10 IRRIGATION FARMING. 



tive point, and on these lines the new canal was laid. 

 The grade was all that could have been wished for. 



Among the old irrigation works are those in the 

 vicinity of San Antonio, Texas, begun under the direc- 

 tion of the Spanish Padres about 1715. With the erec- 

 tion of the Spanish missions began the cultivation of 

 the soil in Southwestern Texas. According to local 

 tradition the worthy Padres were expert in rounding up 

 the unfortunate natives and getting an unlimited amount 

 of work out of them in the construction of mission 

 buildings and irrigating ditches. The pay for services 

 rendered was usually bestowed in the form of religious 

 instruction, administered willy-nilly, and occasionally 

 augmented by an extra inquisition, if the forced piety 

 and humility did not agree well with the unwilling 

 convert. 



The pioneer Mormons who settled in the fertile 

 Salt Lake valley in 1847 saw the necessity of irrigation, 

 and to their untiring efforts and attendant success is 

 due much of the credit for the impetus given our more 

 modern methods of artificial crop-watering. It took 

 them two years to get their first canal into working 

 order, and the work was done under the pressure of un- 

 certainty and with many hardships and privations. In 

 1870 the Greeley Union Colony was established in North- 

 ern Colorado on a barren plain and an experimental sys- 

 tem of ditching was begun in imitation of the irrigation 

 fields in Utah territory. It was about this time that 

 the California Arcadians took up the great art of supply- 

 in. i: plant food with "the waters led captive," and ;it 

 once irrigation sprang into new life and came seemingly 

 in the nick of time to redeem America's arid wastes 

 "and make the desert to blossom as the rose." 



