48 THE IRRIGA TION A GE. 



wrong with irrigation when such a prosperous community shows an 

 ever increasing debt. And yet it is in every way a success. 



The San Diego Land & Town Company, the owner of the Sweet- 

 water 'dam, comes into the Federal Court of California and makes 

 statements from which it would be inferred that its waterworks were 

 a failure. I have so far avoided giving- the names of companies un- 

 less their troubles were public property. But when a company airs its 

 linen in court it makes it public property and I mention the name in 

 this case because the irrigation system of this company is supposed to 

 be a failure whereas I have direct personal knowledge that it is not. 



This company alleges that its works cost something like a million 

 dollars. But this includes the distribution system for a city of tower- 

 ing hopes and bewildering acreage that needs only six or eight feet of 

 dog fennel in the streets to finish it off in good shape. The company 

 had here a choice list of fine lots on which it proposed to realize irom 

 prospective tenderfeet and spread out a vast distribution system to 

 help catch them. Granting that it was wise it was not irrigation. At 

 Chulta Vista, which was a fine piece of property for cultivation, the 

 plainest horse sense would have dictated confining settlement to a 

 central line along a main aqueduct and pushing out distributaries from 

 that as settlement called for them. But this would not suit the re- 

 quirements of a boom. So expensive iron pipe strong enough to 

 carry water to a thousand five acre tracts under a head of some eighty 

 feet, were laid all over five thousand acres before there were any 

 settlers, rusting out and drawing interest at the same time with no 

 one to use them. 



There was some expensive litigation that increased the cost, but 

 all that can be rightfully charged against the irrigation works is less 

 than six hundred thousand dollars for the dam and about seven miles 

 of 30 inch pipe, the dam costing about two hundred and forty thou- 

 sand, and the litigation something like half that. The company sold 

 nearly twenty-five hundred acres for three hundred and fifty dollars 

 an acre of land that without the water would not bring fifty on any 

 market, boom or otherwise, was not worth ten for any purpose, and 

 cost the company considerably less than five. It could have sold the 

 whole five thousand that it piped had it not required the purchaser to 

 build a house costing at least twenty-five hundred dollars on each five 

 acre lot. Even with this proviso it could probably have sold the 

 whole for two hundred and fifty an acre, and had it discovered that 

 the boom was really over it could have sold it all for an average of 

 two hundred an acre. 



On this sale was reserved an annual payment of three dollars and 

 a half an acre for the use of the water, with which every purchaser 

 was content. They paid this for some eight years without objection 

 when suddenly the company goes into the hands of a receiver who is 

 one of the inside gentry and gets ten thousand a year or something 



