F 392 R5P7 BANCROFT LIBRARY THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AN OLD EL PASO LANDMARK POSTON'S CAMP, 1856, EL PASO STREET, IN 1886. NEW COURT HOUSE BUILDING, EL PASO, TEXAS. PASO DEL NORTE-MEXICAN SIDE, VALLEY SCENE NEAR EL PASO-ON THE RIO GRANDE, RIO GRANDE IRRIGATION AND LAND CO'S MAP. PRICE, ONE DOLLAR. IRRIGATION BY CHARLES D. POSTON, LATE COMMISSIONER OR THE UNITED STATES n Ex-Delegate in Congress from Arizona, Ex- Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Ex-Register of the Land Office, Ex- Consular Agent at Nogales, Ex- Military Agent at El Paso, Etc., Etc., Etc. AUTHOR OK 'EUROPE IN THE Sr.M.MKR TlME," "THE SUN WORSHIPPERS OF ASIA, "APACHE LAND," ETC., ETC. CHICAGO : THE J. M. W. JONES STATIONERY AND PRINTING COMPANY. 1887. Entered according- to Act of Congress, in the year 1887, by CHARLES D. POSTON, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, I). C. IRRIGATION. IRRIGATION existed in Egypt before the pyramids were erected. It has fed the millions of Asia since the creation of the world. It nurtured Rome into existence, and was practiced in America before Columbus discovered the New World, and yet the people of the United States east of the Mississippi river know but little about it and care less. The Moors introduced irrigation into Spain, and the Spaniards imported an imperfect system of irrigation into Mexico, Texas, Cali- fornia, etc. The Valley of the Nile has yielded its fruitful abundance from irrigated lands for countless ages, and Cato wrote learnedly advocating its introduction into Italy; but the greatest achievement of modern times has been the improvement of the system of irrigation in the East Indies, by the British Government of India. Irrigation in the East Indies antedates all history ; the Great Mogul gave it a grand impetus during the magnifi- cence of his reign. When the British Government (after the Sepoy mutiny) took over the control of more than two hundred and fifty millions of subjects in India, the first duty of Statesmanship was to provide labor and food for the people, and this has been accomplished by the extension of a system of irrigating canals unequalled in the world. Famine in India is rendered impossible, as long as the Himalayas give their melted snows to fructify the Indian valleys. The Ganges Canal, with its branches, is three thousand five hundred miles long. Among other duties in the service of the Government of the United States, it was a pleasure, nearly twenty years ago, to investigate and report upon the system of irrigation throughout ASIA; and in this service I learned much in Japan, China, India, Persia, Arabia and Egypt ; and subsequently observed much on the subject in Italy and Spain. In Cali- fornia as early as 1850, it gratified a youthful curiosity to follow the irrigating ditches which those primitive people had made, and subsequently the grand irrigating canals in Arizona and Northern Mexico excited a livley interest in a lost and perished race, who have left little or no other evidence of their existence upon earth. It was my fortune, or misfortune, to traverse the Rio Grande nearly a third of a century ago, where I found a thriftless, lazy class of people basking in the opulence of eternal sunshine, and deriving their meager Y'JlMl r, 1,1 '1 ^0 c n 31'iMi ' ] I! 'I 10 IRRIGATION. subsistence from the richest soil in the world, by the most primitive methods of agriculture, and when I left the Rio Grande in May last, there was scarcely a perceptible improvement in agriculture. The people are too lazy to turn over in bed and with a soil that will produce onions, emitting no more smell than a turnip, I will solemnly swear that they were imparting onions from Spain. While the people of California have built an empire on the Pacific, which is the admiration of the world and the Great West goes marching on the people on the Rio Grande plough with a stick, dig fuel with a hoe, and cut hay with an axe. They irrigate nothing but their throats. In fact, since enterprising people have built railroads to their doors, they have ceased producing anything, and import everything. The advance in real estate enables them to occupy a fundamental position waiting for strangers to come along and buy lots. The grapes of the Rio Grande are of a different quality and flavor from those grown elsewhere, and what little wine they make is consumed with avidity in the Valley. They have ceased to grow wheat, and import flour. (They used to sell flour to the Government at 12 J cents per pound.) WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE ! AND NOT A DROP TO IRRIGATE. . The greatest prerequisite to success in agriculture, fruit raising, etc., in the Western States and Territories, is water. A constant and abundant supply of water is the true key to Western progress and development. In nearly all of that country the rainfall is totally insufficient, and not to be relied upon ; hence Western people have been forced to study the problem of irrigation. Having been forced to look into this question, we naturally try to trace up its origin and history. The system found in California and in this country has been bequeathed to us by Mexico, and was inherited by them from Spain. Looking farther back, we find that it was one among the many good gifts which the Moors gave to Spain when they overran that country in the eighth century. Whether the Moors obtained it direct from the Arabs, or took it from the Egyptians, we are unable to determine at this late day. But in inquiring after its still more ancient origin and source, we must not stop this side of the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris. If we start here, in the dim and shadowy ages of antiquity, beyond which even tradition becomes unintelligible, we will find that, with few exceptions, the highest types of civilization and the brightest examples of progress and prosperity have been located, sustained and nurtured by systems of irrigation. IRRIGATION. 