THE IKRIGATION AGE. 



369 



OPEN LETTER 



To His Excellency, Governor Haines, and to the 

 State Land Board of Idaho : 



It is now (September, 1913) four years since 

 the widely heralded "opening" of the notorious 

 "Big Lost river" Carey Act tract. The writer was 

 present at that opening and made his filing as En- 

 tryman number thirteen. He also appeared as at- 

 torney for Entryman number one Mr. P. D. Myer 

 of Cleveland, Ohio. It is three years or more since 

 the date set for the promised delivery of water. 



Both of us paid for the privilege of filing $4.00 

 per acre, to the Irrigation company, upon the so- 

 called "Water Right," and 25 cents per acre to the 

 state to its "Carey Act Trust Fund." Neither 

 entry was made for speculative purposes, as corre- 

 spondence in the writer's hands will abundantly 

 demonstrate this correspondence including a bona 

 fide offer made in 1910 for assignment of the writ- 

 er's entry at a figure which would have left a com- 

 fortable margin of "profit." 



After all these years of unfulfilled promises and 

 with a vista of apparently endless litigation be- 

 tween conflicting interests, it seems appropriate 

 that a few remarks should be addressed to you, 

 and, through yourselves, to the citizens of the great 

 state which has entrusted the administration of its 

 two greatest resources land and water to your 

 hands. These remarks will be addressed to you in 

 no spirit of hostility and in the light of some infor- 

 mation with regard to these primal resources of the 

 so-called "arid land" states. 



When I arrived in Idaho, in 1909, after attend- 

 ing the Irrigation congress at Spokane, it was as a 

 homeseeker and with entire faith in the integrity 

 of your state, which was then making extraordinary 

 efforts to attract settlers within its borders. In 

 the fall of 1909 a number of Carey act "openings" 

 were scheduled to take place. I investigated the 

 merits of all of them as far as was possible, from 

 the documents upon file with the State Land Board. 

 Your state engineer's report upon the "Big Lost 

 River" tract was satisfactory your Irrigation Code 

 and Carey Act Statutes appeared to contain suf- 

 ficient guarantee of faithful performance of con- 

 tract. The report of the "board" was favorable 

 the construction bond, while grossly insufficient, 

 was entirely "regular" and executed with a strong 

 company. The state's original contract, of 1909, was 

 entered into with Mr. George A. Speer of the Trow- 

 bridge & Niver Co., of Chicago. Copies of tele- 

 grams from Chicago banks, doing business with 

 Mr. Speer's company, and vouching for his financial 

 integrity, were shown me. Whether the financial 

 status of the Big Lost River Irrigation company, 

 to which Mr. Speer subsequently assigned this 

 contract, was ever looked into I cannot say. 



As a last recourse, and because your Carey Act 

 Statutes made the escrowing of settlers' first pay- 

 ments, by the Land Board, optional instead of man- 



datory, I put the question point blank to the gentle- 

 man who, at that time, occupied the honorable posi- 

 tion of State Land Register, and was told, without 

 qualification or reservation, that the Entrymen's 

 first payments upon the Big Lost River tract would 

 be held in escrow by the Land Board. Was this a 

 case of deliberate falsification by a trusted official 

 of the state, or was it not? I leave it to your judg- 

 ment to decide. Incidentally, was it criminal dis- 

 regard of the obligation of the state to safeguard 

 its future citizens, when, unlike all other "Carey 

 Act" states, it made the escrowing of Carey Act 

 settlers' first payments subject to the whims of 

 the board instead of a statutory performance? 

 Again, as to the bare facts of construction it is, 

 and always has been, difficult, out of the mass of 

 conflicting testimony, to get at the real facts of the 

 Lost River dam, but the conviction must be forced 

 upon the observer that the statutory provisions for 

 state's supervision of reservoir construction were 

 not carried out, otherwise it is inconceivable how 

 the apparently faulty construction could have pro- 

 ceeded so far without interruption. 



With this digression let us proceed with remi- 

 niscence. After these investigations at Boise, the 

 writer journeyed to Arco, the place of the "draw- 

 ing," with some hundreds of others, misled by the 

 active interest displayed by state officials and by the 

 cunningly worded "prospectuses" of the company, 

 implying that the state and federal governments 

 vouched for the soundness of the project and in 

 some way guaranteed its successful execution. All 

 this, be it remembered, before the General Land 

 Office had inaugurated its present regime of rigid 

 investigation of such projects. The incidents of the 

 "openings" must still stand out clearly, in the minds 

 of the many who attended, how the project was 

 lauded, in public addresses, by officials of the land 

 board and by other "public-spirited citizens" in pri- 

 vate and official life, as well as by the "experts" 

 commissioned by the company to attend ; how every- 

 thing possible was done to stimulate the buying 

 propensities of the crowd, and how successful these 

 efforts, as demonstrated by the record-breaking 

 sales made. Then the return home a long distance 

 for many and the wait for the "Irrigation Season" 

 of 1912, which, instead of the promised water, 

 brought forth nothing but dilatory tactics and 

 evasive letters upon the part of the company. Fol- 

 lowed the agitation, by the townspeople of Mackay, 

 against the faulty construction of the dam, its in- 

 spection and condemnation with cessation of work, 

 default of interest payment upon the flood of bonds 

 against the project put out by the Trowbridge & 

 Niver concern (whose members were heavily in- 

 terested in the irrigation company itself), receiver- 

 ship of the company, failure of the bonding house, 

 unsuccessful efforts to revive the project and the 

 suit of the contractor to foreclose upon his lien, de- 

 cided in his favor. As to the marketing of the 

 bonds, the prices secured, the representations made 

 to purchasers, the uses to which the proceeds were 

 put, all kinds of stories are in circulation and in 

 print, but to these matters, of which I have no per- 

 sonal knowledge, I will not revert, except to state 

 that they were fully investigated and exposed in the 

 "Financial World" of New York City (1911).. An 



