Arizona republican., 1906-03-17
ARIZONA RESIDENT
 A GENERATION AGO
Writes to Inquire What the Valley
 is Like Now.

To live any length of time in Ari- zona, no matter when or where, is to acquire an infatuatiOn for the west that one can never entirely get rid of. This is well illustrated in a letter re- celVed by Secretary Van der Veer from samuel A. Demarest of Carrollton, Carroll county. Miss, as follows:
 Dear Sir: I see in the papers that the government is building a dam across Salt river for the purpose of furnishing water to irrigate the re- malning portion of the desert between the Salt and Gila rivers. I wish you would send me all the literature about the country, as several persons have asked me about it and I have recom- mended il as being the best country. to settle in that I know of.
 'I lived in Arizona thirty years ago thought then it was a good country and think so yet. One thing I know IS that irrigation is more certain to produce croOs than any other method or water supply. What I desire to know IS about the land that is to be bene- hted by the dam; whether it is home stead land and how to proceed to get 1t If it is. If it is not too much trouble to get it l can get quite a number of settlers to go out there and take it up. Please answer this letter and send me papers giving particulars about the Iand as the people really want to know
 Big changes have been wrought in Arizona since the residence here If MT. Demarest, thirty years ago. but he has never forgotten the main fact. which is that Arizona has the finest cli- mate and with water the finest soil in the world. Naturally he assumes that the land is still very largely desert and the storage reservoir is to reclaim ab- solutely desert land. Not being here he does not know that all the water that can be stored in the Roosevelt reservoir will be required to moisten and fully reclaim the vast areas of land, tbat are already titled and whose reclamation was first attempted by private enterprise. There will be des- ert lands in Arizona a hundred years from now, possibly a larger acreage of It, too than will then be under cuIti- vation. for Arizona is a big country An area equal to some of the eastern states can be reclaimed and still leave vast deserts of unwatered but equally as rich land for later consideration
 But the one point that should be set forth more fully in the advertising of this region, is that all the irrigation works now in progress here are for the watering of titled lands. Seeing this vast virgin area private capital for the last twenty years has been trying to reclaim it and has already done so to the extent that there has been located, proved. and title secured already to as much land as can be watered by the reservoir. Later pro- jects may reclaim additional areas of
 
 acres of it here are still open to homestead, only there is no water for it. But the most favorabiy situated lands will be watered first and they of course were the first selected by the settler and are now under title.
 But attention should ct the same time be called to the fact that com pared to their wonderful fertility and productivity. there is a vast acreage the market price of which is still at a poor mans figure. In fact no lands in this valley are yet at a final reclaimed price. A tract seldom commands more than a hundred dollars an acre while lands of similar nature and productiv- ity in California command four 10 six hundred dollars an acre.
 But the largest part of the Salt river valley lands is still purchasable at from S25 to $50 per acre. with clear title and reservoir rights; lands that Tn a few years should be worth anywhere from S100 to $500 per acre. And some acreage a little further from the com merciaI centers on the outer cages of the reservoir district yet equally ds much entitled to water. can yet be had for from $15 up.
 It is only natural that eastern peO- pie should imagine that the lands to be reclaimed here are government lands. The entire territory from Penn sylvania west was once government land and for the most part has been settled by men who secured it from the government at first hand. Know ing that the reclamation enterprise here is a government project and that some of the governments projects are for the reclamation of government lands, in fact most of them. it is q very reasonable conclusion. The first letter of an inquirer is nearly always about the cost of government land, and much time could be saved to both the land settler and the land buyed if the former in his advertising emphasized the fact from the beginning that any land seller and the land buyer if the from fifteen dollars an acre up. accord ing to what he wanted, as an initial i'm