STUDY OF CACTUS

OPUNTIA SPINOSIOR

Commonly called Staghorn Cactus

Arizona's Pioneer Irrigators

carried away barley and corn to the amount of nearly $2,000, driven off horses to the value of $500, and cattle to the value of over $6,000, for which none of the settlers ever received any reimbursement, the profits were not large."

In 1867 a picturesque, devil-may-care frontiersman named Jack Swilling, who had originally come to Arizona as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, started the first canal that had been dug in Salt River Valley since the days of the Ho-hokam. It headed about four miles east of Phoenix in the vicinity of Pueblo Grande, for parts of its distance followed the course of a prehistoric acequia. Ultimately it became the main supply ditch for the city of Phoenix, running along Van Buren street, and was filled in less than a decade ago.

The main object of Swilling and his friends was to produce hay for military posts. In this they were successful, but not with any great regularity or profit. Clearing the land of its thick mesquite and undergrowth jungle was a slow and laborious process, since they had no tractor power in those days but only mules and oxen. Their canal filled with silt from the muddy water, necessitating frequent cleaning. Their brush dams were continually being washed away. They experienced that alternating abundance and scarcity of water which was the curse of Salt River Valley until the building of the Roosevelt storage dam and a permanent concrete diversion dam at Granite Reef. Apaches were not as much of a menace as farther north and east, but at least one of their number was killed by Indians.

In William A. Bell's "New Tracks in North America," an account of a railroad survey trip in 1867-68, we find this paragraph: "I visited a farm in the San Pedro Valley before leaving Camp Grant. It was only four miles from the fort and yet all the crops that autumn had been cut down and carried off before they were ripe by the Arivaipa Apaches, and all that remained of the stock was a few pigs. Half a dozen soldiers were kept at this ranch all the year round to try and protect it, so the fort might be supplied with fresh farm produce; yet during three years this farm had changed hands thrice; the first man was killed, the second was scared away by the frequency of the attacks upon him, the third is now thoroughly disgusted and talks of settling among the Pimas on the Gila."

In reminiscences written for the Arizona Pioneer Historical Society, Charles A. Shibell vividly reported what happened to a farming venture of his near Sonoita. Parties of Mexicans were frequently attacked in the vicinity and one of Shibell's hired men was killed within 100 yards of the house. Stock was driven off "faster than we could replenish it . . . After harvesting the crop we abandoned the ranch and moved to Tubac."

Farm workers and herders all carried rifles as a matter of habit and necessity. While plowing, a man would often have a rifle in a boot attached to the plow beam, and a revolver belted to his waist. Every farm house not within easy reach of a stockade was as much a fort as a residence.

First Yankees to invade Arizona as homeseekers, and not with the intent of moving on as soon as a stake could be accumulated, were the Latter-day Saints, or "Mormons." Brigham Young, who had turned a deaf ear to the siren song of California gold and bade his people to settle as farmers on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake, sent many a colony into the new territory to the south. Under church discipline, fired by religious zeal as well as the home-making instinct, the Mormons were better co-operators than most pioneers, their achievements more lasting. All over Arizona we find the traces of abandoned irrigation enterprises, but few of these were initiated by Mormons.

Consider the handicaps of the first L. D. S. colony in Upper Gila Valley, which arrived in 1879. Like the settlers on the Verde, they lacked a surveyor. Somehow they contrived, without serious error, to run their lines with a compass, a plumb bob and a saw horse. Then they plowed the route of the canal with a clumsy old-fashioned plow, pulled by three yoke of oxen. A "lizard" was made by cutting down a forked cottonwood tree and nailing boards to each of the large limbs that formed a V. This was heavily loaded with stones and dragged along the plowed ground, with the result that most of the loosened earth was pushed out. The plowing and "lizard" process were repeated and the ditch dug the rest of the way down to grade with shovels and slip scrapers. These scrapers were box-like contrivances of cottonwood boards, shod at the front end with a piece of iron such as an old wagon tire.

These details give but a hint of the trying conditions under which the canal was dug, the land cleared and leveled and sown to crops. Food was scarce and there was the ever-present dread of Indians.

