lost their savings, suffered hardships and privations through the collapse that began with the failure of the Trowbridge & Niver firm five years ago. Not a man, not a newspaper, in Idaho is attempting to minimize or hide this fact. But they resent bitterly, and with good reason, the indiscriminate condemnation of every irrigation enterprise in the state. To understand the situation, to realize the benefits as well as the handicaps which the large-scale irrigation projects have bestowed upon Idaho, it is necessary to look at the state as it was ten or twelve years ago.
Idaho is a long slim state, gaining width and bulk only from the bustle down. Two-thirds of the state's area is filled with an intricate system of mountain ranges. "I've driven three times clear around the state of Idaho," says Major Reed, labor, immigration and exposition commissioner of the commonwealth. "I've driven and ridden across it more than twenty times and, by Jove, I'm willing to bet that Idaho is larger than Texas if we could iron it out."
The only extensive bodies of level land lie on the banks of the Snake river. The Snake, rising in the snows of Yellowstone National Park, enters Idaho at the state's extreme eastern part, swings South and west in a tremendous half-circle, heads north for the Columbia and is pushed out of the state by the mountains that fill Idaho's panhandle.
In the eastern part of the state, at the beginning of its tremendous loop around the mountains, the Snake flows tranquilly, steadily, between low banks, as a self-respecting river should. Since 1860 farmers have come into this part of the valley, have tapped the river's banks, either individually or in small associations, have built ditches and gone to irrigating. Today over three thousand of these farmers' ditch companies are irrigating more than a million acres.
Ten years ago the irrigated area ceased at American Falls, the cataract familiar to millions of travelers who have watched the foaming cascade from the railroad bridge. Below American Falls the Snake enters a country of gray sage-brush, gray sand and sinister dark brown rock, flanked on either side by white ranges. For a while the Great Snake travels leisurely between low perpendicular walls, low enough to offer several sites at which dams could be built to lift the water upon the adjacent plain. Gradually the water increases its speed, the somber walls rise, the river gurgles at the bottom of a deep chasm. And down in this dark chasm the green waters, lashed into clouds of spray, turn brilliant white as the river leaps two hundred feet at Twin Falls, roars two hundred and twelve feet over the brink of majestic Shoshone Falls before it comes to rest again.
Millions of acres of fertile land were lying along the rim of the Snake's canyon below American Falls, but jack - rabbits, sage-hens and coyotes were the only population. It might be possible to throw across the river a dam high enough to divert the water upon the plain, but the farmers' ditch companies lacked the capital for so expensive an undertaking. Anyway, it could not be done, the old settlers maintained. The floods would make short work of the dam; if it stood up by a miracle, the water would never reach the canal headgate because it would vanish through the seams and crevasses in the river's lava banks. And if the water should ever reach the headgate, the wiseacres prophesied, the porous bottom of the ditches would absorb the moisture like a sponge long before it could reach a single field.
I. B. Perrine, a teacher, stage-owner, prospector, horticulturist and dreamer of dreams was raising fruit on the warm bottom of a gulch branching off from the river's main canyon. Into his hands fell the maps and the prospectus of a gigantic irrigation project, still-born many years ago, before the time was ripe. Perrine's vision leaped to the rim, roamed restlessly over the still, gray plain. The magnitude of the thing gripped his imagination. He showed the maps and the plans to Colonel S. B. Milner, placer-mining down the river. Governor Steunenberg and State Engineer Ross joined the crystal-gazing circle. They filed on the water, made a new survey, interested F. H. Buhl and Peter Kimberley, men with money, had 240,000 acres set aside under the Carey Act, started work on dam and ditches and held the first of the famous "land openings" at which lots were drawn to determine which buyer of a water right should have first choice in the selection of land.
The old-timers snickered. Their predictions were coming true. No one had faith in the enterprise. Barely a score of purchasers attended. . . Only thirty-eight hundred acres were sold.
