Bisbee daily review., 1906-03-29
ARIZONA RESIDENT A GENERA.
 TON AGO.

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 ceived ty Secretary Van der Veer from Samuel A. Demarest of Carrollton, Car
 roll county, Miss, as follows:
 Dear Sir: see in the papers that
 the government is building a dam
 across Salt river for the purpose of
 furnishing water to irrigate the re-
 maining 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 it as being the best country
 to settle in that I know of.
 q lived in Arizona thirty years ago.
 thought then it was a good country
 and think so yet. One thing know
 is that irrigation Is more certain to
 produce crops than any other method
 of water supply. What desire to know is about the land that Is to be bene-
 fited by the dam; whether it is home
 stead land and how to proceed to get it if it is. If it Is not too much trouble
 to get 1t I 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
 land. as the people really want to
 know
 Big changes I.--ve been wrought in Arizona since the residence here of MT. Demarest, thirty years ago. but he
 has never forgotten the main fact.
 which is that Arizona has the finest eli 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 vii be acquired to moisten and fully reclaim the vast areas of
 land that 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 culti- yation, for Arizona is a big country. An area equal to some of the eastern states can be reclaimed and still leave IN 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 governmenut land for millions of acres
 of it here are still open to homestead, only there is no water for it. But the most favorable 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 at 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 ir this valley are yet at 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 to six
 r---S-ad dollars an acre.
 .. a..e 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 in few years should be worth anywhere from $1G0 to $500 per acre. And some
 acreage little further from the com
 mercial centers, on the outer edges of
 the reservoir district, yet equally as much entitled to water, can yet be had for from SIS 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 1t from the government at first hand. Know ing that the reclamation enterprise