11 ANCIENT IRRIGATION. The glory, grandeur and wealth of royal Babylon, of Nineveh, Thebes, Bagdad, Cairo and Memphis, around which, as common centers, the civili- zation of great periods of time hung and radiated, were all attributable to and dependent upon the agricultural perfection surrounding them, and made possible by IRRIGATION. We might go further, and say that it has been the support and sustenance of the civilized world long after the cessation of Roman sway. For none will fail to recognize that the Nile country alone supported what was known as the Roman world, and that Egypt was always regarded as the granary of the empire. The Egyptian people were overthrown and vanquished, but their system of irrigation survived and gave sustenance to Roman civilization, and remained intact throughout all the vicissitudes and changes. If anything, irrigation was better in the days of Semiramis than in the days of Boabdil, although, like the other concomitants of the beautiful Alhambra, orchards, vineyards and meadows, as then seen along the banks of the Guadalquiver, speak of a splendid development, both material and intellectual. The Moors obtained from their Arab progenitors a taste for astronomy and some inclination toward practical mathematics, and to some extent we find applied mathe- matics in its crude state assisting in making large portions of their country bloom and blossom as the rose by the ingenious devices which the Moors had of supplying water to the gardens, orchards, vineyards and beautiful meadows which dotted old Hispania during their occupancy. It is a fact which cannot be controverted, that after the recon quest of Spain and the expulsion of the Moriscoes, Spain began to decline. The splendid schools of Granada, and the numerous manufactories of Valencia and other places gradually faded away and left Spain without any support, save that which she gathered by the sword, for she had neglected almost entirely her irrigation system ; and the apology for one which we have, and which was found in California when that State was acquired, is the system handed down by the successors of those Spaniards who vanquished and expelled the Moriscoes from Spain. PROGRESS REQUIRED. It is my purpose now to show the inadequacy of this system, and the present results of it, as compared with the capabilities and possibilities of a new system which the progressive American demands and will have. We have touched but very briefly upon its antiquity, for the reason that four-fifths, we might even say nine-tenths, of English-speaking people are 12 IRRIGATION. practically unacquainted with this system. Their civilization, compara- tively speaking, is in its infancy; it is still jejune, and has grown up in a climate of moisture and regular rainfall, and operating upon what might be termed virgin soil, and until recently the people of the United States had no necessity of irrigation. But times are changing, and the time will come when four-fifths of the population of America may be dependent upon irrigation in their agricultural pursuits. Then, we say, we will do well to look into this question, and when the American idea once takes hold of it, systems new and prolific will evolve wonderful results. Having brought the reader down to the consideration of this point, we make the broad statement that the results of irrigation in California, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico show, in a large majority of instances, an increase of one hundred per cent, over results dependent upon rainfall alone in the Eastern and Middle States. The history of the West proves this statement to be correct. This once admitted, then in the valley of the Rio Grande the soil, the climate and the water must cause the reader to stop and investigate, with renewed and eager interest, the conditions and statements which are placed before them. THE AMERICAN NILE. Our Rio Grande is the American Nile. The similarity is complete the analogy remarkable. The Nile has its source in the interior of Africa, in the lakes of Herodotus, of Livingston and of Stanley, the Alps of Abyssinia, many of which are covered in their winter time by heavy masses of snow. The lower portions of the great plateau are visited dur- ing April by perfect deluges of rain, such as only tropical countries can produce. The accumulation of these torrential rains, and the melting of the Alpine snows, causes the river to rise with almost clock-like regularity between the first and fifth days of May, and by the end of that month it is booming and bank full. The turbid floods go tearing their way through rough defiles and deep canons that fissure a volcanic country, the forma- tion of which, travelers tell us, is very much like that of Colorado, with limestone, granite, and occasional vast trachyte formations predominating. The waters become thoroughly charged with a combination of mineral ingredients, which contain in themselves all the elements of fertility. When the turbid floods reach the great valley of Nubia and Egypt they are of a slimy consistence, and about the beginning of June, just before the annual planting time begins in that country, they commence to over- flow their banks and spread over the valley lands, which have been in a state of cultivation ever since Abraham's time, and probably long before. IRRIGATION. 13 Whatever the crops of the preceding year may have abstracted from the soil is more than restored by the abundant deposit of fertile mud which the river leaves behind when its period of boom is over. The lands are found covered with a crust of stiff slime, containing lime, potash, chlorides, ammonia, and various other valuable ingredients. Into this rich slime the Egyptian fellah casts his seed, and in an incredibly short time, with scarcely any cultivation, and only such subsequent and additional irriga- tion as the reservoirs filled during the river's rise will allow, he reaps more than an hundred fold. No manure is ever applied, but the soil is constantly getting richer, and bears at the present day, after a thousand years of neglect and mismanagement, better crops than in the days of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies. THE RIO GRANDE. High up on the interior plateau of Southern Colorado, in the legendary country of San Juan, among wild crags and heaven-aspiring battlements covered with eternal snow, rises the Rio Grande, or as the Spaniards, who must have seen it first some time in May or June, 1538, called it the Brave River of the North. It rises in the great porphyritic formation of the