THE IRRIGATION AGE. 379 



the beginnings of the present system, and one which furnished a dif- 

 ferent standpoint for a study of the subject. 



As Utah is the result of a religious emigration, so Greeley is the 

 creation of the town meeting. Its founding marked the beginning of 

 a new and different industrial development in Colorado. Before this 

 it was the wealth of the mines or the migratory and adventurous ex- 

 perience of the range live-stock business which had attracted settle- 

 ment. Greeley, on the contrary, represented an effort of home making 

 people, both to enjoy landed independence and social intellectual priv- 

 ileges equal to those of the towns and cities they had left. Among 

 its first buildings was Colony Hall, and among its first organizations 

 the Lyceum, in which all the affairs of the community were debated 

 with a fervor and fearlessness quite worthy of Horace Greeley's fol- 

 lowing. Co-operation was adopted in the construction and manage- 

 ment of public qualities, of which the irrigation canal was the first 

 and most important. The wisdom and justice of making common 

 property of the town site, the beauty and value of which could only be 

 created by the enterprise and public spirit of all, was recognized and 

 put into practice and satisfactory results. The only deliberate ex- 

 travagance was the erection at an early day of a school building 

 worthy of the oldest and richest New England community. The high- 

 est methods both of irrigation and cultivation were sought out through 

 numberless experiments, until Greeley and its potatoes grow famous 

 together. The home and civic institution of the colony became the 

 pride of the state, and the hard- won success of the community inspired 

 numerous similar undertakings and furnished an impulse which re- 

 sulted in the reclamation and settlement of northern Colorado. Boul- 

 der, Longmont, Loveland and Fort Collins were the outgrowth of suc- 

 cess at Greeley, and each adopted many of the ideas and tendencies of 

 the parent colony 



Twenty years subsequent to the beginning of Utah, and contem- 

 poraneously with the settlement of Colorado, similar influences began 

 to make themselves felt in California, especially in its southern part. 

 Anaheim is called the mother colony. This was co-operative in its 

 inception, and its principal irrigation system has ever remained such. 

 Riverside followed a few years later and represented a higher ideal, 

 but the spirit of speculation in which California civilization was born 

 soon fastened itself upon irrigation, as it had done in the case of min- 

 ing, and ran a mad race through southern California. Irrigation in 

 this state became corporate and speculative. Where Utah and Colo- 

 rado had depended only upon their hands and teams for the building 

 of irrigation works, California issued stocks and bonds, and so mort- 

 gaged its future. Men began to dream of a new race of millionaires, 

 created by making merchandise of the melting snows, by selling 

 "rights" to the "renting" of water, and collecting annual toll from a 

 new class of society, to be known as "water tenants." 



