THE CONQUEST OF ARID AMERICA , 



ments in the system, until it reached an annual charge 

 of ten dollars an acre. 



In the experience of Riverside we may see the com- 

 mercial romance of irrigation in its most striking form. 

 The original sheep pasture, assessed at seventy-five cents 

 an acre, sold readily at twenty-five dollars an acre when 

 irrigation facilities had been supplied. While this re- 

 presented a handsome profit to the original investors, 

 it was extremely moderate compared with the returns 

 which the second purchasers realized. A few years 

 later the unimproved lands sold for prices ranging from 

 three hundred to five hundred dollars per acre. The 

 improved orange orchards, which had been evolved from 

 the sheep pasture, were valued, and actually sold, at 

 one thousand to two thousand dollars per acre. There 

 have been years when the best of them earned a profit of 

 fifty per cent, on the higher figure. 



Riverside was destined to win its chief celebrity as the 

 pioneer orange colony. Its founders had based their 

 faith in the possibilities of this industry on what they 

 had seen in the gardens of old missions. 



They did not hesitate to plant their lands largely with 

 citrus fruits in the face of many predictions of disaster. 

 The new culture prospered from the start, but made se- 

 vere demands upon the patience and intelligence of the 

 settlers. During the same years in which the Greeley 

 colonists were working out, by means of experiment and 

 painful experience, the solution of agricultural problems 

 for Colorado, the Riverside colonists were performing 

 precisely the same service for southern California. The 

 skill and the enterprise which the one people applied to 

 potatoes, the other applied to oranges, with the same 



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