176 ANNUAL EEPOKT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



by careful handling, the light soil becomes reasonably compacted, or 

 held back by the roots and straw of the vegetation, or protected by 

 the growing trees and shrubbery, so that no further damage is 

 incurred. 



PROBLEMS. 



These problems of dealing with the settlers, of giving them sound 

 advice, and at the same time collecting from them the cost of the 

 works, involve the problems which are far more difficult than 

 those of engineering construction or related business manage- 

 ment. The difficulties of management are complicated by the 

 fact that the iri'igator frequently regards his individual interest as 

 antagonistic to that of the community or management, insisting upon 

 wasting water because of the mistaken belief that the more of a good 

 thing he has the better. He thus gradually reduces the value of 

 his land or ruins it and that of his neighbors, contesting stubbornly 

 every effort at economy and wise management, because it interferes 

 with his convenience. He has paid for water and he wants all he has 

 paid for and more, awakening too late to the fact that in all this he 

 has been struggling to do the wrong thing, because it seemed at the 

 time easiest or cheapest. This phase of the work demands not merely 

 engineering skill and agricultural knowledge, but the exercise of 

 patience, tact, and firmness to the highest possible degree. 



It is probable that as irrigation systems develop, as the country 

 grows older, and experience is acquired, the good practices will 

 crystallize into customs and the customs into laws or regulations, mak- 

 ing it easier to control the distribution of water, but at the present 

 stage of the development under the reclamation act, with new officers 

 and employees in a new country with almost unknown soil and 

 climatic conditions, with families from all j^arts of the United States 

 and from abroad, with irrigators who have never irrigated before, 

 with customs imcrystallized, with laws and court decisions confusing 

 and apparently contradictory, it is easy to see that there is no bed of 

 roses for the water master, who must operate hundreds of miles of 

 new ditches, delivering water to hundreds of new farms, through or 

 by means of hundreds of structures, including headgates, flumes, cul- 

 verts, and with bridges, crossings, etc., to be maintained. 



The water master, or the man wlio manages a large complicated 

 system of hundreds or thousands of small farms, who must plan out 

 day by day the schedule of distribution, who must guard against 

 loss, be keenly vigilant for possible breaks in the sj^stem, and who 

 takes the place of Providence for a community, is the most abused 

 individual in the community. 



