the 1841 Preemption Act] enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants." Those who follow build a little village on the existing cabin and field, until finally "the settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn." In this scheme, "a portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society." In other words, everyone wins. Of course, settlers push out Indigenous people for exclusive access to land, though this does not factor in.

This view of settlement was advantageous for Western boosters. Railroads, wealthy land speculators, and politicians wanted people to migrate because that is how the land--their investment--would increase in value. Western politicians often had private investments and also wanted their constituencies to grow. By mid-century, the Oregon Territory attracted farmers, and California attracted gold miners, but the Interior West was a harder sell. Still, boosters pushed for favorable land policy and advertised Western land as extremely desirable.

Settlers, however, tended to learn that these claims were hyperbolic once they reached the Great American Desert. Irrigation was a necessity, yet surface water was in short supply and impossible to develop on an individual basis. By the 1880s, Manifest Destiny appeared uncertain. John Wesley Powell's 1878 report on the arid West threatened to dampen enthusiasm with its claims that almost all of the best lands had already been settled. Settlers who tried to prove up their claims on the Great Plains and in the Intermountain West faced great difficulty. Only about a third of all those who claimed land through the Homestead Act in the nineteenth century proved up their claims. By the 1890s, according to Hofstadter, farmers were increasingly "condemned to live with the contradictions of being ennobled, on the one hand, while being driven by the dictates of market civilization to view land value as the richest source of profit and security." Yet the increasing urbanization of American society meant that the cachet of the agrarian myth only grew.

When the US Census Bureau declared that there was no longer a distinguishable line between frontier and settlement in 1890--that the frontier had closed--the West was still very sparsely settled. It was a region that consisted largely of ranching and mining. The former required thousands of acres for every herd of cattle, and the latter was too transient. The intertwined goals of the "Anglo-Saxon race's" settling the continent from sea to shining sea and driving up the value of speculators' investments required agriculture.

One year later, a journalist named William Ellsworth Smythe convened the first national Irrigation Congress in (appropriately) Salt Lake City and launched a magazine, Irrigation Age. Smythe was an evangelist for the cause of irrigation, which he described as a religious rite in the development of Civilization. His 1900 book The Conquest of Arid America was a paean to irrigation and the boundless promise it held for the arid West. The book was propaganda, and it promoted such claims as the idea that Western soil was exceptionally fertile because it had never been planted. In reality, much of the soil was alkaline and would not grow crops even with irrigation. I wrote in a previous post that if civilization was unable to make wild lands productive it would not be civilization. Smythe made a very timely argument: because white Americans were a civilized people, they would necessarily be able to tame any wild lands.

Smythe's was a more popular message than John Wesley Powell's dire predictions about the scarcity of water. Powell attended the Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles in 1893 and made a famous pronouncement: "I tell you gentleman you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land." The crowd shouted him down, and afterward Powell stopped speaking in public, resigning from his position as the director of the US Geological Survey the following year. Smythe and his cohort were providing policymakers with the stories that they wanted to believe and with hope where Powell had only given them frustration.

That same year, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered one of the seminal works of Western history in an address titled, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." It lamented the recent "closing" of the frontier. Turner approvingly cited John Mason Peck's passage quoted above and made the case that these waves of western settlement played a vital role in the creation of American democracy. The frontier was where individuals learned to work together with one another and become personally involved in the creation of the nation. Smythe claimed something similar: creating common irrigation networks would forge a society out of a group of disconnected settlers. The acknowledgement that individualism had its limits lined up with Powell's plans for the West, which involved political districts drawn along watersheds. But the big difference was that Turner's and Smythe's frontier was self-correcting--no "government" necessary.

Smythe and Turner were both reiterating the ideals of Thomas Jefferson. The frontier served as the crucible of democracy as well as a safety valve for the inevitable class conflicts that came from industrialization and wage labor. Democracy would be resilient as long as "pioneers" could set out for new settlements--that is, as long as there was more free land available. The closing of the frontier put this vision in danger. Where Turner wrung his hands at the prospect, Smythe was optimistic, proposing federal investment in irrigation to keep the frontier alive. Smythe's science was dubious, and his prescriptions for democracy lacked evidence, but the frontier has indeed persisted through to the present.

The irrigation movement saw success when the federal government committed itself to the project. In 1902, Nevada senator Francis Newlands sponsored the Reclamation Act. With Smythe as his brain trust, Newlands helped establish a federal service for the purposes of "reclaiming" arid Western lands. True to form, Newlands was a land developer who owned land in California and in the Washington, DC area. While the Reclamation Service had a limited impact for the first decades of its existence, by the time it came into its own as the Bureau of Reclamation it would have a profound effect on the development of the West as a safety valve for the rest of the country.

If Telosa's vision of "equitism" sounds to you like the latest articulation of a warmed-over Jeffersonian ideal, you would be correct. There is nothing that billionaires in the tech sector excel at so much as inventing ideas that have existed for longer than they've been alive. But this incessant push towards newness and reinvention is at the core of the US West. If it wasn't obvious, we already have multiple megacities in the desert: Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City. The idea that we should create brand new ones rather than try to solve some of the existing problems is one that Western land--and water--has kept alive for far too long.

This gets us to my assertion that these megacity proposals are dubious. If there is very little difference conceptually between nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century boosterism (aside from agriculture no longer being its main vehicle), there is a massive difference in the physical landscape. There is no more water left to claim, and without water, all the "empty" land in the West's deserts cannot support any human use. That being said, the promise of new water never fully goes away; it just gets more and more expensive. Utah politicians recently floated the idea of piping in seawater from the Pacific Ocean--presumably because of the boneheaded assumption that saltwater is acceptable for filling Great Salt Lake. One proposal would cost about $100 billion and require something like 400MW of electricity, and this does not take into account the process for getting approvals for a pipeline to run through two different states. Such a pipe could deliver about 300,000 acre feet a year, which wouldn't even be enough to refill the lake. Desalination may end up playing a role for California or Arizona, which could potentially free up Colorado River water upstream if the states agree to that, but it's pricy. If these ideas aren't ambitious enough, there's always NAWAPA, which I don't even want to talk about.

Though I disagree with Frederick Jackson Turner on the specifics, I believe it is true that by the late nineteenth century, the West had come to play a vital role in the development of the United States, even though it only held about a tenth of its population. Policymakers' enthusiasm for westward settlement temporarily flagged when faced with the realities of the arid landscape, but a combination of financial incentives, ideology, and bad science buoyed the endeavor enough to secure a federal commitment. Now, the scarcity of water, at long last, seems to have caught up to us, and it is unclear what avenues the boosters have left to pursue.

References:

Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1991)
Richard Hofstadter, "The Myth of the Happy Yeoman," American Heritage 7 no 3 (April 1956), and The Age of Reform: From Bryant to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955)
William Ellsworth Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York: Harper, 1900)
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1893)

Read more:

There is No Shortage of Water

A Short History of Water in the US West

The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)

The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923)

How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)

Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)

Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River

The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb

Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project

The Second Treaty Era

The Safety Valve

The Case of Uphill Flowing Water

What's the Deal with Alfalfa

Water for City and Country in the Late 20th Century

Great Salt Lake as Wasteland

What's the Deal with Water Marketing

Expansion is at the Root of the Problem