UNPROFITABLE IRRIGATION. 



NO. III. 



BY T. S. VAN DYKE. 



*T*- HE stupidity of many landowners who think some one else will in- 

 aJ_ vest money to make their property worth several times what it was, 

 without their contributing a cent or an acre, and patiently await the 

 settlement of the tract at the high prices asked by the land speculator, 

 has been a fertile cause of the discredit into which irrigation works as 

 an investment have fallen. The land owner can rarely learn that this is 

 one of the most dangerous of all ways of trying to get something for 

 nothing. He will not stop to inquire whether anyone else has ever made 

 any money in that way, and years of waiting in the path of progress 

 will not teach him that he would do better to try and get somewhere 

 before he dies by recognizing the fact that water costs money, that capi- 

 tal must have interest, that settlement is slow, and that the annual pay- 

 ment must be set low or it will not only be a burden to the irrigator but 

 a bar on the transfer of the land in case he wishes to sell. 



Next to this stupidity comes that of the companies themselves. 

 Much capital has gone blindly ahead in the past and built expensive 

 works, thinking that the land owners must have water and would buy it, 

 when they could have learned twenty years ago that such confidence in 

 sweet human nature was almost certain ruin. Others that have secured 

 land enough by exchange or purchase, or the desert land act, which the 

 taker has to buy water for in some way because he cannot make his 

 proof without it, have rushed as wildly ahead because they thought they 

 had a fine project. The world needed it, therefore the world would 

 scramble for it. It takes half a lifetime to learn that it is the easiest 

 thing to produce a first class article that the world needs and should 

 have but which, nevertheless, the great pigheaded world don't want, or 

 don't want just now, but will call again. The surest way to outwit the 

 world on this, is to force it to see the beauties of your proposition, not 

 with high-flown words, a grand prospectus, glib-tongued real estate 

 agents or stereopticon lectures a thousand miles away, but by deeds. 

 Instead of prating of smiling skies make the land smile for itself. Then 

 your smiling real estate man can smile to advantage. 



It is very seldom that a company has sense enough to do this and 

 when it does it has still less sense about the way to do it. A year after 

 the building of the Sweetwater dam I found the settlers at Chula Vista, 

 the new settlement under it, in the depths of despair. They were start- 

 ing in to work out the problem of irrigation anew for themselves just as 

 if no one in California had ever tried it. They were making the wretched 

 muss that is generally seen in such cases and' when I told them they 



