IRRIGATION PRACTICE AND HIGHWAYS 307 



which may indicate the relations of irrigation to 

 the development of the State and to the phases of 

 rural life and industry that may be traced to 

 parentage in artificial stream-flow rather than in 

 rainfall. 



California cannot claim to be the area on which ir- 

 rigation farming was first practiced in the United 

 States, because there are vestiges of prehistoric ir- 

 rigation works in Arizona, New Mexico and Colo- 

 rado and records show that the padres from Spain 

 who entered Texan territory in the first half of the 

 sixteenth century found the natives irrigating their 

 gardens and learned the practice from them. Thus 

 the irrigation introduced by the padres in 1769 was 

 a new thing only in California, where the Indians 

 were unskilled in agriculture. Nor can California 

 claim to be the pioneer in irrigation by Anglo-Saxons, 

 unless the small-scale work of a few American set- 

 tlers who established themselves on land-grants or 

 purchased secularized mission lands, before the gold 

 discovery, can establish such priority. It is custom- 

 ary to award to the Mormons, who turned a Utah 

 river out upon the plains in 1847, priority in large- 

 scale organized irrigation in the United States. They 

 led, however, by a narrow margin because the Cali- 

 fornia gold-miners in 1849 were diverting streams 

 to uncover their beds for mining and to get water 

 for flow in artificial channels to distant uses to an 

 extent and variety of enterprise which the Mormons 

 did not attain. The relation of such undertakings 

 by miners to agricultural development, from the be- 