Of the founding of another Gila Valley colony, one of the L. D. S. historians has written: "In 1881 a small group of Mormon settlers arrived at Eden. They built bowers of brush under which they rolled their covered wagons, to secure better protection from the pitiless Arizona sun, and had no other home for weeks. In 1882, eight families were living in a little stockade fort that enclosed a half acre of land near the river. As soon as these settlers arrived they began digging an irrigation ditch from the river. At times there would be only one meal a day, and that a meagre one. The men could scarcely summon enough strength to continue their work."

Thanks to General Crook and the resistance of the settlers themselves, whose numbers were growing steadily, the Apaches were gradually subdued. But this did not end the woes of the irrigators. Floods were forever destroying their canal heads and their dams. It was nothing unusual for a river to shift and leave an intake half a mile away from the stream. "Whisker moss" and other plants flourished in the canals, causing the commonly sluggish current to drop its load of silt and choke the channel.

Most of the earlier canal systems were maintained on a somewhat loose co-operative basis by the farmers they served. All were supposed to share equally in the labor of keeping the canal and dam in service, contribute cash for lumber and other materials that had to be bought. It was inevitable that disputes should frequently arise over division of the labor and division of the water.

Let me tell you what happened every year down on the lower Gila, where I spent my boyhood. Usually there was plenty of water in winter and early spring, when the crops were planted. There might be a period of shortage in May and June, until the summer rains came. For a few hours, or even days, the canal would carry all the water everybody could use. Then it would go dry suddenly the dam was out again. Or perhaps a flash flood in an arroyo had cut the ditch in two. With the river a muddy torrent, there was no moisture for the land.Each farmer would haul several barrels of water from the river for the family to drink while he was away for the water from our shallow "dug" wells was too salty for human use. He would load his wagon with a "grub box," a plow, slip scraper, shovels and axes for brush cutting, and drive away to join his neighbors in repairing the damage.

If the break could be mended or the dam replaced before the river went dry, we would have a crop that year. If not, the sorghum and alfalfa and wheat wouldwither, as well as our carefully tended garden truck and melons.

Corporations entered the business of supplying water to farmers, as public utilities but without the regulation to which utilities are subject today. They took over and consolidated many small canals, built large ones at great expense - and in every case went bankrupt. Their dams of lumber and boulders and earth offered little more resistance than the brush obstructions of the farmers to roaring freshets of the Salt and Gila. They had just as much trouble with ar-royos. And a company, with its treasury exhausted, could restore service even less expeditiously than a group of farm-ers whose treasury was their ability to work hard in the face of repeated dis-couragement.

An example is the Florence Canal Company, organized in 1887 to absorb several old canals in Casa Grande Valley. This corporation had a capital stock of $500,000, sold "water rights" for 52,160 acres at $3 to $15 an acre. Such a right entitled the holder only to buy water at an annual charge. Still the capital was insufficient and a $300,000 bond issue was floated. The bondholders foreclosed in 1893, organized a new company and sold an issue of $600,000. In 1900 the property was sold for taxes; a receiver was appointed in 1907; there was another tax sale in 1913; operation continued under receivership clear up to 1924, when Congress voted funds to construct Coolidge Dam and purchase the canal rights for the co-operative San Carlos Irrigation & Drain-age District.

In the meantime there had been incessant litigation with creditors and with suffering farmers who failed to receive the water they paid for. Some of them withdrew and built another canal. The various companies were financially powerless to keep the system going on any efficient basis. If the farmers had been able to pay several times as much, they still could not have kept the canal clean and a dam across the river. Nor could they have replaced the water diverted by settlers above, which steadily depleted the flow.

The truth is that large-scale irrigation in Arizona is possible only because of concrete's indestructibility, and under co-operative, intelligently managed associations of land owners such as we have in Salt River, Casa Grande and Buckeye Valleys. An irrigation system must be owned by those whom it serves. The conception of a corporation supplying irrigation water to farms, the same as domestic water to urban homes, is fundamentally wrong. Many tragic mistakes were made before this lesson was learned.

