THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



383 



valleys of Colorado and northern New Mexico are 

 located just right. 



Irrigation is the connecting link between the dry, 

 arid climate of Colorado and the inexhaustibly rich 

 soil. By irrigation the streams which for ages have 



with, and then has easy down-hill work to get the fer- 

 tilizing flow over every foot of it. The labor of irri- 

 gation is equal to. about one-half the time the Eastern 

 farmer loses by bad weather, and about one-fifth the 

 hard work he puts in on muddy roads. Many men have 



Castlewood Dam, Colorado. 



flowed through dry valleys toward the sea nave been 

 made to water the ground, and make the desert to blos- 

 som as the rose. 



Colorado is the roof tree of the continent. The 

 land slopes away in every direction. The valleys have a 

 very heavy fall, often 20 or more feet to the mile. 

 Water will flow readily on a slope of only a few inches 

 to the mile. The builder of an irrigating ditch taps 

 the stream a few miles above the land he wants to 

 irrigate and leads his ditch or canal away from the 



learned to be skilled irrigators in less than a week. 

 There are few that can not master all the details of the 

 science in a single season. 



Speaking in general, the majority of settlers com- 

 ing to Colorado will have to buy their water rights, 

 either from the Government in the case of the Uncom- 

 pahgre project, or from private ditch companies in most 

 of the other valleys. The first settlers took advantage of 

 most of the easy irrigation projects. The lands now 

 offered for settlement are mostly lands in which serious 



A Canon City Fruit Grower's Home, Colorado. 



stream at an angle. If the stream is falling at the 

 rate of 20 feet to the mile, and the ditch is given a fall 

 of two feet to the mile, each mile traversed will find 

 the ditch 18 feet higher above the river. As it grows 

 higher from the stream, the ditch gets further and 

 further away. In ten miles, there may be a strip of 

 land five miles wide, sloping from the ditch back to the 

 river. If the canal is tapped the water can be led in 

 laterals to the sides of fields, then down through fur- 

 rows, or spread out in sheets over the crops. 



A Colorado irrigator plans his work carefully, gets 

 the water to the highest places of his farm to begin 



engineering problems have been overcome to provide 

 water. Ditches have been brought down canons on high 

 flumes to reach the heads of valleys, tunnels have been 

 run to bring unused flows from streams where there was 

 a surplus of water into valleys where water was scarce. 

 Ditches have even crossed the Continental Divide in 

 Colorado. Millions of dollars have been spent in the 

 construction of reservoirs, in which the floods of June, 

 when the snows melt fast on the high mountains, are 

 stored to reinforce the scantier flows of the streams 

 in July and August. 



The man who buys farming or orchard land in 



