The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s was due in part to a succession of overawing flood-related catastrophes. But it had just as much to do with the fact that by the late 1880s, private irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across the hundredth meridian had gone to Washington and California and Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams whose water they could easily divert. Such opportunities, however, were quick to disappear. Groundwater wasn’t much help either. A windmill could lift enough drinking water for a family and few cattle; but it would require thirty or forty windmills, and reliable wind, to lift enough water to irrigate a quarter section of land—a disheartening prospect to a farmer with no money in a region with no wood.
Even if their land abutted a stream with some surplus water rights, few farmers had the confidence, cooperative spirit, and money to build a dam and lead the stored water to their lands through a long canal. It was one thing to throw a ten-foot-high earthen plug across a freshet in order to create a two-acre stock pond—though even that taxed the resources of most farmers in the West, who had invested all their savings simply to get there from Kentucky or Maine. It was quite another thing to build a dam on a stream large enough to supply a year-round flow, and to dig a canal—by horse and by hand—that was long enough, and deep enough, and wide enough, to irrigate hundreds or thousands of acres of land. The work involved was simply stupefying; clearing a field, by comparison, seemed like the simplest, most effortless job.
The farmers’ predicament, on the other hand, was an opportunity for the legions of financial swashbucklers who had gone west in pursuit of quick wealth. In the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of irrigation companies, formed with eastern capital, set themselves to the task of reclaiming the arid lands. Almost none survived beyond ten years. At the eighth National Irrigation Congress in 1898, a Colorado legislator likened the American West to a graveyard, littered with the “crushed and mangled skeletons of defunct [irrigation] corpora- tions ... [which] suddenly disappeared at the end of brief careers, leaving only a few defaulted obligations to indicate the route by which they departed.”
There was, indeed, a kind of cruel irony in the collapse of the irrigation companies. Most of them operated in the emphatically arid regions—the Central Valley of California, Nevada, Arizona, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico— where agriculture without irrigation is daunting or hopeless, but otherwise the climate is well suited for growing crops. The drought, on the other hand, struck hardest in the region just east of the hundredth meridian, where, in most years, a non-irrigating farmer had been able to make a go of it. Kansas was emptied by the drought and the white winter, Nevada by irrigation companies gone defunct. In the early 1890s, the exodus from Nevada, as a percentage of those who hung on, was unlike anything in the country’s history. Even California, in the midst of a big population boom, saw the growth of its agricultural population come to a standstill in 1895.
California, the perennial trend-setting state, was the first to attempt to rescue its hapless farmers, but the result, the Wright Act, is another in the long series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions to western topography and climate. The act, which took its inspiration from the township governments of New England, established self-governing ministates, called irrigation districts, whose sole function was to deliver water onto barren land. Like the western homestead laws, it was a good idea that foundered in practice. The districts soon buckled under their responsibilities—issuing bonds that wouldn't sell, building reservoirs that wouldn’t fill, allocating water unfairly, distributing it unevenly, then throwing up their hands when anarchy prevailed. Elwood C. Mead, then the state engineer of Wyoming and probably the country’s leading authority on irrigation, called the Wright Act “a disgrace to any self-governing people.” George Maxwell, a Californian and founder of the National Irrigation Association, said ‘‘the extravagance or stupidity or incompetence of local [irrigation] directors” had left little beyond a legacy of ‘‘waste and disaster.” Though the Wright Act was in most ways a failure, Colorado, thinking it had learned something from California’s mistakes, adopted its own version, which added a modest subsidy for private irrigation developers in order to improve their odds of success. By 1894, under Colorado’s new program, five substantial storage reservoirs had been built. Three were so poorly designed and situated that they stored no water at all; the fourth was declared unsafe and was never even filled; and the fifth was so far from the land it was supposed to irrigate that most of the meager quantity of water it could deliver disappeared into the ground before it got there.
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