THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



505 



RAILROAD MEN AND THE CONGRESS. 



Interests Vitally Interested in Reclaiming the Land 

 to be Represented by Their Officers. 



BY R. H. FAXON, 



Director of Publicity, Eighteenth National Irrigation 

 Congress. 



MO force of men can be more interested in the welfare 

 ' of the city of Pueblo or of the Eighteenth National 

 Irrigation Congress, or of the State of Colorado as a 

 whole, than the officials and employes of the great trans- 

 continental systems of railroads penetrating the moun- 

 tain-west. 



The fact that these great railroads find, on the way 

 to the East and West, the city of Pueblo standing sentinel, 

 the gateway through which this line of traffic must pass, 

 lends especial interest to the city in the happenings of the 

 system, and to the system in the happenings of the city 

 and state. 



The Eighteenth National Irrigation Congress will be 

 held in Pueblo, September 26-30, 1910. 



It will bring to Pueblo, the Arkansas valley, and the 

 state of Colorado thousands of delegates and visitors. It 

 will bring distinguished representatives from foreign gov- 

 ernments. It will bring important officers of the national 

 government at Washington. It will be the most impor- 

 tant gathering ever held in the West. It will bring visi- 

 tors who, following the conclusion of the congress, will 

 want to see Colorado; will want to have a look at the 

 incomparable Western Slope with its fruit; at the capital 

 city of the State; and the splendidly-irrigated and de- 

 veloped section of Colorado lying north of Denver. 



Hence, while the advertisement and benefit that the 

 city of Pueblo will naturally derive is excedingly great, 

 the advantages and opportunities will flow to the entire 

 State. 



The National Irrigation Congress is the most im- 

 portant non-official body in the country. It has been in 

 existence longer than any of its associate organizations. 

 It represents a field that, sectional in the first place, has 

 now become national. Its resolutions have been written 

 into statutes, and its discussions and endeavors have be- 

 come fixed national policies. Its members are among 

 the ablest statesmen, thinkers, scientists, agriculturists, 

 irrigationists, engineers and publicists of the country. 

 Nothing that it says or does fails to interest the national 

 government and the whole people. 



An example of this is the doctrine of home-building 

 and home-making, originated by the National Irrigation 

 Congress years ago. The desire of man for land, the wish 

 to make a home, to be a producer and contributor, was 

 largely anticipated by this organization, and for a decade 

 it preached the doctrine, with the result that everywhere 

 in the country today it is recognized. 



The national reclamation act had its inception in the 

 National Irrigation Congress. It sent its committees and 

 its officers to Washington to labor with the national 

 law-givers long before the latter finally enacted the law 

 of June 17, 1902. The tremendous impetus given the re- 

 clamation of arid lands and transforming the desert into 

 the garden, in which the government and the engineer and 

 the private land-owner and the capitalist have worked 

 with a singleness of purpose in the years since, has been 

 felt, not alone in the West, but all over the country. 



The ambition for the time when this country would 

 produce the amount of sugar it annually consumed, and 

 might even become a sugar-exporting nation has always 

 been uppermost throughout the country. The National 

 Irrigation Congress has fostered and protected and builded 

 up the beet industry all its life, and there is promise of 

 the fulfillment of the hope of the country in respect of 

 sugar production, largely through the efforts of the Na- 

 tional Irrigation Congress. 



The National Irrigation Congress is a potential, en- 

 ergetic agency toward development development not only 

 of the West, but of the country as a whole, and that, 



after all, is probably the best thing that could be said of 

 it. 



The great bodies of land in Colorado and in the 

 vicinity surrounding Pueblo hold out great promise for 

 the land-hungry, and herein is the opportunity for Pueblo 

 and the State to present the attractive situation that 

 exists. The magnitude of the development work going 

 on today in the State of Colorado is not excelled any- 

 where in the West, and there is wonderful activity in 

 the Pueblo section. 



The Eighteenth National Irrigation Congress is a 

 distinct compliment, by reason of its meeting-place in 

 Pueblo this year, to this tremendous activity in furthering 

 agriculture under irrigation. 



STOCK FINISHING ON THE IRRIGATED LANDS AT UVA 

 WTTOMNG. 



