52 The Colorado Experiment Station. 
conditions, are usually dependable, but we must determine which 
of the two it is. 
I believe that there is no doubt but that the settlers of this 
section suffered many disappointments and that while events showed 
that they misjudged the difficulties, they had at the time no way 
of recognizing these difficulties, or of knowing how serious they 
were. In portions of this section the water plane in 1889 was, 
according to the information that I have been able to obtain, twelve 
feet below the surface. In October, 1907, I found it four feet 
below the surface. How much it had been recently affected by the 
irrigation of neighboring lands I do not know. Here is a difference 
of eight feet in the height of the water plane, and why this water 
did not drain out was not apparent. In 1907 a very considerable 
area of this land was seeped and there was some nitrate present but 
not enough to become an easily recognized feature. Drainage has 
since that date been introduced on a considerable scale and in 1909 
and 1910 nitre spots were recognizable in many places. I wish at 
the present time simply to record the sequence of facts. I will 
first consider a piece of land, a part of which had been planted to 
barley and a part to oats. The whole piece measured several acres. 
Both the barley and oats had been creased for irrigation after sow¬ 
ing. In very many places there were no oat or barley plants between 
the creases. The seed had never come up, or the young plants had 
been killed. There were abundant indications that the latter had 
been the case, whether the former had been or not, but from my 
observations on other areas I have no doubt but that it, too, was 
the case here, i. e., that much of the seed did not come up. The 
plants were confined to the sides of the creases just above the edge 
of the water. The bottom of the crease or furrow was, of course, 
free from plants, and the crown between the creases was brown 
and barren and extremely mealy. 
The question of where the water which had raised the water 
table in the years between 1889 and 1907, eight feet, came from is 
appropos. So far as I know this rise was wholly due to the irri¬ 
gation of these lands, in other words, this section does not receive 
the drainage from other lands higher than it. 
I did not attempt to take a sample of this soil, only one of 
the mealy surface portion. The sample, 981, was taken with an 
irrigating shovel and I probably took some of the soil as deep as 
two inches. This sample as taken contained 28.44 percent of its 
weight, air-dried, which was soluble in water. It is no wonder 
that the oats and barley died. This is so great an excess of salts 
that one is tempted to ask whether sodic sulfate or any other rela¬ 
tively innocuous salt would not have sufficed to account for the 
conditions presented. I will record the facts as I find them, here 
as elsewhere, without regard to the question of whether they appear 
