VOL. I

The

American Economic Review

MARCH 1911

No. 1

SOME UNSETTLED PROBLEMS OF IRRIGATION

Shaler called the Cordilleran area, comprising the western third of the United States, the "curse of the Continent". West of the hundredth meridian, precipitation, except for certain favored sections, is insufficient for agriculture or for forest growth, and pasturage can be reckoned on for the spring and early summer only. From the mesas and foothills of the Rockies to the western slope of the Sierras, arid or semi-arid conditions prevail. The average annual rainfall varies from two inches in the deserts of the southwest to twenty inches on the Great Plains, but nowhere except on the north Pacific coast does it furnish a reliance for the farmer. On the western slopes of the mountain ranges, where the moisture-laden winds of the Pacific ascend to colder altitudes, there is considerable rain. The precipitation of autumn and winter is held in vast beds of snow and ice until the fervid suns of May and June release the flow. Then springs and torrents rush down to the lowlands, the rivers overflow their banks, and the valleys are flooded. How to conserve this excess water to serve the needs of summer-grown crops is the problem of arid America.

The first Americans who attempted to farm the desert were the pioneers of the Mormon migration. Brigham Young and the one hundred and forty devoted saints who followed his lead across the Wasatch Mountains to the new Zion on the mesa above Great Salt Lake, had no knowledge of irrigation; but agriculture was a sine qua non to a settlement so remote from civilization. Within two hours of their arrival they began to plow for a belated planting. "We found the land so dry", wrote Lorenzo Snow, "that to plow it was impossible, and in attempting to do so some of the plow beams were broken. We therefore had to distribute the water over the land before it could be broken." The simple device worked satisfactorily and was used thereafter, not only to soften the soil but to water the crops. The damming

of City Creek marked the beginning of irrigation in the Great Basin. Thereafter water supply was regarded even more than character of soil and means of transportation in determining the location of the successive "stakes" planted in the wilderness. Irrigating works were built, as were roads and bridges and sawmills, by coöperative effort, each colonist contributing labor or material or money as he best could. New and struggling communities were not infrequently financed by the Church, stock being taken in exchange for funds advanced. The Mormon communities have now some six million acres under irrigation in the arid West and are producing wheat and alfalfa, sugar beets, peaches, cherries, and strawberries, out of all proportion to their ratio in the agricultural population of the United States.

Meantime the American pioneers in California were profiting by the irrigating experience of their Spanish predecessors. Dr. John Marsh, a Yankee and a Harvard graduate, secured a Spanish grant to a good square mile of land at the foot of Mt. Diablo and set about its cultivation with a zeal that soon made him one of the wealthiest landowners in the province. His orchards and vineyards and irrigated fields were the marvel of the hijos del pais. Sutter's ranch on American Fork was an equally convincing demonstration of what brains could do by adding water to the soil and climate of California. Water rights were free as air and every ranchero used the streams that the winter rains sent across the lowlands, according to his own convenience. Only in the pueblos, San José and Los Angeles, was there endeavor to treat the scant supply as a common property to be developed by the building of dams and ditches under the direction of the public authorities. The advent of the gold seekers made heavy demands upon the water resources of the Sierras. Running water was a prime necessity in placer mining, the new market afforded by the mining communities induced a far more extensive agriculture, and water rights became, for the first time, a matter of serious concern. The water needed to operate the sluices and long toms had to be conducted to the diggings in flumes, sometimes many miles in length and representing a considerable investment of labor and capital. Mining custom, which the California Legislature formulated into law, established the principle of "first come first served". A notice posted at the point of diversion, stating date of posting and the amount of water to be taken out, constituted a claim to a specified number of miners' inches.

The law required that the claim should be registered with the county officer within sixty days of the posting, and the courts later decided that the claimant must prove that the construction of ditches, canals or flumes had been undertaken immediately and prosecuted with diligence, and that the water drawn off was being put to a beneficial use. Notwithstanding these precautions, the miners' custom, notably when applied to agricultural districts, gave rise to strife and uncertainties that seriously handicapped industrial development. It had become evident that land with no assured water supply was of little value for agriculture. The streams that might be utilized within the resources of individual ranchmen were soon monopolized, and works of greater cost were needed to construct diversion dams, build main canals, and set up pumping machinery for the irrigation of the thousands of acres of fertile land that lay back from the water courses. In the hope of encouraging the development of the Great Valley between the Sierras and the Coast Range, a region all untouched by the Spanish régime, the Legislature (1862) passed an act authorizing the incorporation of canal companies and the construction of canals "for the transportation of passengers and freights, or for the purpose of irrigation and water power, or for the conveyance of water for mining or manufacturing purposes, or for all of such purposes". Under this liberal enactment, several irrigation companies were organized on the basis of claims to the flow of the San Joaquin and its tributary rivers.

