Colorado Experiment Station 
50 
question is: Has the carbonate of soda, or black alkali, become so 
abundant as to be the determining factor in the unproductive condi¬ 
tion of the area had in mind—in this case, the Hooper-Mosca, section, 
an area coincident with the brown, artesian waters? 
A fourth question pertains to this and to other sections of the val¬ 
ley as well: This is the question of the development of nitrates in in¬ 
jurious quantities. I have seen at least one tract of 640 acres on which 
the pea crop was wholly destroyed due to the presence of excessive ni¬ 
trates. I heard of a second tract of 80 acres which was destroyed by 
the same agent. The people attributed these failures of the crop to the 
grasshoppers, though the peas that I saw either had not come up at 
all or had turned yellow and died without having been touched by the 
hoppers, if indeed there had ever been any hoppers there. 
This general statement of the case by no means presents all of the 
problems of the valley, but these are the big, patent ones. 
The United States Land Office sent a party out to investigate 
claims on which patents had been withheld for one cause or another. 
Some of these investigators recognized that there was something radi¬ 
cally wrong in many of the cases. These settlers are not all dishonest 
men, trying to get patents to land for unworthy purposes, and yet they 
have been unable to satisfactorily comply with the government’s re¬ 
quirements, as in the case of the desert claim mentioned in preceding 
paragraphs, or have abandoned the claims after having spent several 
years and perhaps all of the money that they have been able to get in 
order to make a success of them. In conversation with a member of 
this party, I found that he was seriously considering these questions. 
The trend of his argument was that men would not spend two or three 
thousand dollars and four years of their lives, perhaps with their fam¬ 
ilies, on these claims, and then fail to comply with the government’s 
reasonable demands or abandon the claims altogether, unless there was 
something wrong, for which an adequate explanation had not yet been 
found. I believe that his conviction was an honest one, that the gov¬ 
ernment ought to protect such parties against the possibility of under¬ 
taking to prove up on such lands without full knowledge of the diffi¬ 
culties, or of giving them a full chance to try if they wished to know¬ 
ingly undertake it. 
It was not our intention to take up these agricultural features in 
this bulletin, but the growing conviction of their unusual character, 
their seriousness, and, as I believe, their intimate relation to the char¬ 
acter of the artesian waters of the section justify me in giving the out¬ 
lines of the salient problems presenting themselves. Up to the pres¬ 
ent time these questions have been dealt with only as they were inci¬ 
dental to the chief work presented, i. e., a study of the hydrology of 
the valley. 
