Article September 11, 1902 Issue

A Miracle of Irrigation

The Century

If ever men worked miracles, they have worked them here in these western valleys. If ever something was created from nothing, these men have done it. Thirty-five years ago the Salt River Valley, into which we had driven, was all a parched desert, uninhabited save by a few lean Indians and two or three hardy traders, whom the sand and cactus crowded down close to the water of the river. It was a thousand miles from the nearest railroad an unknown, desolate, forbidding land, a part of the Great American Desert, which travelers said would never support human life. To-day the Salt River Valley contains a population of over twenty-five thousand. It has three cities, one, Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, having electric lights, an electric car line, good hotels, churches, and other buildings; residences surrounded by trees, lawns, and a wilderness of flowers. More than 125,000 acres of land round about are laid out in farms, highly cultivated, with orchards of oranges, almonds, olives, and figs, and grain and hay fields. Thousands of cattle feed in the rich meadows, and there are bees, chickens, ducks, and ostriches unnumbered. Richer soil than this once desert valley does not exist anywhere in the world except in other, both having the same soil, the same opportunities, but only one having water. Here when a man builds his fence of cottonwood posts, such is the soil and such the water, that the posts take root and grow into trees, so that the wire of many old fences is seen running through the center of large trees. Here a farmer rarely needs to use fertilizer, for the river comes in bearing rich silt and spreads it over his fields; and he may sometimes cut two or three or more crops a year from his alfalfa fields, and then pasture them during the winter winter which is in reality a continual spring. The Century.

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