THE HISTORY IN UTAH 355 
attempts at dry-farming were made during the first 
seven or eight years. The publications of those 
days indicate that dry-farming must have been prac- 
ticed occasionally as early as 1854 or 1855. 
About 1863 the first dry-farm experiment of any 
consequence occurred in Utah. A number of emi- 
grants of Scandinavian descent had settled in what is 
now known as Bear River City, and had turned upon 
their farms the alkali water of Malad Creek, and 
naturally the crops failed. In desperation the starv- 
ing settlers plowed up the sagebrush land, planted 
grain, and awaited results. To their surprise, fair 
yields of grain were obtained, and since that day 
‘dry-farming has been an established practice in that 
portion of the Great Salt Lake Valley. A year or 
two later, Christopher Layton, a pioneer who helped 
to build both Utah and Arizona, plowed up land on 
the famous Sand Ridge between Salt Lake City 
and Ogden and demonstrated that dry-farm wheat 
could be grown successfully on the deep sandy soil 
whicn the pioneers had held to be worthless for agri- 
cultural purposes. Since that day the Sand Ridge 
has been famous as a dry-farm district, and Major 
J. W. Powell, who saw the ripened fields of grain in 
the hot dry sand, was moved upon to make special 
mention of them in his volume on the “Arid Lands 
of Utah,” published in 1879. 
About this time, perhaps a year or two later, 
Joshua Salisbury and George L. Farrell began dry- 
