62 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



are the outgrowth of the success first shown to be possible at 

 Greeley. 



Twenty years after the beginnings of irrigation were made 

 by the Mormons in Utah, and contemporaneously with those 

 made in Colorado, similar influences were working like leaven 

 throughout portions of California. She also had learned that 

 her soil could be made as rich as her gold mines simply by the 

 use of a little water, but the speculative spirit which had 

 characterized the settlement of the state soon fastened itself 

 upon her irrigating possibilities, infecting the whole region 

 and running a course throughout the entire West as fierce as 

 the gold fever of '49. Incorporated companies were formed 

 to do the work hitherto performed by the individual or by com- 

 munities working in co-operation, so that whereas the settle- 

 ments in Utah and Colorado had depended upon their own 

 muscular efforts in the building of their modest systems, the 

 Incorporated Companies planned immense undertakings en- 

 terprises worthy of the age and for the construction of these 

 issued stocks and bonds with visionary prodigality. Were they 

 not going to build hundreds of miles of tubular and open 

 waterways? Were they not going to provide for the irriga- 

 tion of thousands and thousands of acres which, when so 

 treated, would become incredibly productive and enormously 

 profitable? Men began to dream of becoming billionaires by 

 making merchandise of the melting snows ; of an oligarchy of 

 wealth unmeasured by the dreams of avarice and rendered 

 perpetual by selling to settlers upon the soil the "rights" to the 

 privilege of "renting" water, and in collecting in perpetuity 

 an annual toll from a new class in Anglo-Saxon society who 

 should be practical serfs, and be known as "water tenants." 



There were two factors which made it seem reasonable to 



