Most, if not all, of the Arizona settler-recruitment publications were silent about whose land their audiences in the East would be settling. Instead, they celebrated the desert as a blank slate, trying to generate excitement among would-be Arizona residents and entice them to imagine all that they could build and grow on this drawing board in the sand. Once emptied and imagined as a space outside of politics, the desert-as-laboratory became a testing ground for the settlers’ ideas of modern science, Western ingenuity, and the creative injection of ideas from the Old World to make the New World thrive.
The “Old World” was not Europe but, in fact, the biblical one: boosterist brochures were filled with references to the Colorado River Basin as the American “Nile,” which it was said offered all the fertile land needed for prosperity and progress. To build a new arid empire in the United States, where better to look than the Middle East?
One staple of the Middle East’s own agricultural power in its arid regions was date cultivation, which quickly became an object of desire for U.S. agents of empire. The date was an exotic but much coveted fruit in America in the late 1800s. The first directors of the University of Arizona’s Agricultural Experiment Station (AES), which began operations in 1890, all believed that they could build a domestic date industry on the basis of its existing popularity.
These men—Frank A. Gulley, James W. Toumey, and Robert H. Forbes—became proponents of the university’s first experiments with date palms and worked with private and government agents to import diverse date varieties from around the Middle East through the 1890s and early 1900s. The first decades of AES’ work were largely focused on expanding Arizona farmers’ capacity for date cultivation.
The date was, in this period, an imported specialty fruit that was much in demand in the United States. Muscat, Oman, was, in the 1800s, the center of Arabian date exporting and specialized primarily in the fardh variety, which was hardy enough for long ocean journeys. Upon arrival in the U.S., the dates were not sold fresh but in huge congealed blocks that grocers would then portion off for consumers. Dates were not available year-round, arriving only on ships from the Gulf around Thanksgiving and Christmastime. Americans apparently loved the sweet, sticky treat, and it quickly became a beloved part of the American holiday season.
When records of date importing began in 1824, the U.S. imported 44,425 pounds of dates, and these figures increased dramatically over the rest of the century. By 1885 the country was importing more than 10 million pounds of dates annually, growing thereafter to as much as 20 million pounds annually between 1893 and 1903. By 1920 imports were up to 32 million pounds; by 1922 53 million pounds. Around the turn of the century, grocers were selling millions of pounds of dates during the holidays. With this booming business, the United States had become Oman’s most important foreign customer.