The Yuma Reclamation Project: Irrigation, Indian Allotment, and Settlement Along the Lower Colorado River

Chapter 4: The Yuma Project

By the time irrigation developments began to unfold in the Yuma Valley , irrigators had already appropriated many of the smaller streams of the arid West. Since it was the smaller streams issuing from the western mountain ranges that were most easily diverted to newly planted fields, at the turn of the twentieth century a fragmented pattern of relatively small irrigated farming districts had become established in the western United States (map 4.1). A pioneer farmer with a team of horses and some ordinary farm tools could single-handedly construct the necessary ditches to water fields located near a small stream, but in order to irrigate more distant farms or higher benchlands cooperative effort among irrigators or the capital of private corporations was required. Hence, the irrigation works of the West fell into two categories: small ditches built by individuals or associations of farmers and larger works constructed as an investment for outside capital and not planned or owned by the irrigators themselves. In the Yuma Valley both types were represented, and each was experiencing major difficulties, primarily because of the unpredictable nature of the Colorado River. Generally, the irrigation works constructed by the landowners themselves throughout the West were relatively successful endeavors, and most of the land brought under irrigation by the early 1900s had been accomplished in this fashion. These tended to be cooperative but relatively small-scale ventures . The problem encountered by Yuma irrigators was that the farmers who had joined to form the Yuma Valley Union Land and Water Company were attempting to divert a major river without the financial means to do so. On the other hand, the works planned and built with money borrowed from investors intending to sell water rights, such as the rival Irrigation Land and Improvement Company’s (Ludy) canal, were almost without exception financial failures. Most of the corporate ventures were engineered and promoted by incompetent or speculatively inclined persons having insufficient capital to build the dams, storage reservoirs, and canals necessary to irrigate large tracts of land. i฀4 j The Yuma Project 58 t h e y u m a r e c l a m at i o n p r o j e c t The primary problem confronting both the farmers and the investors was their inability to keep the Colorado River in its channel during flood stage and to keep the canals from silting up because of the enormous sediment load carried by the river. Ironically, one of the few large-scale private irrigation endeavors in the West that showed more promise than most involved the activities of the California Development Company, which was conductm a p 4 . 1. Distribution of irrigated lands in the western United States in 1899. (Reproduced from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900: Agriculture—Part II, Crops and Irrigation, 802) The Yuma Project 59 ing Colorado River water through the abandoned channel of the Alamo River across the desert of northern Mexico into the Imperial Valley sixty miles away. The grade of the Imperial Canal from its heading on the Colorado River to the Salton Sink was more than three times as steep as that of the river below its heading. This normally was a sufficient gradient to keep the main canal from silting up, and the territory it irrigated was far removed from the river’s annual overflow. The situation that prevailed in the Yuma Valley was metaphorical; it reflected the federal government’s concern that irrigation in the West had gone about as far as it could. The lands that could readily be irrigated through individual or cooperative initiative were now occupied, and some form of federal intervention would be required if the remaining irrigable lands were to be populated by small family farmers. Vast chunks of the western public domain were rapidly being taken up by stockmen through fraudulent entries made under the Desert Land Act, while the objectives of the homestead law, to permit the expansion of the country’s agricultural area and to provide homes as rapidly as the needs of the people demanded, were not being met. The solution to this dilemma involved the implementation of a national irrigation policy through passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902. Colorado River Surveys The Newlands Reclamation Act provided for the examination, survey, and construction of irrigation works that would enlarge the...