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THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



THE PIONEERS OF NATIONAL IRRIGATION. 



LAND AND WATER FOR THE PEOPLE. 



The Reclamation of a Desert; The Creation of an Empire. 

 TO WHOM SHALL IT BELONG? 



There are men still in the enjoyment of vigorous 

 health, sound minds, and faithful memories, who re- 

 member when the vast region, now represented by 

 sixteen bright stars in the shining firmament of a 

 great nation, was a nameless waste, a dreary, incon- 

 ceivable desert. All they knew about it in their school 

 days was its name across the map : "The Great Amer- 

 ican Desert." Many who attempted to traverse its 

 horizonless expanse left their bones to bleach upon 

 its sun baked soil, and those who escaped were regarded 

 as heroes worthy of as high a niche in the Hall of 

 Fame as they who sought to break through the icy 

 barriers of the polar ocean to find the great north pole. 



The magnetic attraction of yellow gold drew a 

 host from the world's haunts of civilization, and the 

 California miners, with their little cradles, and their 

 petty inch of mountain water, washed the soil for 

 their hearts' ideal, gold, and still gold, and more gold 

 after that. Soil, climate, the perfume laden atmos- 

 phere, the bright blue vault of heaven, the songs of 

 birds presented no visions of a terrestrial paradise to 

 their distorted, yellow, fevered brain. The demands 

 of the stomach, however, created a diversion in their 

 thoughts, and turning the petty miner's inch of water 

 upon the thirsty, fertile soil, food grew at their beck, 

 and more plentiful and luxuriant than they had ever 

 conceived. The discovery was greater, and more far 

 reaching than the discovery at Sutter's mill, and from 

 that trifling miner's inch of water, out of that little 

 patch of corn, planted as a last resort by gold-rich 

 but food-poor starvelings, grew a paradise, which in 

 yellow grain surpassed the yellow gold ten to one, 

 and soon began to feed the world. 



Over beyond the range, toward the rising of the 

 sun, in the very midst of sand and alkali, where to 

 dig or to plow meant a blinding, suffocating, burning 

 dust, an expatriated man and his followers poured a 

 little water, and behold ! the earth laughed with a rich 

 harvest. They poured more water upon the arid soil 

 and again the earth smiled, but more broadly, and 

 from that little patch of corn an inter-mountain em- 

 pire was created. By and by the outer edge's of the 

 two empires touched and they melted into one mighty 

 one, the fame of which spread over the earth and 

 brought a myriad who established homes and lived in 

 comfort beneath their own vine and fig tree. 



So it came about that "The Great American Des- 

 ert" was expunged from the map, and one after an- 

 other vast areas of it became stars in the firmament 

 of this great nation, this great world power, one des- 

 tined to become the recognized arbiter for the nations 

 of the world, and the inexhaustible purveyor of the 

 main portion of the food of the inhabitants of the 

 earth. 



But the vast empire still grew and it is still grow- 

 ing; it has grown beyond the scope and control of 

 those who set it on its course, its limitless possibilities 

 are no longer within the reach of the dribbling miner's 

 inch' of water. Every pioneer of the early days came 

 to a point in his labors where new blood was needed 

 to take up his burden and it became a pioneer in his 



stead in a new, unbroken field. And a third class of 

 pioneers took up the burden of the second one when 

 he came to a stop, and went on with the work of 

 empire building. This third class of pioneers will 

 meet at Ogden, Utah, on September 15, 16, 17 and 18. 

 Make a note of this date. 



So it went on and so it has been going on for 

 two generations, a short period in which to build so 

 magnificent 'a work as that which every man young 

 or old may see and wonder how it was done, for two 

 generations, be it repeated, and at the end of the 

 second there sprang up a third, a necessary third, for 

 the second had reached its limit and could go no 

 farther. 



This third generation, speaking not according to 

 time but according to work, found the field widening 

 instead of narrowing, and that the power of individual 

 effort had reached a halting place, hence they com- 

 bined, the true successors of the first apostles of irri- 

 gation, new apostles upon whose shoulders falls the 

 mantle of all the others who saw empire in water and 

 soil and not in gold. 



Individual effort waxed weaker in making an im- 

 pression upon the surface of this great empire of the 

 West, and so the states, the new stars, came to its 

 aid and the desert .began to bloom. But new questions 

 arose, intricate questions. State lines were an impasse 

 to their solution, and so there was a reaching out for 

 something beyond, some outside power to aid and 

 further the work of empire building. Then it was that 

 the new irrigation apostles, the successors of the origi- 

 nal Pacific and Intermountain pioneers, thought of 

 the general government, and its hundreds of millions 

 of fertile but waterless acres, and. to make a long 

 story short, the National Irrigation Congress, the new 

 pioneers, took up the problem. It required years of 

 struggle against strong opposition before success ap- 

 peared in sight, but success did come, and in 1902 

 Congress passed the National Irrigation law, and the 

 Federal Government bad put its shoulder to the wheel 

 of empire building, and is in it to stay. 



The sixteen states of the great arid and .semi-arid 

 empire of the West, are upon the threshold of a new 

 problem, one greater than any that has ever before 

 come up for solution. It means the continuation of the 

 great work begun by the early users of the miner's 

 inch the planters of the first field of corn, the men 

 who set the Pacific and the Intermountain Empires- 

 on the road to greatness. The men who are to solve 

 that problem are and must be pioneers, for it springs 

 out of new conditions, covers a new field. To say 

 that anybody, else, any other organization than the Na- 

 tional Irrigation Congress can go on with the work, is 

 to destroy the efficacy of its members' work take from 

 them the laurels that belong to them and to them 

 alone, and turn back the process of continuous em- 

 pire building to an incomplete past, a past in which 

 others might have done as well as the man who first 

 thought of using his' miner's inch to raise corn, others 

 beside Brigham Young who might have poured water 

 on the ashy soil of the Intermountain empire, but in 

 which no other did what they did. no other thought 

 of it. 



This work of irrigation is in its infancy, and every 

 man who advocates it and fosters it for the good of 

 the people, for the extension of the empire of the irri- 

 gated West, is a pioneer. He who has been half hearted 

 in his interest, aimed to make use of it for his per- 



