THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



VOL. IX. 



CHICAGO, MAY, 1896. 



NO. 5, 



PUMP IRRIGATION ON THE PLAINS. 



BY H. V. HINCKLEY. 



(Consulting Irrigation Engineer, Topeka, Kansas.) 



THE only limit to the profitable devel- 

 opment of the billion acres embraced 

 in the " Great American Desert " is the 

 extent of the available water supply. The 

 mountains and the plains afford hydro- 

 graphic conditions which are entirely dis- 

 similar. The "little farm well tilled" 

 and watered, when compared with the 

 bonanza wheat farming of recent years, is 

 a step toward agricultural independence. 

 The community in which the individual 

 secures water from an unlimited supply 

 under his own land is free from the con- 

 trol of bonded syndicates. 



It is not within the province of this arti- 

 cle to discover the various causes of finan- 

 cial embarrassment which have come upon 

 many of the landed and bonded canal and 

 water supply systems in, or originating in 

 the mountains. The most practicable 

 plan for the conservation of mountain 

 waters for use in mountain parks, or on 

 the plains in immediate proximity to the 

 mountains, is that of mountain or canon 

 reservoirs with open channel or pipe con- 

 veyors, and failures of such systems to pay 

 the anticipated revenues have not been due 

 to the fact that they have been so con- 

 structed. Upon the prairie plains, however, 

 natural reservoir sites or favorable dam sites 

 are scarce, evaporation reaches high max- 

 ima and artificial reservoir storage of sur- 

 face run-off is, in general, impracticable. 



The plains streams are generally inter- 

 mittent and are often dry during the sea- 

 son when water is most needed for plant 

 growth. Where the plains break geolog- 

 ically into high rolling lands, as in Eastern 

 Kansas and Nebraska, storage in a small 

 way is practicable (that is to say, in reser- 



voirs smaller by far than those which are 

 or would be built in the mountains) as by 

 a dam, across a ravine, holding back a lake 

 of say ten to 100 acres. Some of the val- 

 leys within these broken plains and a large 

 area of the prairies have beneath them a 

 never-failing water supply, moving con- 

 stantly but slowly under the influence of 

 gravity toward the sea or toward natural 

 surface channels in which it may flow 

 oceanward or be evaporated. This under- 

 flow is replenished by rainfall sinking 

 through the sandy soils of the plains in 

 general and, in the valleys, by the down- 

 ward lateral flow, from natural channels, 

 of storm waters or mountain snow waters. 



It is generally conceded that to dam a 

 plains river, like the Platte or the Arkan- 

 sas, having a practically bottomless bed of 

 sand, and to thereby hold back and divert 

 the floods either into service canals or into 

 side-hill or other reservoirs, is impractica- 

 ble. Numerous canals have been built for 

 the diversion from these rivers, during the 

 flood season, of the portions of the flood 

 represented by the carrying capacity of 

 such canals. The general result is an 

 annual washout of cheaply constructed 

 head-works, an unseasonable, unreliable 

 and, consequently, unsatisfactory service 

 to patrons. 



The writer will not say that the con- 

 struction of canals upon the plains proper 

 is in no case justifiable. Local conditions 

 may be, and in places are, such that a 

 canal may be an unqualified success, and 

 such that no other service will fit them as 

 well as that of a canal system, but the fu- 

 ture water supply for plains irrigation will 

 not come from the surface flow of rivers. 



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