104 American Fisheries Society 



tiers followed, additional small ditches were taken out; the 

 larger co-operative canals followed. Soon all the natural 

 flow during the summer season was appropriated. That 

 thousands upon thousands of trout of all ages, but more 

 especially those of the smaller sizes, were daily being car- 

 ried into the ditches, only to die upon the fields, scarce 

 occasioned comment. 



Meanwhile the hunger for land and the thirst for water 

 continued to grow, until the latter was largely over-appro- 

 priated even in favorable years, while in years of drouth 

 many ditches were dry practically the entire season and the 

 rivers themselves became dry beds further and further to- 

 ward their mountain sources. The harvest of the land was 

 swallowing up the harvest of the waters. Even then there 

 came but a faint warning note from the more far-seeing of 

 those whom we now term "conservationists." 



Speaking broadly for the whole inter-mountain country, 

 but more specifically for Colorado, this early irrigation, 

 coupled with the pollution of the mountain streams by min- 

 ing and lumbering, threatened the complete destruction of 

 the native fishes, as well as fish culture, which was then in 

 its infancy. 



No less an authority than Dr. Jordan, after an exhaust- 

 ive examination during the summer of 1889, summed tip 

 the situation as follows : 



In the progress of settlement of Colorado, the streams have become 

 more and more largely used for irrigation. Below the mouth of the 

 canons, dam after dam and ditch after ditch turn off the water. Tn 

 summer the beds of oven large rivers (as the Rio Grande) are left 

 wholly dry, all the water being turned into these ditches. Much of 

 this water is consumed by the arid land and its vegetation ; the rest 

 seeps back turbid and yellow into the bed of the river, to be again 

 intercepted as soon as enough has accumulated to be worth taking. In 

 some valleys, as in the San Luis, in the dry season there is scarcely a 

 drop of water in the river bed that has not from one to ten times flowed 

 over some field, while the beds of many considerable streams (Rio la 

 Jara, Alamosa, etc.) are filled with dry clay and dust. 



Great numbers of trout, in many cases thousands of them, pass into 

 these irrigation ditches and are left to perish in the fields. The destruc- 



