entryman at a cost of more than eleven dollars an acre, plus the water-right charge. That was six years ago.
The boom collapsed. Bond houses, promoters and financiers failed. Dams and canal systems, almost completed, were left unfinished. Settlers in the sage-brush, unable to obtain the promised water, defaulted in their payments, despaired and moved away from some of the projects. Irrigation securities could not be given away. Receivers squatted on the unfinished works; the bondholders received no interest, the settlers complained of the water deliveries; even from the homesteaders on the Government project arose a loud wail of distress. For a time it seemed as though all irrigation projects in southern Idaho, with a few exceptions, were rank failures, and this impression was spread throughout the country by the wide publicity given each new receivership.
Has the bottom really dropped out of irrigation on the gray plains of the Snake? Has everyone connected in any way with the newer projects lost money, faith, courage, crops?
Let Senator Hastings speak. He settled on the Twin Falls North Side tract, the largest of the projects promoted by the Kuhns of Pittsburg. He bought 280 acres near the town-to-be of Wendell, within a few miles of a railroad-to-be, and paid ten dollars an acre more than the other settlers. The delivery of irrigation water on his place was irregular the first two years, as it was on the balance of the big tract; the Spring wind, sweeping across the then treeless plain, did not spare his fields. Last year his hundred alfalfa acres produced six hundred tons of alfalfa hay; he had a dozen cows and two hundred chickens. He had twelve acres in apples; he harvested a ton of grapes. He sold berries, clover-seed, pigs, calves; sold eighty acres of his farm—the town-to-be has become a real town—for three hundred dollars an acre. He heats his house by electricity, has it warm and cozy night and day throughout the winter, and the hired man need not shiver when he gets up to milk the cows; he heats his water, lights house and barns, runs pumps, sewing-machine, washing-machine, feed-chopper and cook-stove by electricity at a total annual expense of $225 for current.
"One success among a thousand failures" you say. "And he had both capital and experience."
Perhaps the Senator can shed some additional light on the subject.
"Around Wendell and Jerome," he said, "the sales' agents certainly did put down a strange assortment of settlers. I guess you could count the experienced farmers on the fingers of one hand in this vicinity. Lots of 'em bought just for speculation, didn't stay on the land at all. Lots more quit the first few years. Some of 'em lost their crops when the water didn't come, others had their seed blown out of the land, and others didn't know how to go about it and never did learn. Still, a good many of the stickers, even of the inexperienced ones, pulled through. There's a Norwegian living a couple of miles down the road on a little place as nice as you could find anywhere in Minnesota or in Iowa. I remember when he came in. He was greener than he had a right to be. He'd been a grinder in Chicago so long that his left hand was almost paralyzed. But he'd saved some money and knew how to work. He built a shack for the wife and two kids, cleared and leveled his land and, when the water didn't come, went to work for day's wages on the railroad grade. It was a sight to watch him wrestle with a Fresno at first, but he stuck to it, went to raising crops as soon as the water came regularly. He's got a good house on his eighty, all kinds of stock, and his land nearly all in crops.
"There's another one down this way, a young fellow from a Chicago bank or some other hothouse. Looked as though he'd been born with a green shade over his eyes and a pencil behind his ear. Bet you he went to bed every night the first year with a backache. But he had sense. Most of 'em bit off more'n they could swallow, loaded up with a hundred and sixty acres when they had barely money and strength enough to swing twenty. This one wasn't greedy, and had a long head. A forty looked big to him. He paid thirty-five and a half an acre for it, raw. If it isn't worth a hundred and fifty today, minimum, not counting the value of his stock and equipment, I'm willing to pay the difference."
I have recited these instances of successful effort, chosen at random from a large number, to give a little lighter hue to the border of deep black that has surrounded every piece of irrigation news from southern Idaho for three or four years. It is true that hundreds of settlers and investors
