Imperial press and farmer., 1901-11-02
NEW YORK TRIBUNE,
 PHILADELPHIA PRESS
What Some of the Leading Eastern Publications Have to Say About the Imperial Canal System.

IlSneS an llluStrdte0 article under the heading of "RecIaiming a Desert" in which 1t says:
 The most remarkable series of irri- gation projects ever wrought out in the United States arc rapidly taking form on the Colorado River, the great est stream in the Southwest. which carries sufficient water to irrigate eight million acres of land. On the California side of the river is the vast Colorado desert. Across the interna- tional line in Mexico, on the Peninsu- la of Lower California, the desert ex- tends to the southwark On the east ern. or Arizona side of the river, the desert extends from Yuma to the head of the Gulf of California and be- yond.
 The greatest of the projects, how ever. is that of the Imperial Company which has entered upon the gigantic task of irrigating five hundred thou sand acres of land in San Diego coun- ty. California, and three hundred thousand acres in Mexico. and which delivered it's first water in June of the present year. The water now deliver able to the Imperial lands is sufficient for the irrigation of more than one hundred thousand acres, and to this additions are being made rapidly. Several hundred acres were planted in June, on the arrival of water. and fully fifty thousand acres will in all proba bility be sown in alfalfa during the coming winter
 Before water was placed on any of
 
 eighty thousand acres were filed on by settlers under the Desert Land Law and the Homestead Law, and hun dreds of people are now rushing into the country. anxious to take advan- tage of the opportunity held out by the government to acquire cheap land under the assurance of crops provided by irrigation"
 The Philadelphia Press, in it's issue of September 29. also publishes an il- lustrated article which is headed Nile Dams Surpassed by Greatest IT, rigation System in the World"
 From the present rush into the country. it seems probable that within a year or so, the entire area of irri- gable lands on the delta in the United States will be taken up. The average holdings will be about 100 acres, i'm plying that some 7500 families will find homes on the delta within the next year or two.
 But the popular conception of desert is wide expanse of light, drifting sands. That is erroneous. There may be drifts of sand, and there are here, in places, banks of sand otf at the edge of the desert. But the main floor. hundreds of thousands of acres in extent, is not of sand, but of a sed- imentary deposit, made by the great Colorado River, the shavings, as 1t were, produced by the carving out of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the grandest and most awful work of na- ture on the whole broad face of the old earth.
 The soil Is compact and teams driven over its unbroken surface trot along at ease. Yet 1t is easily worked, and chemists who have carefully an alyzed 1t declare that it even exceeds in fertility the famous soil of the del ta of the Nile. while the water of the river, used for irrigation, carries greater fertilizing properties than does the water of the Nile. and a we'll drilled to the depth of 5S5 feet was still in the same soil when 1t was abandoned"