History of the Florence Canal Company is duplicated, with only minor variations, by that of many companies which tried to operate projects in other parts of Southern Arizona. An exasperated group of farmers once paralleled the Grand Canal, in Salt River Valley, with their "Appropriators Ditch." In Buckeye Valley the same thing happened, only a truce was reached with the old canal owners before the new one was completed. The farmers who took their own teams and strength, and attempted to bring water to their parched lands, underwent hardships scarcely less trying than those of the Mormons on the upper Gila or the "hot-headed boys" of the Verde.

"Water stealing" long approached the proportions of a major industry. Farmers still carried rifles, not to protect themselves from Apaches but to protect their water. Many a settler, suspicious of his neighbors, sat with loaded gun by his headgate until his "run" was over. Early court records abound with cases of farmers accused of forcing locks, prying open gates, and taking a few precious inches of water to which they were not entitled. Disputes often resulted in shootings, sometimes in killings. Those living on the lower reaches of a canal always believed that those above them got more than their share, which often was true. With a supply that might not be equal to the needs of a fourth of his patrons, the zanjero who could parcel it out in a manner satisfactory to everyone was rare indeed.How court decrees finally apportioned water rights on a basis of prior use, and how those decrees are enforced, is a long, long story in itself. They were not handed down until after the turn of the century, when they helped to lay the foundation for the modern era of Arizona irrigation..

Man-Made Wonders of Arizona

(Continued from Page 13)of sublime mountain gorges and hot dry dessert lands filled with tremendous obstacles. No doubt Arizona is best known for its scenic attractions such as the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, amazing Petrified Forest, and the fascinating dessert regions, but it is slowly becoming a land where man has combined with or competed with nature in producing some astonishing monumental structures.

Foremost among Arizona's recent man-made wonders is the ponderous Boulder Dam, a mass of concrete, steel, and machinery that was wedged, foot by foot, into a deep narrow ragged canyon by stupendous will and effort. Here in northwestern Arizona the ingenuity of man has created a barrier 727 feet tall, 1282 feet wide, and 660 feet thick at the base sufficient to throttle the terrible rage of the mighty Colorado.

Inside the structure of the dam are hundreds of rooms, halls with elevators, and work shops which remind one of a giant office building. It seems almost unbelievable that behind this mountainous structure there is a body of water accumulating that will reach over 125 miles in length and over 500 feet deep. When man built an obstruction in an almost impossible desert region large and powerful enough to create a lake almost as large as Lake Champlain, largest in the state of New York, he comes near to competing with nature. Not only is Boulder Dam the largest dam in the world, a suitable man-made wonder, but it is a fitting monument to man's growing power and ingenuity to be located adjacent the Grand Canyon, nanature's masterpiece. This wonderful dam would still be the greatest even if the structure could be pushed over on its down stream side. The base of the dam would then be raised vertically to 660 feet which no other dam surpasses in height.

Another man-made structure built across the upper part of the Grand Canyon in a giant rock torn region is Navajo Bridge. It resembles a small band stretching across an immense gulf surrounded by drab barrenness, but it is 834 feet long and connects the sheer walls of the deep canyon at its narrowest. At the lowest water level the bridge stands 467 feet above the stream's edge, the highest bridge above water in the world. Like Boulder Dam the preparation and transportation of materials was a tremendous job in itself. Flagstaff is over 125 miles from Navajo Bridge, and every bit of structure had to be hauled this distance over the rough dry hot Painted Desert country on frightful roads. In the case of the Boulder Dam railways and roads had to be constructed before work could actually begin on the dam.

One of the most remarkable man-made regions anywhere is the Salt River Valley in central Arizona. Originally this vast level valley was covered with uninviting, thorny cactus and strange desert trees, surrounded by tall bare mountains with a discouragingly dry hot summer climate. This dreadfully unfriendly desert was made to bloom and flourish like a semi-tropical garden to serve man.

