PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION. 



TODAY'3 DESOLATION WAS ONCE A GARDEN. 

 EVIDENCES OP ANCIENT IRRIGATION. 



FROM NATIONAL IRRIGATION ASSOCIATION. 



One of the most marvelous engineering accomplishments of ancient or modern 

 times is shown in discoveries which were made last year in the lava beds of New 

 Mexico. Thousands of years ago, the geologists tell us, a system of irrigation reser- 

 voirs and ditches was operated in the Southwest which is not paralleled by anything 

 of this nature in the United States today. The builders of these works, a people 

 older than the Pueblo race, cultivated thousands of acres of now arid territory. Res- 

 ervoirs were constructed at the base? of mountains to catch the flood waters before 

 they were absorbed into the loose and bottomless sand, and the ditches, where they 

 ran through sand, were cemented to prevent the water's escape. 



Lava has flowed into sonae of these ditches, once filled with sparkling water in 

 centuries gone by. What can have been the history of this pre-histoiic race or what 

 can have caused their disappearance, can only be conjectured. 



Unlike the ancients of other lands these people have not left a cotnplete record 

 of their glory and their downfall and whether it was the result of climatic conditions 

 or great upheavals or whether they were supplanted by more warlike and stronger 

 races, is a mystery. That they were highly developed, however, in agriculture, 

 which is the mother of civilization, is shown by the evidences which they have left. 

 Their canals wind in and around for miles, showing a superior engineering knowledge 

 in securing an exact and uniform fall; remarkable viaducts were used in crossing 

 canyons, while a network of distributing ditches brought every available acre into 

 use for tillage. Vast fields of waving grain and laden orchards must have stretched 

 away, down the fertile valleys, under the magic touch of water for arid America 

 where it has been reclaimed through irrigation of today yields extravagantly and 

 with such development of a peaceful art must have been likewise an advanced state 

 of civilization. Here was no irrigation by individual owners or diverteis of water; 

 but a great system covering a large area, carefully thought out and operated by a 

 central head for the greatest good of the many and the utilization of the greatest 

 possible acreage. 



And it seems strange in the present era of great progress, and vast undertakings 

 that this section of country, once the most highly cultivated of the continent, should 

 now be an arid and cheerless waste with a torrid sky and parched earth, even while 

 the same rainfall of ages past still continues year by year, and the water supply is 

 still there, only awaiting. its utilization by man. 



