40 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



THE DESERT BLOSSOMS UNDER THE EFFECT 

 OF IRRIGATION. 



Illustrated by the Imperial Valley. 



One of the most striking features in the opening 

 of a farm by irrigation is the rapidity with which 

 the land takes on the appearance of long occupancy 

 once the water is applied. There is little of the long 

 wait that attended the settlement of the timbered lands 

 of the Mississippi valley, few of the early day privations 

 and hardships that marked the opening of a farm in 

 those sections. The delay comes in the constructing of 

 the main canal, and once that is accomplished the farms 

 are made. For the owner to plow and seed every acre 

 in the first year of cultivation is not exceptional. By 



From the beginning of time the Colorado River, a 

 snow-fed stream rising on the west slope of the Bocky 

 Mountains, has been rushing madly toward the sea, 

 discharging an immense volume of water into the Gulf 

 of California. It does not traverse broad fields and 

 fertile valleys, 'but throughout its entire course has cut 

 its tortuous way down mountain gorges, until it finally 

 reached the gulf. 



The Colorado has been an effective tool in the hand 

 of that great artist, Nature. Through countless ages it 

 has been carving out canyons which for scenic grandeur 

 have no equal in the entire world. But the carving of 

 these canyons has meant the tearing away of millions 

 upon millions of tons of solid rock. The process of 

 erosion is slow, and the rock has been removed in minute 

 particles, but these particles, mingled with the sedi- 

 ment brought down to the river by the melting snows 



General Passenger and Emigration Agents of the Northern Pacific Railway. (Taken near Sunnyside, Wash., November, 1904.) 



the second or third year the tree growth has come to 

 destroy the level stretch and bleak appearance and so 

 obliterate the last reminder of the desert. 



The story of opening one irrigated section reads 

 much like that of another and while the following 

 account is largely confined to the experience in the Im- 

 perial valley in California, it will serve almost as an 

 account of similar enterprise in any of the irrigated 

 sections of this State. 



The history of arid America relates many interest- 

 ing tales of the creation of vast deserts back in ancient 

 geologic times, but none more impressive than the story 

 of the great Colorado desert in extreme southwestern 

 California, the desert which has become famous as the 

 death bed of so many venturesome fortune hunters. 



The Colorado desert is distinctive. Of all the des- 

 erts of the West it alone lies beneath the level of the 

 sea : it alone was builded bv a river. 



and mountain streams, have given the Colorado its 

 reputation as a muddy river, for it carries more silt 

 than any river in the United States save the Missouri. 



Like all silt-bearing streams the Colorado has built 

 a delta at its mouth, a delta more expansive and more 

 unique than that of any other river in the world. It 

 was this delta'that eventually created the great Colorado 

 desert. 



Back in prehistoric times, instead of heading sev- 

 enty miles south of the International boundary line, 

 the Gulf of California extended more than 100 miles 

 northward into what is now California. It was walled 

 in on either side by high mountain ranges. The Colo- 

 rado River entered the gulf from the east, at a point 

 near the present international boundary. There it de- 

 posited its silt and solid matter, and soon began the 

 building of a delta. The delta steadily pushed west- 

 ward and southward until, after vears innumerable. 



