SAGA OF THE WELLTON-MOHAWK

SAGA OF THE WELLTON MOHAWK PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMIL EGER, JR.

The fight for the Wellton-Mohawk was a good one, a real rip-snorter, in what we have come to call the "American Tradition." On one side were men of the law, men of the soil, men of science. On the other were the Nature Twins-Mother and Human, with their myriad relationsthe wind, the dust, the floods, the salt, despair, discouragement and other men. It wasn't a short engagement. It won't be an easy peace. But the men of the Wellton-Mohawk have won the war and, for the present, we are at liberty to sit and reflect; see and look ahead. It is time for the pause during which we write the history and set down the plans for the future.

In the history of the Wellton-Mohawk we will study the efforts of Hugo Farmer, of the law; R. H. McElhaney, of the soil; Murray Miller of the sciences. To say that these men were alone in their categories of effort would do a grave injustice to hundreds of others who gave of their time, their money, even their physical well-being, that the Wellton-Mohawk division of the Gila Project could be readied to double the existing productive acres of the great southern Yuma County agricultural empire.

Interest in the area by the white man saw its beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century when the famed Butterfield stageline began to section the commercial pie of the southwest with its knives of straining horses and whirring-wheeled "mudwagons." The Butterfield needed grain, barley and melons. The white man went with his markets.

Full scale settlement didn't come until early in 1870, however, but by 1875 several homestead filings were on record. Soon there were 15,000 acres under cultivation. The community took form and the look of the pioneer began to fade from the faces of those who changed their status from adventurer to citizen. There was always a fiddler for dancing and Sunday became the seventh day rather than one of seven. Practically all business was done in Yuma, one and a half days by buckboard to the west.

But Mother Nature was not idle all this time. While the settlers were knitting themselves into a community, the rains and snows were gathering on far off mountain tops and saturating the higher grounds. In 1891 the Mother of All struck at the plans to leash her to planned productivity and sent the raging torrents down the Gila. The river spilled itself over the region in one of the greatest floods on record. So great was its force that the river channel itself was moved a mile and a half from its course. Gravity flow irrigation became impossible.

By 1900 swirls of dust spun on a deserted land. Team after team had been hitched to buckboard after buckboard, heaped high with all the worldly goods of those who had come to conquer and had lost.

But the way of the pioneer is to fight another day. Back came some of the same who had left and they were joined by others. The land was still there. It needed only two things-men to work it and water for its thirst. They could work. They would get water. What they couldn't get from atop the ground they would get from below it. They sunk wells and tapped the ground water and they were farming again, in quantity economically sound.

But Nature wasn't beaten. She reduced the flood flows which had recharged and sweetened the underground water. Soon the tell-tale white of the mineral salt came upon the land and its people asked themselves, "How long before we have to pack up and leave for good?"

And here we must introduce Hugo Farmer, of the law. When the men of the Yuma Valley wanted to include the Yuma Mesa lands in their project they had sent for Hugo. He carried their plea to Washington and bargained it into reality.

But now the men of the Valley looked beyond the Mesa and saw the plight of the men of the WelltonMohawk. What gain, they asked themselves, if we have the Mesa but lose the productivity of Wellton-Mohawk? Hugo Farmer was told to consult plane schedules again. What had been done in Washington, Hugo would have to do again. He would take back with him a plan for changing the boundaries of the Mesa Project to include the WelltonMohawk. Then fresh water could be delivered where salt was being delivered now.

So "Old Gila Project," as Hugo was referred to in more than one Senator's office, packed his toothbrush alongside bottles of salty water samples and prepared to set up shop in the Washington hotel he'd found which wouldn't dig too deeply into the Wellton-Mohawk expense account.

In early 1941 a Senate Appropriations Committee suggested the feasibility of the boundary change and the inclusion of Wellton-Mohawk. Thus both the Yuma Mesa and Wellton-Mohawk were one, projectwise!

Hugo Farmer began the legal work which would put the plans for the project object into action. That work was almost completed when another date famous in American history showed up on the calendar pads-December 7, 1941.

We were at war! The Gila Project was halted now as surely as though every member of Congress had shouted "Nay" at the roll call.

But Hugo Farmer and the men of Yuma and the Wellton-Mohawk weren't to be stopped. If a war effort could halt a project the war effort could also bring about its acceptance. Hugo returned to Washington-ready for battle again, this time encouraged further by the need of the whole country rather than just a part of it.

And his arguments were convincing. A Senate committee, a few weeks later, recommended an appropriation of a million and a quarter dollars to finish the canals on the Mesa Division, clearing the way for work on relief for the Wellton-Mohawk Division.

