Utopia, Reality, and Irrigation: The Plight of the Fort Lyon Canal Company in the Arkansas River Valley

Abstract

n the West, people's unwavering faith in their power to dominate nature and to transform environments produced unanticipated results. Particularly, westerners have not harvested the full bounty of commercial prosperity and moral progress foreseen by those who envisioned and developed irrigation. The Arkansas River Valley in southeastern Colorado is a good place to study the problems that arose from tilling an arid environment. In one respect, farmers practicing irrigation in this valley signify the success of the dream. Canal companies, like the Fort Lyon Company, were established through the arduous efforts of area farmers who had a vision of cooperation and prosperity, and today their operations fill the valley's air with humidity during the spring and summer, their alfalfa and corn fields abound, and their roadside markets offer a variety of melons and vegetables to passing motorists.' But a closer look reveals something far less than a garden paradise. Buildings in the towns look weathered, many farms appear dilapidated and some are abandoned; the soil in some fields appears pale with alkali and choked with weeds, and irrigators operate canals with ditches worn by more than a half century's use. What accounts for this growing wasteland in the midst of a garden? Scholars have explained the nature of irrigation in two ways. Some have built upon the thinking of William Smythe, the noted turn-of-the-twentieth-century promoter of the irrigation movement. Smythe saw irrigation resulting in cooperative capitalistic enterprises that, by employing the natural laws of God, compelled the arid lands to bear fruit. He had unbounded faith that material and moral progress flowed from this conquest of nature. More recently, Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson James Sherow is assistant professor of history, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.