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Show 36 Another project which helped give corporate management of water a bad name was that of the New Castle Reclamation Company. Based on a series of Desert Act land filings in the vast Escalante Desert in Southwestern Utah, the project built a hotel in the midst of mesquite flats, purchased steam tractors, and showed prospective buyers around the project in two of southern Utah's earliest and hardest driven Cadillacs. The company ultimately undertook an unsuccessful effort to divert water from the Santa Clara drainage of the Colorado Plateau to Pinto Creek which flowed into the Escalante Desert and Great Basin. While Salt Lake City and southern Utah investors lost heavily, a few of them hung onto their land claims until groundwater technology advanced sufficiently to make the Escalante Desert one of modern Utah's most productive agricultural areas. 52 Neither the mutual irrigation companies nor the for- profit promotions did much to rationalize the administration of Utah's water resources. The former perpetuated pioneer fragmentation, while the latter introduced a welter of contending claims and failed undertakings. But each in its way was part of the process by which Utah moved beyond the social and economic conditions of the self- contained pioneer environment Incorporation brought mutual companies into the order of the franchise laws and pointed to potential advantages of territorial water administration and unified territory- wide procedures of dealing with water resources. As much as the private property clause of the Act of 1880 contributed to the freewheeling speculation and promotion of the for- profit corporations, that development, too, was an effort to bring one of the elements of administration into a predictable control. The act also permitted individual initiative to play a much larger role it the water development process. The private efforts of individuals and corporate promoters, as well as the incorporation of mutual irrigation companies, were significant steps in the evolving structure of water administration. ' Yoik F. Jones and Evelyn K. Jones, Lehi Willard Jones 1854- 1947 ( Cedar City: Published Privately, 1972) pp 145- 163. |