Actually the plight of the Wellton-Mohawk farmers at this time wasn't as serious as it had been. Floods in the spring of 1941 had covered the land and much of the

surface salt had been washed away. But they weren't lulling themselves into a false sense of security. There was still much of the land which remained useless and they knew they couldn't hope for clear ground water for long. The flood was a rare one and you can't build a home and raise a family on a schedule of crops two years out of ten, or fifteen, or twenty.

"That's why," says R. H. McElhaney, "we were so happy over what Hugo Farmer had done and was doing. His work gave us the sure knowledge that something could be done. So we decided to redouble our efforts in helping him do it."

Of course there weren't as many to lend a helping hand as there once were. Three out of four of the WelltonMohawk families had surrendered to the elements. "You just can't stand there and watch your land shrink away to nothing. You move in and stake everything you have because you know the land's good. Finally you get to where you start making enough so that your wife can dress as she should, the kids can look forward to an education and you can see a little vacation next year maybe. Then one morning you wake up, look out the window and see the salt lying on the ground like spilled white paint. Then every morning after that the first thing you do is go to that window and you see more and more and more white.

"That's when you pack up and leave it to the dust, the heat and the salt."

"Yes," says McElhaney, his eyes cold with remembering, "and I didn't blame them when they said that. I even helped some of them move. But there were some of us who decided to dig in our heels and hold. Lots of folks said we were foolish. Some used even stronger language than that. And believe me, there were times during the last few years when I was close to admitting to everything they said I was."

But the "some of us" did dig in their heels and they did hold. And when they AND Hugo Farmer assaulted Washington something had to go. It was Washington that "went."

There were powerful forces in opposition to the giving of precious water to the Wellton-Mohawk. They had courtroom men, skilled in the uses of legal language, wise in the ways of lobbying and the twisted phrase. And they had a seemingly limitless supply of money.

But the Wellton-Mohawk men had their faith and the faith of their neighbors. More than one plea went from the Wellton-Mohawk men to their friends in Yuma for plane fare money to send McElhaney and others back to testify before congressional committees. And the power of the Wellton-Mohawk can be seen in just one of the answers to those pleas-Yuma's senior and junior chambers of commerce raised $4,000 in four minutes one afternoon to send men back to testify. And it was that testimony which turned the tide. Seated on one side of the table at the congressional hearings were the nattily-dressed, conference-polish lawyers and lobbyists of the opposition pleading for their fees. On the Wellton-Mohawk side were simply-dressed, calloused-handed farmers, pleading for their lives.

Ask anyone who was there. Ask him the effect on those elected representatives of the people when the committee chairman spoke into his microphone and was answered . . .

On July 30, 1947, President Harry S. Truman set his name to a document which assured the victory. The Gila Bill was law. Wellton-Mohawk would live!

The feeling back home when the news reached Yuma can be expressed in the fact that The Yuma Daily Sun dug around in its shop and came up with the largest type the foreman could find to headline the story; it could be expressed in the hat tossing jubilation in the Chamber of Commerce office, it could be expressed in the fact that there wasn't a frown in town for twenty-four hours.

But perhaps it would be best expressed by a telephone conversation when someone called a Mohawk Valley woman who had seen her 300 acres shrink to 73 and told her the news. She answered with a sob, "Thank God. How wonderful for our children."

But now to the sciences. The surveying, the testing, the planning. Reams of paper, gallons of ink. Photographs, blueprints, schematic drawings. Pick and shovel, bulldozers, excavations. Perspiration on the brows of men with loosened ties; sweat on the foreheads of men without ties.

These are the men "of the Bureau," a much maligned, much appropriated, much cursed, much praised branch of our Federal government which takes orders from the Department of the Interior and gets advice from everyone who pays taxes.

Without it the Wellton-Mohawk could never be, could

Never have been. With it, the Wellton-Mohawk has something on which to lay the blame when the million and one little things go wrong.

The Bureau's Murray Miller has an imposing title. If you were to write him you would address the envelope to the District Manager, Lower Colorado River District, Bureau of Reclamation, Post Office Building, Yuma, Arizona. And if your idea of a "government man" is one colored by the news reports of recent years you'd better save disappointment and write, don't call in person. Murray Miller, you see, smokes no long cigars, paid full price for his home freezer and Mrs. Miller doesn't have a mink coat. He is one of the majority of government men. He does his job, pays his taxes, follows the fortunes of the Bureau of Reclamation bowling team via the sport page of The Yuma DailySun and is always promising to go fishing with good friend Marcel Forman, but never gets the time to do it.