San Juan, near Ouray and Lake City, and is fed by the immense snow masses that almost constantly cover that inhospitable country. It tears its way out like a young giant, grinding the rocks to pieces as it goes along, and becomes surcharged with their mineral con- stituents, identically the same that the waters of the Nile contain, and only adding an immense quantity of aluminoid detritus, which makes it muddier even than the Missouri itself. The similarity of the chemical constituents of the two kinds of water has often been noted by scientific travelers and experts. Both, after being allowed to settle, show a liquid of limpid purity, and of remarkably pleasant taste and wholesome character. But in their native turbulency, both are equally muddy, and leave the same thick sediment of slimy mud behind, after their waters recede from an overflow. This takes place with our Rio Grande usually in May and June, when the immense snow masses of the San Juan country begin to melt. Then the river plays some fantastic pranks, occasionally overflow- ing its banks from foot-hill to foot-hill. These amiable eccentricities will have to be curbed when the popula- tion of the valley becomes denser and more Americanized. Judicious rip-rapping at exposed angles, and a general planting of the banks with willows and Bermuda grass, and the building of the great canal, will prevent overflows except by means of the irrigating channels. 14 IRRIGATION. This annual rise of our Rio Grande begins at the very time when irrigation becomes necessary immediately when ready for the plough and the seed. It continues during June and July, and usually lasts long enough to tie on to the rainy season of July and August. The system of ditches is at present badly planned and very inade- quate for the purpose intended. The acequia madre which supplies Paso del Norte with water, is about as good a specimen of an irrigating ditch, planned and executed by Mexican labor only, as we can find in the valley. There is at present scarcely any systematic attempt along the whole course of the river, from the northern boundary of New Mexico down to where the canon country below the mouth of the Concho River com- mences, to construct suitable dams below the points where it is intended to take out acequias, and thus obtain a full head and a constant supply of water at a comparatively trifling expense. All these points will come to be better understood and executed after a while, when a pushing and energetic American population occupies the valley and converts its fertile but now unused lands into vineyards and orchards. The construction of a great irrigating canal, such as is in contempla- tion at the present time, demands naturally a large outlay of labor and material. To repay this outlay, all the waters so taken out must be used to advantage, and large tracts of land must thus become dependent upon the one great canal. No single farmer, and no single neighborhood, can undertake such a task. THE CANAL. This canal once constructed, every acre within the valley will become a vineyard, an orchard, or a meadow. All the idle water which flows wastefully to the Gulf, will be made to yield the greater part of its wealth of plant food which it holds in suspension, and we will no longer witness this great volume of water running past our doors while our ditches are dry, when they should be full to overflowing. The flow of water in the Rio Grande is ample for the needs of the valley. The opportunity is here offered to the capitalist to make a profit- able investment in an enterprise which will give a richer return than can be found elsewhere in this country. The cost of a canal a distance of fifty miles has been estimated to be approximately $250,000. There would be tributary to such a canal some 150,000 acres of valley land, ready for cultivation as soon as water can be obtained. Every acre of this land would then contribute to the canal company a yearly stipend of say one dollar per acre for water privileges, which would insure to the investors a net income of about $100,000 per annum. These facts and figures IRRIGATION. 15 can be verified by personal investigation. Capital is now, for the first time in years, beginning to look to the Southwest, and with restored confidence and abundant crops there is no point in the West which will command that attention which the valley of the Rio Grande will command in the near future. STATISTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC. If the reader is not deterred by a few dry facts and prosaic figures, he will find it profitable to follow me with due patience a little while longer. In a general way, the limit of agriculture, without irrigation, is indi- cated by the curve of 20 inches rainfall, and where the rainfall is equally distributed throughout the year, this limitation is without exception. But in certain districts the rainfall is concentrated in certain months, so as to produce a "rainy season," and whereever the temperature of the rainy season is adapted to the raising of crops, it is found that farming can be carried on with even a little less than 20 inches of annual rain. This, however, holds good only in certain portions of the United States. Nowhere in Texas are 20 inches of rain sufficient for agriculture, while in Dakota and Minnesota a much less amount is sufficient. The annual rainfall in El Paso, as ascertained by a series of observa- tions for a number of years (over twenty), has been found to be 8.53 inches. This precipitation is distributed generally in the following ratio : Spring, 0.43 inches ; summer, 3.49 inches : fall, 3.38 inches ; winter, 1.23 inches. Thus at a glance will be seen the utter hopelessness of carrying on agriculture of any kind in this section of country without artificial irrigation. In comparison with the 8.53 inches of annual rainfall at El Paso, we find 31.30 inches at San Antonio, 27.58 at New Braunfels, 33.52 at Austin, and 22.61 inches even at Fort Clark. At all of these places u dry farming" can be carried on, and ordinarily with profit and a reasonable share of certainty. But there will be occasional droughts or cloud-bursts, and sometimes a whole season's hard labor is lost to the patient husbandman, without a particle of fault on his part. But how