1 HE IRE1GA TION AGE, ill 



difierent water supply periods and these measurements submitted un- 

 der oath to those who are willing to finance a feasible canal. Careful 

 surveys are being made of land that can be covered by the new ditches 

 and where- water supply, quantity and quality of land, marketing fa- 

 cilities and grafts on the community are reasonably certain, plants are 

 installed, but few:of which contemplate greater work than a score or 

 so miles of ditch with a reservoir at the head. 



There are only a few of the irrigation canals of the west now in 

 the hands of jthe^original owners. Litigation is one of the first dis- 

 eases to which an irrigation canal is heir. After the smoke of the first 

 battle has died away it is usually found that a reorganization is need- 

 ed, and when this is perfected, if it ever is perfected, the original 

 owners are out. of the deal with more or less loss charges up to the 

 speculation. This is almost the universal experience with a "stock" 

 concern, and with the canal even owned for the people and by the 

 people, it has been proven that the honesty of the people is graded by 

 the distance they farm from the head of the ditch, it being an axiom 

 that the only perfectly.honest? man on a canal is the one at the extreme 

 lower end, where he has no opportunity to take water "out of turn." 



The laws regulating or attempting to regulate the water feature 

 of the arid west are in a most degraded, chaotic state, and this fact 

 creates more litigation than all the mining -fraternity ever dreamed of, 

 and in fact lawsuits and family difficulties caused by loose laws on the 

 subtect are three times more than from theft, divorce, murder and the 

 corruption of other property interests combined. The irrigation ca- 

 nal is often promoted for no other reason than the filching that may 

 be done during the early stages of the proposition. The latter stages 

 are never taken in to consideration in fraudulent schemes for the rea- 

 son that the promoters are well aware it is never to be carried out. 

 The early work, the selling of worthless stock and other foul means 

 are to give the opportunities for the "clean up," and after that the 

 proposition falls by the wayside. 



Prom all this it will be readily understood that an irrigation prop- 

 osition is liable to be looked upon with a good deal of suspicion. 



The mining world has been filled with so much that is dishonest, 

 and this field of crookedness is so closely allied geographically with 

 that of irrigation and other wildcat undertakings which, unfortunate- 

 ly, have been laid at the door of the westerner, while it, as often as 

 not, was contrived in the east, that the capitalists shroud each new 

 arid land proposition with the sensation of a jok>>. With the railroads, 

 the armor plate business, the cattle and sheep industries, the stock 

 markets, government bonds, etc., etc., furnishing th^ greater and more 

 certain fields for investments, irrigation has been considered a second- 

 ary matter and one which should be approached with a good deal of 