The rich and perfectly irrigated lands at Uva Wyoming 

 offer an ideal advantage over most such projects by enabling 

 the farmers to go into stock raising as well as mixed farm- 

 ing. This industry is growing very fast and is proving highly 

 profitable, first, because the day of open ranges is rapidly 

 passing, and next, because the home-fed stock is of better 

 quality. The peculiar situation of the Uva lands favors home 

 feeding at its best, and at a low cost to the farmer 



North and east of Uva, in Southeast Wyoming, there are 

 enormous areas of government land, insufficiently watered 

 for farm purposes, and not reserved for the useof any group 

 of cattlemen, but free to be used by anyone having cattle 

 or sheep and a home farm for finishing. On these semi-arid 

 reaches, any man who owns 160 acres of the irrigated land 

 at Uva may run three to five hundred head of cattle or 

 several hundred sheep, the cattle taking the best growths 

 and the sheep cropping the rest. The natural grasses and 

 herbage are nutritious and sufficient to form up the animals 

 and keep them in good condition through nine months of 

 the year. Three months additional feeding at the home farm 

 on alfalfa and grain grown for that purpose rounds them out 

 to full weight and brings them into prime market condition, 

 fully rested and only a short run by rail from Uva to Chey- 

 enne, Denver, Kansas City or Chicago, where they bring top 

 prices. 



No good farmer needs be told that hay turned into beef 

 or mutton brings more money with a less proportion of 

 trouble than if it were sold in the bale. Relatively, the same 

 holds true of corn and barley. That is one reason why a 

 man in the Uva country, having say 500 tons of alfalfa on 

 his place and a bunch of animals to eat it, can borrow money 

 at the bank. It is a particularly safe loan. 



This phase of fattening and finishing works out equally 

 well with either sheep or swine. The experience of farmers 

 in the neighborhood of Uva has proven it with sheep, par- 

 ticularly. Lambs can be bought for $2.50 or $3.00 each from 

 the sheep men outside, and three pounds of alfalfa a day 

 for three months, with one pound of barley added for the 

 final month, will turn out a creature worth $6.00 to $7.00 

 delivered on the siding at Uva or the nearest other station. 

 These figures do their own talking. 



While the stock interest is growing larger every season 

 at Uva, it is by no means excluding other production. Gen- 

 eral farming is far more remunerative than it is anywhere 

 east of Central Nebraska and Kansas. Sugar beets, wheat, 

 oats, potatoes, and the same general growths that are com- 

 mon to the Middle Western States yield much more heavily 

 than in those States, and bring higher prices at home for 

 little is shipped out unless tempted by exceptional prices in 

 years of shortage elsewhere. In fact the district wheat crop 

 is insufficient for the local mill supply. The price is always 

 over a dollar and sometimes runs close to a dollar and a 

 half. Three hundred to five hundred bushels of potatoes are 

 usual, and the price runs from high to very high, as com- 

 pared with the middle west. Sugar beets give twenty tons 

 per acre, and up, and bring $5.00 a ton flat. A mill is to be 

 put up at a convenient point close by as soon as the farmers 

 have pledged a sufficient acreage to insure supply, and the 

 presence of this mill will give further stimulus to cattle 

 and hog raising. But alfalfa has shown itself to be the 

 strong- and sure money-maker, especially when the grower 

 is also a stock-feeder, but even without stock, it turns in a 

 fine profit. The presence of some aliment peculiarly favor- 

 able to It in the soil makes it a better all-round ration than 

 most alfalfa grown elsewhere. 



Uva is le=s than a hundred miles north of Cheyenne, but 

 lies about 2.300 feet lower, at the base of the Rockies, in a 

 beautiful valley, through which run two rivers that never go 

 dry These rivers are full of rainbow trout. It is a pretty 

 place and healthful at all times, with pure air, and no ex- 

 tremes of heat or cold. Farm help is always to be had. There 

 is a perpetual supply of fuel from the coalfields of the region. 

 There are good schools, good stores, good telephone service, 

 rural free delivery, and daily trains over the new through 

 railway from Seattle to Galveston. on which Uva is a station. 

 The run to Denver by way of Cheyenne takes only a few 

 hours In respect of being very much in the world, the Uva 

 district is quite like the neighboring district of Greeley. But 

 it is not very large. Considerably less than 10,000 acres of 

 it remain to 'be sold, and part of that acreage is under the 

 Carey act so that prices are not high, and the sales are made 

 on time. The Uva irrigation system is a model for all the 

 west. 



Send $2.50 for The Irrigation Age, one year, and 

 cloth-bound copy of the Primer of Irrigation. 



