Answer: B
Explanation: Explorers had not actually seen the Plains when describing it. And also.......
HOW THE ‘GREAT AMERICAN DESERT’BURIES GREAT PLAINS INDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY.
In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the
Missouri River a great scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered
and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition
of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer
Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer,
and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of
Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured
weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the ‘Red
River’. While returning, they found that Long had ‘mistaken’ the Canadian River for the Red, and that they
were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long
labeled the whole place a “great desert.” An editor improved the phrase to Great American
Desert, and emblazoned the phrase on history.
A Persistent Mirage is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the
groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning beyond the
pale that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner’s frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement,
moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains.
Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who
lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal
network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large
populations, and produce tradable surpluses, undergirded by bison protein. Euramericans from
Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the
Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the
escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the
horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the
great Indian Agricardo Complex, with its history just begun.
