THE IREIGATION AGE. 



145 



lawmaker and the jurist of the Western half of this 

 country. 



The most effective way of doing this seems to be 

 to trace the growth of administrative methods on a 

 single stream, to show how its waters have passed from 

 public to private ownership and how they are being 

 leased, sold, divided and used, letting this serve as an 

 example of what is taking place in thousands of other 

 valleys between the Missouri Eiver and the Pacific 

 Ocean. To attempt to deal generally with this subject 

 would only result in dazing you with conflicting laws 

 and diverse conditions of the seventeen arid States 

 and Territories. There are complications enough in 

 one valley to occupy one evening. 



I first saw the stream we are to use as an illus- 

 tration twenty years ago. I had traveled for 300 

 miles up the incline of the plains which lie against the 

 eastern base of the Eocky Mountains. It was a coun- 

 try almost without inhabitants, and where it seemed 

 that a light-footed and laborious grasshopper would 



ITofff volume *ppropriit-t</ 4632.S3 StC.-ff 

 Totmf num A f or stppropriftor* 104. 



-Relation bctwe. 



ttn woDtbly discharge of thn Fondro Riwr anil llio approprlatloi 

 therefrom. 



have hard work to live. The last part of my journey 

 was up the valley of the Poudre Eiver, near the mouth 

 of which is the town of Greeley and the site of the 

 historic Greeley colony*, and at the upper end of the 

 town of Fort Collins and the State Agricultural Col- 

 lege. This stream, which is too large to be called a 

 creek and too small to be properly dignified as a river, 

 has its source in the perpetual snows of the moun- 

 tains. It tumbles down through rocky gorges for a 

 hundred miles and then flows for fifty miles across 

 the plain which falls away from the mountains to the 

 east about twenty feet to the mile. Where the river 

 leaves the mountains it is nearly 6,000 feet above the 

 sea; where it joins the South Platte it is 4,800 feet 

 above the sea. Bordering the stream is a strip of irri- 

 gated land varying in width from half a mile to 

 fifteen miles. Fifty ditches and canals divert its 

 water. The one farthest upstream starts in the canon, 

 the one farthest down, forty-five miles below. The 

 largest canal is sixty feet wide, five feet deep, seventy- 



five miles long, and supplies water to 400 farms. The 

 smallest ditch can be stepped across and waters less 

 than 100 acres. 



The first ditches were built more than forty years 

 ago in the vicinity of the stage stations along the line 

 of the overland trail, one branch of which ran up this 

 valley. At that time everything consumed had to be 

 hauled in wagons over 700 miles. The freight rate 

 was 25 cents per pound, with .no insurance from loss 

 from floods or Indian raids. Even unskillful irrigation 

 was a success. Hay sold for $100 a ton; cabbages 

 brought $1.00 a head and potatoes 50 cents a pound. 



The founding of the Greeley colony in 1870 was 

 the beginning of a new order of things in Colorado. 

 Before that irrigated farms had been too small and 

 too widely separated for their owners or their owners' 

 families to enjoy either churches, schools or the ad- 

 vantages of social life. But the colony canal was 

 large enough to create a community which could give 

 its members all the comforts and institutions of civiliza- 

 tion. Its success was quickly followed by other large 

 projects which had their headgates farther upstream. 

 Capitalists saw a new source of wealth in the melting 

 snows. Irrigation development became corporate and, 

 in a sense, speculative. In less than nine years over 

 $1,000,000 was invested in canals and ditches which 

 reached from, the river for scores of miles out on the 

 unsettled barren plains and covered many sections 

 which were not watered nor farmed for twenty years. 



The promoters of these enterprises came from all 

 parts of the country and the money which built them 

 from more remote sections. The largest one was built 

 by a Scotch company with money brought from Edin- 

 burgh. Colonists from New York enlisted their friends 

 in two or three others. The promoters of these enter- 

 prises were spurred by rivalry to secure these hitherto 

 unused resources of nature, and in the race for acquire- 



* Greeley, Colo. The reader is referred to an interesting and valuable 

 account of the origin, settlement and evolutions of Greeley in Harper's Mag- 

 azine, February, 1903, under the title of " A Decreed Town." EDITOR 



A Potato Crop Near Greeley, Colo. Irrigated Culture. 



ment gave little heed to future consequences. No one 

 knew how much water would be needed to irrigate an 

 acre of ground, nor whether the river would fill all the 

 canals after they were completed. The result was that 

 ditch building far exceeded the capacity of the stream 

 to supply water. The largest of these canals carries 

 more water than the average flow of the river during 

 the irrigation season, and all the water it carries can 

 be turned into any one of a half dozen in August and 

 September. When the snows are melting, or follow- 

 ing cloudbursts, there are brief periods when the river 

 will more than fill all these works, but it requires a 

 continuous supply to serve farmers, and the chronic 



