The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1900-06-28
FARMS IN ARIODESERTS
William B. Smythe'S Book
About Value of Irrigation.
ARID LANDS ARE BEST
LESSONS TAKEN FROM ANCIENT
CIVILIZATION.

Especially fortunate are those re-
gions of the earth which are arid,
where the rain and the dews never fall
and where the treeless. shrubless,
CRASHES plains stretch away in gray,
desolate wastes to the horizon with
never relieving splash of the green
of vegetation to rest the eye upon
That's the ideal spot for the farmer.
That's the place for him to plant his
potatoes and his corn; to SOW his wheat
and his oats. It is there he should put
out his plum and his cherry and his
apple trees. 1t is there he should go
to raise his oranges and his figs and
his pomegranates. Let him leave the
humid east if he wants to get rich. Let
him sell out his green pastures and
apple and peach trees, fruited deep and
go TO the bOunteOuS, sun baked reaches
or the great western deserts where the
rain falls upon neither the Just nor
the unjust, for it never falls at ALL
That's the farmers paradise. That's
his true Garden of Eden. That's the
spot where nature is so ticklish that
she will giggle with garden sass if he
so much as takes a hoe in his hand:
4A06A u1lAlA ilCl IdL SUES Shake IeeiD-
ing harvests into his barns if he so
much as gives her a jocose lab in the
side with a pillow share.
AS an abstract agricultural PROPOSE
ton this perhaps seems a little queer,
but William z. Smythe says it is so,
and he has written a book to prove it.
Read his Conquest of Arid America"
and however sceptical at the outset you
may have been as to the advantages of
deserts as farming lands, you will be
convinced that Mr.. Smythe at least has
made strong presentment of his case
1t is subject to which he has given
much time and much thought. He has
visited and studied practically all the
arid region of the continent. He has
made close investigation of all the col
onies that have been started in those
regions and has analysed the causes
which made some of them successful
and others fail. And in the advantages
of soil that has through long ages
been arid he has an abiding faith
Whatever causes worked disaster to
certain attempts made to create pros
porous centers of population in west
edn deserts, the soil itself, in his opin-
ion, was in no instance to blame.
Fortunate beyond all other parts of
the United States" he says, lin its eli
mate and in the surprising wealth of
its forests, it's quarries and its mines.
western America is yet more favored
in another element of it's physical
foundation. This is the substantial
aridity which prevails throughout its
vast proportions.
The anomaly that its foremost bless
ing should consist in the fact which
gave it a widespread reputation for
worthleSsness is interesting. but unim-
pOrtant. Nature frequently conceals
her raw materials of greatness, alike
in men and in counties, until time and
opportunity are ripe. In the aridity
of the west we shall find the true key
to its future Institutions Climate may
produce a healthy ace, and mineral
resources may enrich it, but the nat
ural conditions which determine the
character Of social and industrial or
ganization, and mould the customs and
habits OF men, are. the potent influences
which shape civilization. Hence we
shall see that ia any just estimate of
the relative worth Of western resources
the fact of aridity must be rated as
high above re value of forests and
mines as human progress is dearer
than money, and as the fate of a race
is more momentOus than the prosperi-
ty of individuals"
III COAA % a. - 10y II Ll-dttVl Lldl the
desert is TO be made to bloom, in fact
is now and has been this many years,
made to bloom. But the material pros
perity which is TO come and does come
from the irrigation system of farming
is but portion of the benefits to be de-
rived. The splendid health which come
from residence in the pure dry atmos-
phere will build up a race of fine
physique for one thing. Irrigation also
leads to refinement and intellectual de-
velopment, it seems. BY its very ma
ture and the necessities growing out of
it farmers will be brought into closer
contact with one another than is the
case in the humid regions where farms
OF hundreds Of acres are common. As
was pointed out by Professor Hiigard
of the agricultural department of the
University of California in a recent
article in the Atlantic Monthly. ''irri-
cation means heavy investments of
capital or labor, hence the cooperation
of many and the construction of per
manent works; il necessarily implies
the corelative existence of a stable
social organization, with protection for
property rights, and Gin view Of the
complexity of the problem of proper
and equitable distribution of syateT( an
advanced appreciation of the need and
dQF eiAAtp5ES VI AO-UDCl dAlNG VI dlliLd-
ton"
In other words, a community farm
ing irrigated landS should be more or
less a cooperative community in the
first place, and, in the second place, a
compact community. 1t has been found
by actual experience in the west that
farms of $50, 200 and 400 acres, which
are frequent in the east and keep the
farmers and their families far apart
from one another, cannot be operated
to advantage on the irrigating princi-
pie. At the very largest an irrigated
farm should not be of greater extent
than forty acres, whereas twenty acres
is about a fair average. The diversity
and certainty, as well as the greatly
increased size of crops that have been
watered Just when they need water
and left dry when water would be a
detrIment makes a farm of from TWEEN
~ to thirty acres equal in value to one
that ran into the hundreds of acres
and depended upon nature for its
moisture and thus ran all the risks OF
drought of deluge.
Thus in the irrigated farming coun-
try the people would live close togeth.
er and would have the resultant adj
vantages of constant social contact as
compared with more or less isolation
It would be the frequent result oil
working irrigated farms that the far
mers would all live together in a neal
little village where they could have al
the devices in the way of modern i'm.
provements that go with life in &
prosperous community to say nothing
of the religious. educational and socia
advantages of village over remote farm
life.
It is not too much to say that Mr.
Smythe pictures in his own mind the
now. desert west teeming with popula
ton, with thriving village after village
all strung together on trolley and tele
phone lines and all happy and con
tented with the happiness and content
ment which come from the certainty
of a profitable return for labor and {