When the Roosevelt Dam was built and a lesser chain of three dams completed on the Salt River in the tall desert mountains 45 to 90 miles from the capital city, large lakes were stored in great mountain basins. With this liquid gold man developed a thriving community. By doling out the waters from snowcapped peaks locked behind huge barriers of stone, concrete, and steel, man has built and created in addition to the dams a great city. Now on the desert, instead of weird cactus, great silent spaces, extreme heat and desert dryness, are found large orange groves, large lettuce and melon fields, beautiful homes, transportation facilities, and tall business structures with over 110,00 people scattered over the valley. Because of a most successful irrigation project, cities, ranches, and a southwest civilization have sprung up on a desert waste land in slightly more than a quarter of a century.

Montezuma's Castle

To create this man-made empire man has not only discovered the water sources in the mountains and a method of storing this liquid wealth, but he has found greater water supplies handy beneath the burning rocks and soil of the desert, and by constructing a system of pumps and a power plant his water supply for the future is assured.

There are other intriguing man-made monuments in Arizona. Some of them white men had built in the distant desert region before 1700. These are the mellowed missions of Tumacacori near Nogales and San Xavier near Tucson. These grand old cathederals have stood the test of time and wear remarkably, and the things for which they were built have been the most enduring works of the white man in the Southwest, for they brought religion, civilizing influences. agriculture, and culture to thousands of natives whose lives are still being influenced today. Other man-made objects to create ad-miration and keen interest for thousands of modern people are the ancient ruins of primitive man, especially the cliff ruins stuck high upon the side of a precipitous cliff. How these prehistoric savages with only stone tools, their hands, and fire engineered the construction of such imposing dwellings in which to live and seek protection from enemies and the weather is sufficient cause for serious speculation on the part of educated men today. To think that these simple na-tives had to make baskets from desert grasses and plants for containers to carry the mud and rock on their backs and scale these dangerous walls to build a home is almost unbelievable. Today to build a dam or tall building, the engineer has every machine and tool and piece of equipment at his command to construct his job, but the aborigines had to hew cedar logs for beams and supports with stone axes and fire. For ceilings and walls they used weeds and willows and adobe and stone. They knew nothing of mathematics or building plans and used only the eye for a level and very thick walls at the base for strength. Their blue prints were the trial and error method of experience. Their "drawing paper" was granite stone surface upon which they cut their drawings and de-signs. Some of these structures in Ari-zona have stood since 300 to 400 B. C. as a monument to early man's struggles.

There are a number of structures of the white man in this state that have not stood the test of the destructive forces of time and erosion. The Southwest has several old communities, old forts, old ranch buildings dating back to only 1850 that have been failures, giving up the ghost long ago to the desert and the elements.

One of these relics is old Charleston that stood on the banks of the San Pedro nine miles from historic Tombstone. Charleston, built in 1880, had several hundred people living in adobe brick homes when it was a boom silver town. It was a tough old wild west settlement. Here Curley Bill, Arizona's most famous outlaw, and his gang made their quarters. It was also the location for the Tomb-stone Milling Company which handled the rich silver ore from the Tombstone hills. The desolation of equipment, furnaces, machinery, buildings once offices and homes scattered over the hillside near the old town site is a dreadfully tragic scar on civilization and man's enterprise. Galeyville on Turkey Creek twenty miles northeast of Tombstone has shared a similar fate. In Charleston and Galeyville only a few mud heaps and staggering mud walls remain among the cactus and mesquite thickets as a sad reminder of man's building venture in the desert.

Tombstone, itself a famous monument of man's hands, built on the bare desert hillside, was the most glamorous wild west mining town. Starting from mesquite and cactus and rocks and no water in 1879, it had by 1881 an amazing population of over 10,000. Today with its Bird Cage Theater, Crystal Palace Bar, Boot Hill cemetery, it is an example of man's competition with nature that failed. With the exception of several hundred people still living in a quiet village with its memories and relics, the mines, the shafts, and equipment are being slowly reclaimed by the desert again.

There are still rich ores beneath those hills, but nature decreed that man should be defeated, and strange to say this defeat was brought by underground waters flooding the mines and driving out the progress and might of man. Water, the scarcity of which makes the surrounding region a vast desert, has become the master in this mining venture of man.