Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

10. Farming and Ranching in the American Desert

161 10 Colorado’s first agricultural fair opened September 21, 1866, a mile and a half northwest of Denver. An early snowstorm had turned the forty acres of fairgrounds to cold mud, but visitors were delighted with the facilities. The exhibition hall, an octagon 300 feet in circumference ,wasfilledwithdisplays—quilts,orespecimens,and mammoth vegetables such as fifteen-pound turnips and thirty-five-pound cabbages from the South Platte Valley. Outside were stalls for prize livestock and a half-mile racetrack. The highlight came at the end of the four-day event, when 3,000 people watched nine women match their equestrian skills. Staged seven years after the gold rush, the fair demonstrated the fact that farming had gotten off to a slow start. Pioneer boosters gushed about gold, but they had to admit that the territory’s agricultural bounty was slim. In 1866, perhaps only 50,000 acres were planted along the South Platte River and its tributaries. Four years later, the 1870 federal census found only 1,700 farms (mostly in southern Colorado) and fewer than 100,000 acres of improved farmland. City people supported agriculture because they knew that without farms, their cities would wither. During the lean years of the mid-1860s, Robert Strahorn published the Colorado Agricultural and Stock Journal at the same time he supervised circulation for the Denver Tribune. Ned Farrell’s Colorado: The Rocky Mountain Our opinion is that farmers who stay at home, and spend as much money to improve and cultivate their farms will realize more clear profit by so doing than they will to go to the mines. —Rocky Mountain news, apRil 23, 1859 Farming and Ranching in the american Desert DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c10 This advertisement from the Colorado Business Directory, 1876, capitalized on the success of the Greeley and Longmont colonies. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection.) farming and ranching in the american desert 163 Gem and Ovando Hollister’s Mines of Colorado devoted chapters to the delights of piedmont farming, and William Byers frequently promoted agriculture. Their optimism, however, could not hide their fears that without a large farming population, Colorado might miss the purifying influence of that “conservative element of all national and political and social growth.” In more practical terms, they realized that without farms, mining would die. Agriculture, said the Rocky Mountain News, was “the only means by which our mines can be developed, for unless we can become self-sustaining, we may not hope that the necessities of life can be furnished here at rates that will warrant extensive mining operations.”1 Boosters read rain gauges. They knew the region was semiarid, that only with irrigation could farming succeed. Although long practiced by Hispanics in southern Colorado, irrigation was unfamiliar and forbidding to Anglo-Americans accustomed to steamy summer nights and towering thunderstorms along the Mississippi or the Ohio River. An immigrant to Colorado would have to learn how to measure flowing water, how to prepare and maintain head gates, when to turn the water onto the fields, how much to apply, which crops to favor, and which to shun. Coloradans argued that irrigation was more a blessing than a curse. A steady and assured water supply, they said, was obviously superior to reliance on sporadic cloudbursts. They asserted that irrigation water from the mountains continually replenished the soil. The Colorado Tribune claimed that irrigation produced 50 percent more crops than bottomlands farmed in the eastern manner. Stories of two-foot-long beets and yields of seventy or eighty bushels of wheat per acre seemed sufficient proof. The Colorado farmer never needed to worry about grubbing out the rank weeds that exhausted the soil in humid climates. Crops could cure in the field without fear of mildew, mold, or rot. Yet, the optimists admitted, successful farming would require new attitudes. “One man alone cannot build an irrigation canal many miles in length and so redeem broad prairie land from the curse of sterility,” wrote agriculture booster William Pabor. “It takes combined energy, skill, and capital to construct them.”2 Following the model of railroad land grants, the Rocky Mountain News as early as 1864 appealed to the US Congress to grant tracts to corporations that would build irrigation canals in the arid West. chapter ten 164 Greeley and other colony towns Five years later Nathan Meeker, agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, proposed another way to get ditches built...