STORY OF IRRIGATION 



THE BEET SUGAR INDUSTRY IN THE ARKANSAS 

 RIVER VALLEY OF EASTERN COLORADO. 



BY JOHN E. FROST. 



It was about 1870 when a young farmer from Bardolph, McDonough 

 County, Illinois, still on the hither side of the meridian of life loaded 

 his personal effects and his family into a covered wagon and started 

 for the great west in search of a region where he hoped to find health 

 and an opportunity to make a fortune. He crossed the Mississippi 

 and then the Missouri River, pushed west through Kansas, following 

 closely the line of the A. T. & S. F. Ry., which was then pushing its 

 way through the Buffalo pastures of western Kansas towards the Colo- 

 rado line in order to earn its land grant of three million acres within 

 the time limit of the granting act. 



This young farmer was Mr. George W. Swink, now State Senator 

 Swink and Mayor of Rocky Ford. He pushed his way along the over- 

 land stage trail way ahead of the Santa Fe railroad construction to 

 where the stage trail crosses the Arkansas River at a point where the 

 rock bottom had given it the name of Rocky Ford. At this point he 

 stopped and decided to locate. He built a small adobe house and store 

 where for several years thereafter he kept a small stock of outfitting 

 goods, and also furnished hotel accommodations to stage passengers 

 whose love of adventure or search for fortune tempted them to seek a 

 region then so remote. 



Mr. Swink homesteaded land and commenced farming in a small 

 way and with his few neighbors began the construction of a small 

 irrigating canal, taking the water from the Arkansas River, which is 

 now known as the Rocky Ford Canal, and which was the inception of 

 irrigating operations in that region- About three years later the con- 

 struction gangs of the Santa Fe Railway broke ground almost in Mr. 

 Swink's door yard, and in a few months the great "Iron Trail" was 

 completed to Pueblo, and Rocky Ford became one of its stations. An 

 occasional new settler straggled in, a little more greund was put under 

 cultivation each year, and thus was made a feeble beginning of farm- 

 ing in that part of the great Arkansas River valley, then a desert, but 

 now the most productive and richest farming region of Colorado. 



It was about twenty-five years later when the great wave of im- 

 migration and settlement produced by the period of unprecedented 



