UNPROFITABLE IRRIGATI 



WORKS. 



No. II. 

 BY T. S. VAN DYKE. 



The rock on which most irrigation enterprises have split is building 

 works and trying to sell water afterwards. This has been a failure in 

 most all times and places and cannot well be otherwise. Nothing would 

 seem more easy than to sell water to a tract of land on which a lot of 

 miserable settlers are hanging by the eyelids, waiting for Providence to 

 send that long expected tenderfoot to buy them out before the store, 

 keeper who hrs a mortgage on the land for provisions can foreclose the 

 mortgage. Yet nothing is harder. 



Few things appear more simple than to sell water in some way to 

 that miserable storekeeper who is on the verge of bankrupcy because he 

 has " staked " too many of the dry ranchers and has had to take the 

 ranches. He will groan as deeply over his load as any one, will swear 

 that the land is worth less than nothing without water, but when you 

 come to sell him some he suddenly does not need it. 



Pew things seem more simple than to induce the banker who gets 

 that land from the bankrupt storekeeper to do something that will make 

 it an asset in somebody's hand and stop the row of the financial bricks 

 it starts tumbling. But no, he will go bankrupt on a stack of it and his 

 receiver will swear over it still more, and the man who buys from the 

 the receiver will never forgive himself for his folly, but the last thing 

 any of them will do will be to buy water, They all admit the necessity 

 of water and admit generally that it is cheap enough. What then is the 

 matter ? Haven't the money ? All right, we will fix that in a minute. 

 You concede that without water the land is practically unsaleable and 

 that with it it would be readily saleable at two or three times the price 

 at which it now goes begging. Just give us half cf it for water on the 

 other half and you need not put up any money. A very simple looking 

 proposition but you are no nearer selling water than before. 



And what then is the matter ? Only this and nothing more. Each 

 one in the chain knows the value of water as well as you do. He knows 

 that half the land with water is worth several times as much as the 

 whole of it without. And for this very reaspn he proposes to absorb 

 the entire difference between the value of the land wet and the land dry. 

 He thinks you should be paid of course for the capital you have invested 

 in the work. But that is the business of the tenderfoot who buys from 

 him. After buying he should reward capital by piying an annual rental 

 sufficient to maintain the work and pay an interest on the cost. In the 