As in the other two branches of the three-pronged effort which went to make the Wellton-Mohawk, Murray Miller wasn't alone in the Bureau's efforts. And he's the first to bring out the point. He has a list of names a yard long imprinted on his mind in gold letters, men and women whose united efforts made it possible for the Bureau to do its share.

But just as our pen must punctuate our history with the question mark of Hugo Farmer and the exclamation point of R. H. McElhaney, so must we use the period of Murray Miller.

Of course, we can't study the building of the Wellton-Mohawk canal with the same detail as we studied its fight.

The average reader can understand Senate cloakroom maneuvering and the battle of a group against adversity. But comprehending the technicalities of major construction is only for the few.

However, one can look and marvel. Imagine, if you will, looking out across a tableland of sand, marked here and there with clumps of thin, gnarled fingers of spindly growth. That tableland is a thin top crust covering more sand, which has the consistency of thickened water. Then imagine, if you will, going over blueprints which tell you you must scoop out ditches in that mass and line them so that they will stay scooped out to carry water. Then imagine, if you will, facing the prospect of building 87 miles of that canal and three pumping plants which will lift the water from low spots to high ones so that gravity flow can be maintained over an area which varies from 150 feet to 350 feet in elevation. Murray Miller and the Bureau have done it. $42,000,000 worth.

Ride along it some day. The canals are changing to a dull gray now that the bone-white protective covering has been absorbed. But it's an awe-inspiring sight. Mile after mile with the water lapping against its sides. One section of just slightly less than four miles in length is absolutely the shortest distance between its beginning and end, it's that straight. (They told Murray it couldn't be done but the proof that it could lies in the fact that it's on the books as some sort of a world's record.) At a certain point on your tour you'll come to a mass of concrete you'll probably pass right by as being just like several others you've seen. But it isn't. It's one of the reasons that list of Murray's is so long, the list of those who helped without even being on the scene. Estimates ear-marked an astronomical yardage of concrete at this stress point and plans were made to pour it. Murray happened to be in Denver going over the plans and mentioned the amount suggested. A laboratory technician got a gleam in his eye and went to work. A ream of mathematical calcula-tions later the technician built an exact replica of the point, to scale, and turned a scaled flow of water pressure against the model. The model held. Result-estimates revised to less than half the amount of concrete originally scheduled for pouring.

Your tour will also take you to the pumping plants, rectangular structures of concrete, housing electric motors operating pumps which will dwarf you even if you are five inches taller than your father who "was always known as a big man." The whirr of the motors and the thumping, pumping of water being lifted as much as 85 feet; liter-ally tens of thousands of tiny wires, radio tubes, relays, switches; lights flashing, needles twisting and turning against calibrated faces telling stories only years of training and education would allow you to read. And then you hear that the plans call for a central station, no larger than your master bedroom, from which these pumps and others will be controlled by the flicking of switches, the reading of meters. It doesn't only cause you to marvel at men, it makes you humble before the capabilities of man.

And you don't need the awesome power of the massive, intricate things to make you marvel. You'll find it in the small things too. For instance, you'll notice slight humps in the canals as they approach the pumping plants. Why are they there to interrupt the even line of the concrete? They are there to counteract the bores-products of water, not man. Ever notice the slight "bump" sound when you close the tap on the kitchen faucet? It's caused by the sudden halt of the water flow and the resulting energy built up as the water is forced back through the pipe. Much the same thing happens in a canal when the pumps shut off. The canal water slams against the closed gates and

starts to back up causing waves, or bores. You can imagine the tremendous force this backing water would have as it slammed against the first gate it reached behind the pumping plant. Bureau mathematicians brought out their pencils, their papers and their slide rules and measured the bores for each pumping plant in the canal system. Then they recommended the size of those slight humps and a sufficient number of them to waste the energy of the return-ing bore so that when the water reached the gate in its backing up process it would do so with a mere slap of lapping water.

Of course this phase of the Wellton-Mohawk victory had its heartaches too. And it will have more of them. Like the time a rare but very severe rain storm washed a section of canal into itself and there came the agonizing struggle to clean out, dig again, line again and still keep within the schedule. And there was the fighting, begging, worrying over procurement of materials.

But those are parts in the whole of the game, pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of effort toward a purpose. The Bureau of Reclamation has done its part. It too can feel pride of accomplishment in the smiles of the Wellton-Mohawk men, in the railroad cars which will one day take the fruits of the land and the labor to the markets of the world.

But now, what of the future? What will result from this $42,000,000 expenditure? Is it worth it?

Who will pay for it?

