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THE CHISHOLM HOME AT ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO When first irrigated this was the farthest town from a railroad in the United States.

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CANAL AT MESA, ARIZONA

Problems of the Arid Region

By Elwood Mead

HE civilization of arid America is

the gift of streams. Their use in irrigation has opened markets for Eastern factories, stimulated the erection of Western ones, promoted mining, built cities like Los Angeles and Salt Lake, made profitable the railways which unite the two extremes of the continent, and made attractive homes for over two million souls. A region once given over to the nomadic range live-stock business is being dotted with cities and rural homes.

The land reclaimed has an aggregate area greater than the State of New York. From being originally without value, a single section, devoted to fruit-raising, has sold for over a half-million dollars. Irrigation has so increased the productive capacity of land in Utah that the farm unit is twenty acres. This supports a settler and his family in more than ordinary comfort. A township of the A township of the same land would not produce enough to keep this settler from starving if compelled to cultivate it in its original condition.

All this is the result of using a resource which for centuries has run unchecked to the sea. Instead of these fertile valleys continuing to parch and burn under the cloudless, rainless summer skies of this region, they are being moistened by water drawn from every available source. It is taken from rivulets and creeks in the hills and the great rivers of the plains. It is pumped from wells and drawn from basins where stored. Over $100,000,000

(some estimates make it twice this sum) has been expended in digging ditches. and canals to distribute it, and a new branch of engineering in this country has been created. An army of men are employed to regulate the head-gates of the main canals and to turn on or shut off the water at the margins of farmers' fields. Thousands of weary miles are traveled every day by the men who patrol ditch banks to watch for leaks and prevent accidents, or to labor day and night without ceasing when breaks do occur, to repair the injury before disaster and ruin overwhelm the irrigators whose fields await the interrupted supply.

In a country where streams must be destroyed in order that people may live, the common-law doctrine of riparian rights, so universally recognized in all the States of the Atlantic seaboard and Mississippi Valley, has no place. The necessities of climate are inexorable. Where crops cannot be grown by rainfall alone, to insist that streams shall continue to flow "undiminished in quantity" is to condemn the lands along their banks to perpetual barrenness. This is so contrary to common sense that, with or without laws, streams are being "appropriated," diverted, and used.

A commerce in water of immense and constantly growing importance has been created. Lawyers and judges are struggling with the complex legal problems growing out of stream ownership where

"appropriations" are regulated by statute, and the still worse complications which exist where the retention of riparian rights has been attempted.

It is impossible for those who live where fields are watered from the clouds to appreciate the significance of a "water. right" where moisture comes from streams. Many rivers are the arteries which supply the life-blood to important and widely separated districts. A peaceable and just distribution of their flow requires the harmonizing of the diverse and conflicting interests of individuals, communities, and even of States. Some of these rivers extend for hundreds of miles, and control the destinies of a multitude of people. Humboldt River

rises in the mountains of eastern Nevada, and loses itself in Humboldt Lake near the western border of the State. The oldest settlement is at Lovelocks, near the lower end of the river. The farms, which are exceedingly productive and valuable, depend on a water supply which comes from mountains three hundred miles away. Border ing on the upper part of the river is a hundred times as much irrigable land as the

banks of the river waiting to absorb the augmented flow. The individual user on such a stream is helpless. Only just public control and administrative ability of high order will serve to make secure the multitude of rights to the water of a river used in irrigation. Where this is lacking, it often happens that irrigated fields at the head of a stream are flooded, while those far down are parched with drought, injurious waste above causing destructive scarcity below.

