THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



JUDGE L. W. SHURTLIFF, 

 Chairman of the Utah Irrigation Commission. 



chief city has exalted the brave Sutro, while a man of 

 the new era stands at the head of the State in the 

 capitol at Sacramento. The work of the San Fran- 

 cisco Examiner is bearing fruit, but both that news- 

 paper and its army of followers should- remember 

 that there may be other duties which have an equal 

 claim upon their attention. The California legisla- 

 ture assembles only once in two years. There is 

 every reason to anticipate that before 1897 there will 

 be a strong pressure for the opening to settlement 

 of a fraction of the arid public lands. Unless the 

 legislature provides laws under which the Carey act 

 may be turned to some account, the future irrigation 

 development of California will be merely a matter of 

 water and land grabbing under the lax and ill- 

 adapted laws of State and nation. At this very time 

 lands that ought to be in process of wise reclamation 

 and settlement under some form of public super- 

 vision are being captured by adventurous specula- 

 tors. It is worse than folly to permit the precious 

 water supply and valuable lands to be manipulated 

 in a way that seldom brings good to anyone, and fre- 

 quently harm to all concerned. It is possible for 

 California to introduce a better method to the extent 

 of at least one million acres. It is not too late to 

 accomplish something, and we yet hope that Califor- 

 nia will wake up to her duty and opportunity. 



tl The New Year's edition of the San Fran- 



Years cisco Chronicle contained a remarkable 

 Hence." symposium on the future of California, 

 entitled " Fifty Years Hence." To a considerable 

 degree these hopeful prophecies apply to the arid 

 region as a whole, and it is worth while to review 

 them briefly in this light. The place of honor is 

 given to an article of extraordinary merit, entitled 

 " Irrigation's Future," by Colonel Wm. Ham. Hall. 

 While the article is in the highest sense imaginative, 

 no one could undertake to say that it is visionary, 

 since Colonel Hall has grounded his hopes on a solid 

 basis of scientific knowledge. He roughly estimates 

 that in 1945 California will have under irrigation 

 6,500,000 acres, cultivated by 1,600,000 practical irri- 

 gators. The census of 1890 shows that California 

 had in that year but 13,732 irrigators. By what 

 method does this audacious prophet justify his hopes 

 of such astounding increase in the resources of irriga- 

 tion? He has perfectly lucid explanations to offer, 

 applying not merely to California, but equally well to 

 all other parts of Arid America. Of course the basis 

 of his hopes is the complete utilization of the water 

 supply, and the first important development which 

 he predicts in this line is the adoption of flooding as 

 practiced on the Nile. He describes this method at 

 length, showing that it has enabled land to hold its 

 fertility for centuries while supporting a population 

 of 1.2 persons per acre, or a family of six persons to 

 each five acre tract. He thinks this plan of irrigation 

 by inundation will be successfully introduced on the 

 many rivers in the San Joaquin valley. By this 

 method floods that are now disastrous will be utilized, 

 though it may be necessary to allow certain of the 

 lands to lie " fallow," as it were, in alternate years. 

 The adoption of this system would of course involve 

 the construction of basins and levees as in Egypt. 

 Colonel Hall thinks that this will be the next step in 

 the order of development, following the high class 

 irrigation which has thus far claimed the exclusive 

 attention of enterprise in California. He shows the 

 difficulty in the way of utilizing narrow and deep can- 

 yons for storage, and says this can only be overcome 

 by building dams from 200 to 300 feet in height. 

 While this cannot be done to-day, he believes it would 

 be a no more wonderful achievement for the next 

 half century than the extension of spans of bridges 

 from less than 700 to over 1,700 feet, and the erection 

 of buildings twenty stories high, have been for the 

 last half century. His further hopes of the extension 

 of the water supply for irrigation may be briefly sum- 

 marized as follows: 1. By building series of small 

 reservoirs for short-time storage along the foothills by 

 torrential streams, and the application of water for 

 winter flooding. 2. By improvement of works for the 

 diversion and delivery of irrigation waters and the 



