AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 



"beginning of irrigation" in the course of which he 

 writes : 



"Even modern irrigation is comparatively old. It 

 began seventy years before the English colony 

 landed at Jamestown, when Spanish missionaries 

 gained an enduring foothold in the valley of the 

 Rio Grande. They built churches which still stand, 

 and planted gardens which still flourish, but in 

 watering these gardens they taught nothing new to 

 the native inhabitants. The Spanish explorers, who 

 rode up the valley of this river, in the first half of 

 the sixteenth century found Pueblo Indians irrigat- 

 ing the thirsty soil as their forefathers had done for 

 centuries before them and as their descendants are 

 still doing. The ditches of Las Gruces, 



New Mexico, have an unbroken record of three cen- 

 turies of service the history of which is written in 

 the banks of the canals by the sediment with which 

 the waters of the Rio Grande is laden. Year after 

 year this has been deposited on the sides and bot- 

 toms of these ditches, until from being channels 

 cut out below the surface, they are raised two or 

 three feet above. It is here that one can yet find 

 agriculture almost as primitive as that of the "days of 

 Pharaoh, where grain is reaped with the sickle and 

 threshed by the trampling of goats."* 



When one gets behind the trenches at James- 

 town he surely precedes the birth of "American 

 agriculture" of the Atlantic type, and when he 

 storms the Pharaonic line he challenges the an- 

 tiquity of the world. It was on the Atlantic side that 

 the tourist bemoaned the absence of ruins. It is on 

 the Pacific side that the claim can be established 

 that, even for antiquities, one should "see America 

 first." 



THE SPANISH PERIOD. The allusions by Professor 

 Mead to the incursion of Spanish explorers and mis- 

 sionaries upon the vestiges of the prehistoric period, 

 which may be said to have been found surviving 

 amidst its ruins, serve to mark the beginning of a 

 new period in the development of Pacific Coast agri- 

 culture the achievements of the Spaniards. But 

 the greatest agricultural work of the Spaniards was 

 not accomplished in the valley of the Rio Grande 

 nor among the most ancient ruins of Arizona. They 

 accomplished most in California where they found 

 no signs of preexisting agriculture and where the 

 only antiquities were the mounds of the clam- 

 diggers a low grade of aborigines who knew 

 not whence they came nor where they were going, 

 until the missionaries advised them! This work 



* Elwood Mead, loc. cit., p. 42. 



215 



