COLONY BUILDING. 



COLONIAL SETTLEMENTS IN THE 

 ARID WEST. 



BY W. C. FITZSIMMONS. 



rjERHAPS the greatest ultimate advantage to fol- 

 1 low the irrigation of cultivable land in the arid 

 belt is the facility thus afforded for colonial settle- 

 ments. Isolation has ever been, and now is, everywhere 

 the bane of agricultural life in the United States. Less 

 progressive people in some other countries have, from 

 time immemorial, set us a better example. The farm 

 village is common in many countries, and is not un- 

 known even in Mexico and the Central and South 

 American States. Unhappily, it is rather the workers 

 upon surrounding lands and not the land owners who 

 form the villages. The custom of living in villages 

 and going forth to the labor of the field at sunrise 

 may have had its origin in the necessity for banding 

 together as a protection against wild beasts or savage 

 men. In any event, the custom prevails largely in 

 other countries than our own, and has manifold ad- 

 vantages which need not be here specified. 



The ideal and possible American farm village, how- 

 ever, is not one wherein are grouped in wretched 

 hovels the ill-fed tenants of a "land baron" who 

 maintains himself in princely state elsewhere; but 

 one made up of elegant homes and little farms, each 

 one tended by the happy, educated and independent 

 owner and his family. Such centers of education, 

 refinement and good citizenship are nowhere so easy 

 of realization as in the irrigable arid region. Indeed, 

 they are practically impossible in non-irrigable sec- 

 tions, and any near approach to these desirable con- 

 ditions in most of the older States can never be ob- 

 tained. It is only where the control of a sufficient 

 water supply makes possible the maximum products 

 of land that subdivision into small holdings can be 

 carried to the point of a self-supporting farm village 

 or small colonial settlement. In the vast irrigable 

 sections now lying bleak and dreary on the endless 

 plains of Texas, or among the snow-clad peaks of 

 Montana, are thousands of the most eligible sites for 

 colonies which a proper development of irrigation 

 systems, either general or local, would make im- 

 mediately available. To the casual observer these 

 dismal wastes are a terror, and the Ohio man, or the 

 man from Illinois, who sees them for the first time, 

 experiences a sensation akin to that of the traveler 

 who leaves the green border edging the Nile and 

 betakes himself toward the limitless dreariness of 

 Sahara. To him these regions appear to be forever 



destined to be wholly given over to desolation, and 

 entirely beyond the power of man to make fit for 

 human habitation. No greater error could be made. 

 These most uninviting stretches of monotonous, plain 

 and struggling herbage are the broad stages upon 

 which are certain to be wrought, in the not distant 

 future, some of the most remarkable transformation 

 scenes ever witnessed by man in any country. These 

 gloomy realms.now the inhospitable home of the coyote 

 and the prairie dog, are destined to become the 

 centers of the highest type of rural life upon the con- 

 tinent. Let this soil, now as bleak as interstellar 

 space, but feel the revivifying touch of water from 

 the mountain stream and the miracle is wrought! 



The hardy pioneers who toiled over interminable 

 stretches of muddy and dusty roads to reach the 

 heavy timber lands of Ohio and Michigan in the early 

 "thirties," believed they were leaving the stony hill- 

 sides of Connecticut, or the worn out lands of 

 southern New York, for a land flowing with milk and 

 honey, and such they found it, not in esse, but in 

 posse. The labor of clearing the dense forests of oak 

 and hickory, of sycamore, birch and maple, would to- 

 day appall the stoutest heart, to say nothing of par- 

 alyzing the strongest arm. They wrought as no slave 

 of the cotton fields of Georgia would have found him- 

 self equal to, and spent their strength and their years 

 in destroying the magnificent growth of timber to 

 make way for the log cabin and the stumpy, ill- 

 cultivated field. The conditions of farm life in these 

 years and in these wooded fastnesses were laborious 

 and inconceivably irksome. Yet these pioneers 

 builded mighty States, and a high degree of civiliza- 

 tion followed the sturdy strokes of their brawny arms. 



But what required their patient toil and Spartan 

 fortitude half a lifetime to achieve may now be 

 wrought out on the desolate plains of the arid West 

 within the space of a few months, and with but a tithe 

 of the mental and physical strain which fell to the 

 unhappy lot of those elder builders of the common- 

 wealth. Let the wealth of waters falling upon the 

 mountain areas but be impounded and poured in un- 

 ceasing bounty upon this bare soil and the work is 

 done. There is no laborious felling of the gnarled 

 oak, no interminable waiting for the scanty crop. 

 The husbandman may at once mount his machine 

 plow, and while sitting at his leisure admiring the 

 scenery and contemplating his happy condition, pre- 

 pare more land in better condition for a crop in a 

 single day than his father could have done by the 

 grinding toil of a week among rocks or stumps. This 

 is no fanciful sketch. All this has been done a hun- 



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