When reduced to its essence, the work of every great explorer and pioneer in the West has consisted in showing that the desert was no desert. It was a cramped and mendicant imagination and a weak faith in humanity that first called it a desert, and it has required the life of many a bold man to dispel that error. The pioneer cow-man came in and saw the dry bunch-grass of the plains. "This is no desert," he said; "this is pasture-land," and straightway thirty million cattle were feeding on the ranges. A colony of Mormons, driven to the wilderness by persecution, saw, with the faith of a Moses, green fields blooming where the cactus grew, and in a few years a great city had risen in the midst of a fertile valley, and a new commonwealth had been born. A Powell came and disclosed the possibilities of the desert when watered from rivers that had long run to waste, and a hundred valleys began to bloom, and millions of acres of barren desert to grow the richest crops on the continent. Miners came, found gold and silver and copper in the hills, and built a thousand camps; the railroads divided the great desert with a maze of steel trails until it was a veritable patchwork of civilization; and timid tourists came and camped, and went away better and braver. To-day several million Americans are living in the desert, not temporarily, while they rob it of riches, but for all time, and they love their homes as passionately as any dwellers in the green hills of New England. A traveler in the West must go far indeed before he find a place where he can say, "This is a worthless and irreclaimable waste, the true desert." There is no faith left in him who speaks of waste places. I stand in the gray sand; nothing but sand in every direction as far as the eye can reach--sand, a few sentinel yuccas, a sprawling mesquit-bush, with a gopher darting underneath, and a cholla cactus, gray with dust. Here, I say, is the waste place of all the ages; no man ever has set foot here before, and it is likely that no man ever will again. But what is that sound--_click_, _click_, _click_--that comes from the distance? It is no kin to the noises of the desert. Climb the ridge there, the one that trembles with heat; take it slowly, for the sun is blinding hot, and the dry air cracks one's lips. Have a care of that tall sahuaro; it has been growing there undisturbed for two centuries, and it is not less prickly for its age. And in all its years it never has seen a vision such as it now beholds; for here are men come to the desert, painfully dragging water with them in carts and barrels. They have put up machinery in this silent place, having faith that there is oil a thousand feet below in the rock; and so they come in the heat and dust to prove their faith. You hear the _click_, _click_ of their machinery; it is the triumphant song of an indomitable, conquering humanity.