keep them off; it has acquired this authority only within recent years. There was delay in constructing and operating the pumps that lift the water to parts of the tract. Under the law the officials had to insist upon the payment of the ten annual instalments when the project was opened, whether the homesteaders could pay or not; all over the tract excessive irrigation caused the ground water to rise dangerously close to the surface, to create swamps here and there. But—
Collection of the annual payments has been suspended by Secretary Lane until Congress can extend the time of repayment to twenty years; water is being delivered regularly and abundantly; surplus water is being carried off by a drainage system now being built by four steam and electric dredges. Furthermore–
Rupert, the principal town on the project, had two hundred inhabitants in 1910; it has a thousand now. Its merchants are prosperous, its weekly paper has twelve hundred subscribers—"All paid in advance!" boasts the editor. Sixty per cent of the houses, even the tent houses, the schools, including the new fifty-thousand dollar high school, are heated by electricity. Electric cooking-ranges, washing machines, flat-irons and heaters are as common in Rupert, Burley, Sugar City, in Twin Falls, the metropolis, in most of the new sage brush towns as dazzling electric signs are on Broadway.
J. F. Thompson came to the Minidoka project from the Butte mines poor in health and purse, gray-haired, with a wife, and a daughter almost grown. He homesteaded a forty half a mile from Rupert, worked as a teamster for four years and grubbed the sage-brush on thirty acres with a hoe by hand. Three years ago he bought a dozen heifer calves for three hundred dollars. He is selling ten dollars' worth of milk and cream in Rupert every day now; his concrete milk house is as bright and clean as the polished inside of his cans; he might consider an offer of eight thousand dollars for his forty acres just because he wants more land. He has nineteen milch cows, a bull, two teams, pigs and chickens, a comfortable home, a good income, dreams of a large model dairy, and a thriving baby two years old.
"I guess I've done pretty well in Idaho." says Thompson. "Most of those who came without money did fairly well. They had to get out, hustle and work for a living. Those that had money cleared their land all in a bunch and waited for the water, ate up their capital before it came or watched the wind carry it away."
On the Minidoka project the cost of a water-right ranges from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars an acre. On the Boise project the cost per acre, as yet undetermined, will probably be twice as high. One reservoir on this project has been completed, has been supplying irrigation water for five seasons; the second reservoir, created by the famous Arrowrock dam, to be the highest in the world, will probably be ready in 1916. As at Minidoka, all the available land on the Boise project was taken up long ago. Despite the higher cost the settlers on the Boise project have uttered few complaints. They have had water for five seasons; they will have water for two seasons more, delivered at the actual cost of maintenance and operation, before they will be asked to begin repaying the principal. They have been given seven years in which to clear, level, fence and ditch their lands, in which to build homes, raise crops, buy stock and lift the pieces of raw sage-brush onto a paying basis, and in the first four years they were given abun dant work at good wages building the canals and laterals. On the Carey Act and the other government projects the settler was expected to do in one year what the Boise homesteaders did in seven: make a paying farm out of raw land, begin payments within a year from the first delivery of water. The utter impossibility of this task was not recognized ten years ago. It is today, and this new knowledge will play a most important part in forming the plans for future irrigation development.
This new spirit is visible on every hand. The numerous pumping projects along the lower Snake, in the vicinity of Caldwell, Nampa, and Weiser, along the electric interurban lines radiating out from Idaho's capital, Boise, do not ask the settler to do the impossible. In the Gem irrigation district, for instance, the cost is thirty dollars per acre, ten per cent down, the balance in eighteen years. For the first two years neither interest nor principal fall due; even the electric power for operating the pumping plant during two seasons is furnished without charge. The Idaho
