66 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



ture of skill and money which would be necessary to develop 

 irrigation would be beyond the means either of the individual 

 or of the co-operation of many individuals. 



And so companies were formed and stocks were sold to the 

 amount of millions of dollars throughout the country, gigantic 

 schemes were undertaken and very great and permanent works 

 were built and rendered ready for operation. The Highline 

 Canal, which watered the country contiguous to Denver, Col., 

 with its tunnel through the rock and its aqueduct clinging to 

 the cliff, but with scientific security because it was placed there 

 by the highest engineering skill that money could buy ; the 

 system of the Wyoming Development Co., a single section of 

 which that through the mountain cost more than all the 

 Greeley canals combined, and its reservoir with a capacity for 

 storing the total annual discharge of the Laramie River ; the 

 Sunnyside Canal of Washington, which, when first built, trav- 

 ersed the solitudes of a sagebrush desert for 60 miles these 

 are illustrations of what corporate capital did toward the de- 

 velopment of irrigation in the great West. 



Wherever these engineering works have been constructed 

 there has been opened up for possible occupation a wide and 

 fruitful acreage, and thus every region through which these 

 artificial watercourses run has been potentially and perma- 

 nently benefited. Every drop of water which they gather 

 and divert will yet be utilized for the transformation of the 

 desert into a new soil. They will yet do the full quota of work 

 which they were constructed to perform they will prove an 

 unadulterated blessing to the whole country. In the meantime 

 the hopeful investors in these large enterprises, the people 

 who hold stock certificates for the millions of money which 

 they contributed to build them, have realized nothing but a 



