144 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



trict, organized under the Wright law, and the Turlock 

 under the same act, provide respectively for 80,500 and 

 176,210 acres. These districts are provided for by the 

 La Grange dam on the Tuolomne River. 



Much land throughout the valley is under the ditch, 

 but not yet actually irrigated. This is only a matter of 

 time and expense for providing laterals and preparing 

 the surface for the distribution of water, though in some 

 cases it is a matter of conservatism, the farmers staying 

 by the old methods and afraid to try what they call 

 "new fangled ways of farming." Intelligence goes 

 with irrigation, and the growth of appreciation of 

 its advantages is characteristically American. The 

 movement is hampered somewhat by the irrigation laws 

 of California, which are a tangle of unwise legisla- 

 tion the make-shift laws of a new country where min- 

 ing and mining ditches came first in its romantic history, 



cover from one to half a dozen "sections" by their 

 crops, but two new canal systems of large extent have 

 just been completed and a third is nearing completion, 

 while large hopes are entertained that the scheme of 

 reclaiming the waste lands by the control of the flood 

 waters of the Sacramento, can be made to join hands 

 with a plan to cover the whole of the valley by an 

 irrigation system, the point being that the surplus 

 water of the river, which at times can not be confined 

 to any levees, can be diverted into storage reservoirs 

 and held for summer irrigation. Engineers of the 

 Reclamation Service have definitely located six reservoir 

 sites on Coast range streams, five on Pit River and its 

 tributaries, one on the Sacramento itself at Iron Can- 

 yon, and surveys are now in progress in the Putah 

 Creek and Feather River basins. These will receive 

 the run-off from nearly 26,000 square miles of drain- 



Shoshone Falls, near Twin Falls, Idaho. 



and naturally shaped the first legislation governing 

 the appropriation of water. But this, too, will adjust 

 itself in time, the very importance of the question com- 

 pelling a revision of existing laws. 



In the Sacramento Valley alone are perhaps 2,- 

 000,000 acres of low lands, that is of flat or valley lands 

 proper, besides a great area of foothill lands capable 

 of sustaining a large population once it is made pro- 

 ductive by irrigation. 



It is but a little while since the phrase "No irri- 

 gation needed," was heard throughout the valley, but 

 today the people talk, instead, of the abundance of 

 water for their broad acres. It is thought that not 

 more than 40,000 acres are actually under irrigation in 

 the Sacramento Valley, but there are movements in this 

 direction and a growing conviction that irrigation is 

 essential to the most profitable use of the soil. There 

 are still some large wheat farmers here, able to live 

 easily on the profits of wheat raising where they can 



age area, the estimated annual run-off being enough to 

 cover the entire valley more than nine feet deep. These 

 reservoirs, the engineers point out, will serve two ends, 

 they will relieve the river levees of much pressure from 

 flood waves, and lessen the difficulties of flood control, 

 and they will serve to increase the summer flow of the 

 river by about one and one-half million feet. Prof. J. 

 B. Lippincott, supervising engineer, says: "The irriga- 

 tion and drainage of the Sacramento Valley is a co- 

 ordinate work and must be so considered," and while the 

 attitude of California generally is in favor of self-help 

 wherever possible, the greatness of the problem in the 

 Sacramento Valley makes national help indispensable 

 to its solution. Even then as Mr. Lippincott says, "the 

 magnitude of the work and its cost is such that a com- 

 prehensive plan * * * can not be executed at once 

 even by the Federal Government. Fortunately the work 

 can be constructed in units." 