It is now manifest that the first step in Western settlement should have been the measurement of streams and the inauguration of a system for the recording and

AN ALFALFA FIELD Showing the result of irrigation.

stream can serve. The owners of this land want the water, and there is no law to regulate their taking it. Already scores of ditches above are diverting the supply for merly used below. The farmer at Lovelocks realized that the water he needs is being taken away from him in ditches built long after his farm was brought under cultivation, but what is he to do? Shall he assert his prior right to the river and close the ditches which are diverting its flow? If at daylight he got on the fastest railroad train which passes his farm and rode until dark, he would still be miles below some of the head-gates. If he closed the upper ones, there are scores of others scattered along the willow-bordered

protecting of rights to their use as complete in its operation as the existing system for the disposal of public land. Canals should have been built according to a prearranged plan, in order to conserve the water supply and secure the cultivation of the best land; and where there were enough ditches to absorb the supply, further construction should have been prevented, both as a protection to those ignorant of the situation and as the surest means of preventing controversies. Every

ditch in excess of the capacity of a stream means one of two things: either a loss to its owners from lack of water to fill it, or its flooding at the expense of the earlier ditches. Every excess right means a fraud on its holders or the robbing of earlier ones. Nothing resembling this has been attempted. At the outset the whole subject was neglected, because its importance was not appreciated. Irrigation was an experiment. No one dreamed that millions of people were to fill these valleys. The early users of water were bitterly hostile to any sort of legislation. They maintained that water was as free as air, and that to require them to incur any expense in recording their diversion

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of it was as unwarranted an exercise of arbitrary authority as to place a tax on breathing. They were deaf to the warning that there was more land than water, that the time was coming when there would be more ditches than the streams could fill and more acres under cultivation than could be supplied. So long as streams had a surplus, and every ditch-owner was taking what he pleased and as he pleased, one right was as good as another, and "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" was the motto of irrigators who were almost a unit in opposing adequate irrigation legislation.

The march of settlement has brought with it the results which thoughtful minds had foreseen. Communities have multiplied; the single ditch has become a score of canals, on some streams a hundred or more, while on rivers like the Platte they

are numbered by the thousands. Later comers, foreseeing the impending scarcity, avoid the valleys, and place their headgates in the hills to be nearer the source of supply. The early irrigator, who once had all, now often finds himself with nothing, and too often attempts to secure his rights by a war on those above with shotgun or shovel. When this fails, relief is sought in the courts. As a result, waterright litigation has been one of the most costly, most senseless, most injurious features of our past irrigation history. It has enriched lawyers, impoverished and discouraged investors, promoted discord. between neighbors, and jealousy and strife between communities and States. determination of the simplest physical facts, as well as questions of engineering and agriculture which can be rightly. settled only by men familiar with those

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subjects, have been wrangled over in court by attorneys fresh from the East, and decided by judges who lack the practical knowledge of the volume of water to be acquired, of the amount needed to irrigate an acre, and of the methods by which it has to be distributed and used.

When all the streams of the arid region which can be utilized shall be turned into ditches and canals, and from these ditches distributed with the utmost economy over the soil, only a small fraction of the irrigable land will have been reclaimed. By far the greater part must always remain arid and of little value. Along nearly every stream there will be tracts of irrigated and unirrigated land side by side, both equally fertile, having the same. climate, the same advantages save one. One tract will have a right to the stream; the other will be denied this. Mark the difference. The irrigated tract will be immensely productive, and with a value. equal to or surpassing that of farming land in regions of ample rainfall. The tract without water can be used only for pasturage purposes, and its rental value will scarcely suffice to pay taxes. An acre of fruit land in southern California with a water right attached is worth $500.

An acre of the same kind of land alongside of it, but without a water right, is not worth fifty cents. Control of the water supply, therefore, gives control of land values. It can make arid land blossom, or destroy the farms reclaimed. Property rights in streams are, therefore, of immense value both to those who are already using water and to those who desire to sell to others. Their cash value in a single State is over $75,000,000, while the prospective value is immensely greater. This, it must be remembered, does not include canals or ditches, but simply the property rights in the snows and rains which fill the streams.

No general statement will serve to describe the methods by which water rights are established, because in only three States Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska-is there anything resembling a systematic procedure. In the other States any one who wishes to acquire a right to a stream proceeds about as he pleases to divert and use it until he interferes with its use by some one else, or until some one interferes with him.

Even

in States like Utah and California, where water is of greatest value, there is no tribunal to which irrigators can go for a

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