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The irrigable land in the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation overlapped portions of two townships. Since all of the Indian allotments were confined to that portion of the Colorado River floodplain located in t16s, r22e, Anglo settlers by default were assigned the irrigable area found in the adjoining township, t16s, r23e. The former came to be known as the Indian unit of the reservation division, whereas the latter was appropriately labeled the Bard unit, after the senator whose untiring efforts made the Yuma Project and allotment of the reservation a reality. It was actually the new townsite established by the Reclamation Service to serve the non-Indian unit that originally was called Bard. In January 1909, director Newell suggested that the new townsite be named in honor of the then former senator, not only because of the pivotal role he played in gaining approval of the Yuma Project but also because the name was “short and distinctive.”1 In time the entire unit devoted to non-Indian settlement took on the Bard appellation. The Bard unit represented that part of the project for which the Reclamation Service held especially high hopes, primarily because this portion of the Yuma Project was not encumbered by complications involving the Indian allotments located just to the west, or by settlers and their canal enterprises that were found across the river in the Yuma Valley. The Bard unit encompassed vacant land; hence, it was the Reclamation Service that would lay the foundation upon which the process of settlement and development would unfold. But the settlement policy of the service turned out to be extraordinarily shortsighted. Once the engineering works were in place and a systematic plan for land disposal was formulated, the Reclamation Service assumed that all other facets of colonization would simply fall into place. Unfortunately, this sanguine scenario was not to be the case. The Farm Unit The first step in the process of land disposal was to ascertain the optimal size of the farm unit within the context of the environmental conditions under i฀6 j Bard 110 t h e y u m a r e c l a m at i o n p r o j e c t which the Yuma Project was being developed. It was specified under the original Reclamation Act that reclamation homesteads would be 40 acres in size, but the original act was amended in June 1906, leaving the size of the farm units within reclamation projects to the discretion of the secretary of the interior. Hence, there was considerable debate over the issue of farm unit size at Yuma before the final decision was made, a dialogue, one might add, that was absent when the original decision regarding 5-acre Indian allotments was made. In the fall of 1907, as work on the main canal heading on the California side was about to get under way, both Newell and A. P. Davis, second in command at the Reclamation Service, sent requests to a number of individuals, including supervising engineer Hill, and R. H. Forbes, director of the agricultural experiment station of the University of Arizona, seeking their advice regarding what they believed the size of the farm unit should be. After a review of their responses, Newell and Davis would then forward their recommendation to the secretary of the interior. Engineer Hill believed that the size of the farm unit should not exceed 20 acres, and could possibly be smaller, but cautioned that settlers probably could not be induced to take up land if the farm units were made too small. Forbes, whose experiment station had been in operation in the Yuma Valley since the spring of 1905, likewise advocated small farm units.2 Forbes indicated that the long growing season and the rich alluvial soil favored intensive agriculture, which would prove immensely more productive per acre than larger farms growing crops similar to those found in the humid East. He also pointed out that there would be a rather heavy initial cost of leveling each farm parcel, perhaps as much as twenty-five dollars per acre, which in practical terms would restrict the average farmer to putting only limited areas under cultivation initially. And from a rural development standpoint, Forbes was convinced that intensive and diversified farming supporting many people would result in a wealthier and a more independent community , an important consideration at Yuma because of its isolated location distant from markets, and because of high transportation costs associated with shipments to...

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