Arizona weekly enterprise., 1890-05-03
Wants a Railroad.

Within Maricopa County, on the Salt and Gila rivers are considerably over one hundred thousand square miles of land surveyed and "under water" that is, can be irrigated from some one of the canals now built from one or the other of two rivers named. This vast area of land is capable of producing all the fruits, grains and grasses of the temperate and semi tropical attitudes. Oranges and lemons, the date, palm, the olive and the fig, the raisin and wine grape flourish in unexampled luxuriance, grow as though this were their native locality. And yet there is compara lively a small portion of these lands producing, for the simple reason that the farmer cannot get rid of the hay and grain that he can raise. The ex- port of the county is comparatively small, not because the farmer cannot prodnce anything, but because up to the present time he could not get it to market and have anything left for his work. Millions of tons of hay and grain would be produced within the
 
 nished transportation to market at rates that would leave the farmer a reasonable margin. Our location, however, is unfavorable to cheap trans portation. We. can possibly reach Los Angeles and some Southern Cali fornia towns, or Fl Paso and points in that direction; but we lack access to markets in other directions. The result of all this has been that set tiers are either producing merely enough to live, or are turning their at- tention to fruit raising or the hand ling of stock, and the general popular demand is for more railroad connec- tion in new directions, with new points where distances to market will be less and competition will hold rates down to moderate rate. As we have said before, the great lines of railroad across Arizona have been built solely to reach points foreign to Arizona, without any regard to the vast dor mant resources that the Territory contains; the result has been that railroad companies have been obliged to maintain long stretches of un- productive road, hundreds of miles in extent, while they might readily have been the most profitable and produc- tive sections of the entire line A new road across Arizona from east to west is demanded; one built through the great productive regions of Central Arizona for the special development of those regions, of giving to the world the products of land unexampled upon the American continent as to richness, variety and quantity of its semi-tropical fruits, nuts, hay and all their concomitant products. Such road could be readily built by the A. & P. or the s. P. and in either case should reach San Diego on the coast, and traverse the Gila and Salt river valleys in Arizona, passing eastward toward St. Johns, Apache county, opening up the immense lumber regions of the Mogollon mountains and the coal fields of Apache county and the coal and oil fields of western New Mexico. The capabilities of the region of country in Arizona that such road would open up are simply in estimable, and the whole country would spring instantly into a region of enormous production; it merely lies dormant to-day for want of such a road; the necessary preliminary de- velopment has long been made; the facts are established as to what can be done in this region, there is no guess work about it, and there is no | haS h the first prove a splendidly paying in- vestment. The country wants this road, there is room for it, and we be- lieve it will be built soon, by some body