nothing but misery to the white man's burden. Do the facts bear them out?
The products of the southern Idaho farms last fall swamped the railroad temporarily. For a time potatoes, hay, sugar beets, grain, live-stock, clover and alfalfa seed, peas and beans were piling up for shipment faster than cars could be sent in. Crops do not grow on the sage-brush; real water, real ditches, real farmers are necessary in the process of production.
Two dozen towns have been laid out in the newly irrigated tract along the Snake and its tributaries. Real settlers, real crops are necessary to support an agricultural town. Very few of these new towns have been backsliders; most of them have made steady, continued gains since their birth. Without a continued growth of the cultivated, irrigated, productive areas around them these gains would have been impossible.
“It’s hard on us and the bondholders, but the situation is by no means hopeless” said the spokesman of the settlers under a project considered one of the bad failures. He has six thousand dollars invested in the tract, and the investment, depending upon a regular supply of irrigation water, is trembling in the balance. “The company has spent more than a million on the project. We have water to spare—if we can get it to the land regularly. The settlers owe the company nine hundred thousand dollars. They can pay up if they are assured of water. We have one of the finest bodies of fruit land in the country.
Upon second thought the engineers declared that the proposed reservoir, located in a region of broken and seamed volcanic rock, would not hold water. Still, the con tracts with the settlers and buyers called for the construction of a reservoir on this
particular site. The dam was built to fulfil the obligation. It cost half a million— and it did not hold water. Whereupon the company went two hundred miles up the
river to the headwaters of the Snake in
Wyoming to obtain the necessary storage.
Across the outlet of Jackson lake, along
side of the craggy Tetons, the Reclamation
Service had thrown a dam only sixteen
feet high, storing behind it 380,000 acre
feet of water for use on the Minidoka project. The Reclamation Service agreed to
another seventeen feet, storing 400,000 acre-feet more provided the Kuhns would pay the cost, estimated at half a million.
Two hundred thousand dollars had been
paid and work begun when the Kuhn enterprises fell into the receiver's hands.
raise the dam and the surface of the lake
Four and a half million dollars have been
spent on the North Side project.
Three
hundred thousand dollars more must be spent to insure an ample, permanent supply of storage water for the entire body of arable land under the project. In the mean time, however, the tract is supplied during the low-water season with water brought from the excess storage not needed on the Minidoka project.
Do these facts warrant the assumption
of dismal failure? Or do they furnish a
It requires less than three hundred thou reasonable basis for the steady growth of sand dollars to make our water System Gooding, Jerome, Wendell, Bliss and other
permanent. If the bondholders will, put towns on the newly irrigated two hundred up this sum, we can pay them nine hun and fifty square miles of sage-brush? dred thousand and save our own invest ment. That is the situation.” The land of the Twin Falls North Side
The wail of the Minidoka homesteader,
on the Reclamation Service project adjoin ing the largest of the Carey Act enterprises,
irrigated tract lies across the Snake from has been abroad in the land these many the original Twin Falls enterprise. The days. It rose to a shriek a year ago when North Side, financed by the Kuhns of
Secretary Lane listened to the settlers'
Pittsburg, could not obtain sufficient water plaints. No water at first; too much water to irrigate the entire acreage from the river now; harsh, inflexible terms of payment; during the summer's lowest, stage. For red tape, unsympathetic officials; seed two months in midsummer prior claimants blown out of the dry ground by fierce winds; absorbed almost the entire flow. To supply seed rotting in formerly dry soil that is now sufficient water during these two months a marsh—this was the burden of one the water-right contracts provided that the spokesman's song. True, all true. Many homesteaders company should build a large storage reservoir on the tract, to be filled when the settled on the land years before water was river was in flood. ready. The Reclamation Service could not
