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Show THE WESTERN WEB 37 crude engineering works to bring water to their little valleys and agricultural patches in the Southwest. More than a thousand years ago the desert in the area of the proposed Central Arizona Project was watered by man-made canals several miles in length. It seems doubtful that any single enemy destroyed these early civilizations. Mortal raiders, pestilence and drouth attacked them, but it appears most likely that the latter curse - no stranger to modern man - dealt the greater blows that drove them into oblivion. After that, the ruins of their communities stood in silence through the centuries, and the desert reclaimed their empty fields. The first white invaders found the Pueblo people cultivating their little corn and bean and melon patches along the valley of the upper Rio Grande, but those people were few in number. The American Indians were chiefly nomads, drifting in a boundless empire and living on its bounties as they found them. The American pioneers did not invent reclamation, but they brought to it the ingenuity and engineering ability that made it expand rapidly, and they made arid lands flourish with a regularity that assured a more stable economy. They settled first under the mountains that held the precipitation, and wherever possible they preserved water for times of drouth. West of the ninety-seventh meridian lay the Great Plains, and there also was the area of little rainfall. Seldom more than twenty inches of rain occurred in a single* year west of ninety-seven. There the tall grass of the midwestern prairies began to give way to the shorter buffalo and gramma grasses, and as one con- tinued westward the short grass became steadily more |