206 



THE IREIGATION AGE. 



INDIAN FIRST TO IRRIGATE. 



American Desert Watered by Canals When Columbus 

 Came Over. 



American irrigation was old when Rome was in 

 the glory of its youth. The ancient aqueducts and sub- 

 terranean canals of South America, extending for 

 thousands of miles, once supplied great cities and irri- 

 gated immense areas. Centuries before the venturous 



desert, wearily and painfully executing the commands 

 of an American Pharaoh. 



Coming down to a period less remote and only 

 slightly less interesting, is the first page of modern 

 American history. Here, in the sixteenth century, Cor- 

 onado, the first great American explorer, swept up the 

 Rio Grande valley and journeyed as far north as Kan- 

 sas. In New Mexico he found a pastoral race dwelling 

 in pueblos and practicing the gentle art of irrigation as 

 had their forefathers, perhaps as far back as the days 





\M 



The Idan-Ha Hotel, Boise, Idaho, which is to be official headquarters during Irrigation Congress. 



Norsemen landed upon the bleak and inhospitable 

 shores of New England a large population dwelt in the 

 hot valleys of the far Southwest. From the solid rock, 

 with primitive tools of stone, they cut ditches and hewed 

 the blocks for many-chambered palaces, which they 

 erected in the desert or on the limestone ledges of deep 

 river canyons. 



These voiceless ruins, older than the memory of 

 many centuries, tell the story of a thrifty, home-loving 

 and semi-cultured people, concerning whose fate history 

 brings us no word. In these palaces and in many miles 

 of canals we may almost read the story of another 

 Egypt a people toiling under the burning sun of the 



of Abraham. Certainly their agricultural methods were 

 in no wise different from those which prevailed in the 

 days of the prophets. Even unto this day their grain 

 is gathered in great willow baskets, is threshed by the 

 old process. 



Some of these thoughts came to the government 

 engineers as they ran their lines of levels in the valley 

 of Salt River in Arizona, and it seemed to them a proper 

 task for the greatest nation on earth to restore once more 

 the oases of verdure which the desert had long ago 

 obliterated. 



During the last quarter of a century a crop produc- 

 ing area of 10,000,000 acres, or another State of Massa- 



