THE HISTORY IN UTAH 355 



attempts at dry -farming were made during the first 

 f seven or eight years. The pubUcations of those 

 days indicate that dry-farming must have been prac- 

 ticed occasiojially 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 

 which 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- 



