Desert Conquest / or, Precious Waters

Here’s a curious western novel from Canadian writer Arthur Murray Chisholm (1872-1960). It was first serialized as Precious Waters in The Popular Magazine starting November 1, 1912, and then published in book form the following year, with illustrations by Clarence Rowe and a new title, Desert Conquest, or Precious Waters.  This is one of those westerns without cowboys, but it has nearly every other element that goes with the genre. It begins, in fact, with a train robbery that is actually a “cute meet” between its two central characters, Casey Dunne (the guy) and Clyde Burnaby (the girl). Don’t ask me where you get Clyde for a girl’s name. While love eventually unites these two in promised matrimony by the end of the novel, the real conflict involves a railroad and a settlement of dry-land ranchers. The ranchers rely on a limited supply of river water to irrigate their crops. The railroad is building a dam to divert the river onto its own lands, for development and sale to new settlers. Though this will make the ranchers’ lands as good as worthless, the railroad’s scheme is indifferent to their welfare and callously legal. Never mind any assumed water rights of those who came there first. The railroad can keep any threatened litigation in the courts for as long as it takes, until the ranchers go broke.