Frankly, if you are a taxpayer (and who isn't) you have paid for it already. But don't sit right down and dash off a "how come" letter to your congressman-you will be repaid a hundred times over. In fact, if you want to get downright technical, it will probably be one of the best investments you ever made.

You loaned, through your government, $42,000,000. Your collateral is 75,000 acres of land nobody would have given you very much for a few years back. And you won't be repaid in full for 60 years. Oh yes, you get no interest either.

How can that be a good investment? Why did yourgovernment enter into such a deal for the project? The answer is not only simple-it's profitable. The Wellton-Mohawk will create a vast source of new wealth, great enough so that excise and income taxes, alone, which will be paid on its products will be many, many times greater than the original $42,000,000 (which incidentally will be repaid by water and construction costs on a per acre basis). And this new wealth will not come from the farms alone. Railroad companies will add new tracks and new rolling stock to transport the Wellton-Mohawk production to market. New highways will be built. New service stations, markets, theatres, real estate offices, farm equipment outlets, construction firms will come. And with their coming new people will come to man the trains, build the roads, pump the gasoline, sell groceries, cut meat, take tickets, operate movie projectors, trade real estate, sell tractors and build homes. That will mean more stores, more services. And the economic cycle will continue until the theoretic statistic of four and a third people in town for each person on the farm is a reality.

government enter into such a deal for the project? The answer is not only simple-it's profitable. The Wellton-Mohawk will create a vast source of new wealth, great enough so that excise and income taxes, alone, which will be paid on its products will be many, many times greater than the original $42,000,000 (which incidentally will be repaid by water and construction costs on a per acre basis). And this new wealth will not come from the farms alone. Railroad companies will add new tracks and new rolling stock to transport the Wellton-Mohawk production to market. New highways will be built. New service stations, markets, theatres, real estate offices, farm equipment outlets, construction firms will come. And with their coming new people will come to man the trains, build the roads, pump the gasoline, sell groceries, cut meat, take tickets, operate movie projectors, trade real estate, sell tractors and build homes. That will mean more stores, more services. And the economic cycle will continue until the theoretic statistic of four and a third people in town for each person on the farm is a reality.

That is created wealth. That is taxable.

And there is another reason for the government's expressing its pleasure in Wellton-Mohawk with a financial smile. The population of the U.S.A. is increasing by 2,500,000 a year and, though it be a little known fact, the population is fast overtaking the country's food producing capacity. Wellton-Mohawk can add 75,000 acres to the food production side of the ledger.

Of course Washington isn't concerned only with taxes and food which will come out of the project. The government is also keeping a fatherly eye on what goes into it, and who. It wants family sized farms and erected a large sign, by way of wording in the contract, which states clearly, "Speculators Not Wanted." After the contract has been in effect ten years no one individual may own more than 160 acres of Wellton-Mohawk land, no man and wife may own more than 320 acres. And 19,000 of the 75,000 acres are being reserved for 160 acre veterans' homesteading units. So you see, your investment has a purpose, is being protected and its benefits will go toward good for the greatest number. As for the timing on actual production, the first 10,000 acres turned from sandy brownish-yellow to green in 1952. By the end of 1953 there should be 25,000 acres in production and by 1960 all 75,000 acres should be vying for greatest yields. And by that time estimates place the population of the area at close to 30,000. Three towns are expected to be centers of that population-Wellton, Roll and New Tacna.

There are fine, new schools coming too. And don't mention Wellton-Mohawk to the Yuma manager of the Mountain States Telephone Company. He's been subjected to the full treatment of "persuasion" which turned the trick in the U.S. Congress. Needless to say phone service installation is sailing right along.

There is a housing housing project abuilding now to house employees of the new lumber yard, farm equipment company, real estate office, service stations and the enlarged railroad facilities already in evidence. And, the efforts of people who never heard the name "Wellton" a couple of years ago to buy enough land to call the place "home" makes one think of stories he read about gold strikes.

So, your investment, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, is pretty safe. And if you need any more assurance just take a little jaunt through Wellton-Mohawk and watch its people. They look just like any other people, of course. And they act like other people too. But if you look close you'll see a difference. It's in their eyes. They hold faith AND determination. Eyes like that must have shown the way to those who sat the seats of the Conestoga Wagons or guided the hands which shaped the square pegs to be driven as wedging in the building of log cabins. And you'll see something else in their eyes now that the water has come. It's a look which represents another conquest over toil and disappointment and heartbreak; a realization of another in a long line of dreams; another step toward a goal they really hope never to reach, for, in reaching it, they will have lost their reason for dreaming.