The common law doctrine of riparian rights was adopted by the courts of California in the early years of American occupation with no question as to its applicability to the new conditions. Practice vested in the adjacent landowner not only right to a continuous and undiminished flow, but to diversion for his own use and also for sale to agriculturists less fortunately situated. The effect was to give an extraordinary advantage to first comers and to speculators in this most valuable of natural resources. Subsequent cultivators, men who were proposing to convert cattle ranches and wheat fields into orchards and vegetable gardens, were obliged to be content with what was left or to defend their secondary claims by force. Appeal to the courts involved long and costly suits with inconclusive results, since the process of adjudication must be gone over whenever a new claimant appeared or an old claim was revived or extended. Agricultural enterprise in California is still retarded by the uncertainty of water

rights and the heavy costs of litigation. Any one of the tens and hundreds of appropriators along a single stream may bring suit to enlarge his share, and the law offers no remedy to the revival of old disputes. Often the small farmer cannot afford the contest, and the victory goes by default to the wealthy ranchman or the well capitalized company. The doctrine of riparian rights even as modified by fifty years of court decisions, is hopelessly inadequate, and the water users have had to resort to private agreements with mutual recognition of all the rights appurtenant to the supply in question. The doctrine of appropriation, the only doctrine suited to an arid agriculture, has never been formally recognized in California, much less the superior right of the public to the water supply which is precipitated on the mountain heights, collected in state-owned lakes and rivers, and which is indispensable to the future development of the commonwealth.

By 1875 all the easily irrigated lands of the Cordilleran area were occupied and it had become evident that the homestead law which had worked so satisfactorily in the Mississippi Valley, was quite inapplicable to the conditions presented to the settler in the arid regions. The Desert Land Act was passed (1877) with intent to offer a sufficient reward to induce the man taking up public land to put in irrigating works. A full section of arid land, four times the amount permitted under the preemption or homestead acts, might be acquired by paying twenty-five cents. per acre at the time of entry, redeeming the same by irrigation, within three years, and then paying the final charge of one dollar per acre. Residence on the holding was not required.1

The Desert Land Act was put through Congress by men who knew little of western conditions, on the assumption that water would always be found upon the land and in such form that it could be readily diverted to the fields; but few regions are so fortunately situated. Irrigation on a scale necessary to utilize distant mountain streams or to pump the subterranean flow, required more capital and engineering skill than the ranchmen possessed and usually developed a capacity for watering tens of thousands of acres. The organization of irrigation companies followed. Hydrographic engineering was a new art, construction was not infrequently faulty, water rights uncertain, and the quantity of water available often grossly exaggerated. The 1 The act was amended in 1891, reducing the holding to 320 acres and introducing the residence requirement.

promoters of these schemes relied on the fact that the settlers could do nothing toward completing their titles without water, and they devised contracts by which the farmer paid a flat rate per acre, regardless of the amount of water furnished. The temptation to contract to irrigate more land than could be provided for proved irresistible, and many of the settlers were ruined. Such promoters soon discovered, however, that they had killed the goose that laid the golden egg, for without water-users there could be no revenue.

The decade of 1880 to 1890 was the boom period of irrigation. The energies of the West were turned from the dwindling returns of cattle ranches and mining properties to the latent possibilities of the desert. Speculation ran riot. The capacity of lakes and streams was over-estimated, and the agricultural value of land and climate exaggerated by over-enthusiastic promoters; stocks and bonds were sold broadcast among investors who appreciated the significance of irrigation, but had no means of testing the legal or financial status of any individual proposition. The great majority of these projects failed and the money contributed by thousands of small investors was irretrievably lost. Nothing goes to wreck more quickly than irrigation works where repairs are not maintained; the ditches fill with sand or silt, the flumes warp in the sun, and the cement dams disintegrate under the alternate action of frost and heat. Many of the promoters, as well as the investors, had reason to ask themselves the unanswerable conundrum, what is the difference between a boom and a boomerang.

Of far more interest than the physical problems of irrigation or its speculative possibilities, is the slow but steady growth of custom and legislation away from the doctrine of riparian rights and priority claims to the recognition of the paramount importance of beneficial use and the public good. The first scientific study of irrigation as an economic problem was made by J. W. Powell, Chief of U. S. Geographical Survey, in his report on the Lands of the Arid Region, published by the Government in 1879. Powell had spent a decade in the exploration of the great desert region between the Colorado River and the Snake, and his conclusions were worthy of consideration. He estimated that eight per cent or about 60,000,000 acres of the Cordilleran area, was both fertile and susceptible of irrigation, a conclusion not greatly in excess of the latest calculations of irrigation experts. Since the