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Show 646 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Lands of the Arid Region," wherein he said that of the nearly one billion acres of arid lands in the United States "nearly 120,000,000 acres can be irrigated when all such waters are used." Of this large amount he estimated that 100 million could be irrigated at a cost of $10 per acre, including all the construction work involved in building dams, reservoirs, canals and irrigation ditches. Powell was well aware of the many problems that would arise from irrigating lands-problems which its advocates did not face for many years. These included the need for draining irrigated land, the losses of reservoir water from evaporation, the need for many huge and even more small reservoirs, and the desirability of preventing the irrigable land from being monopolized by speculators. All these were ably discussed in the article.27 Powell was quoted in Congress on July 26, 1890, as saying that 100 million acres could-be irrigated, of which 10 million acres were then being watered and that works were under way to irrigate an additional 2 million acres. On another occasion Powell said that 35 million acres in Montana alone were irrigable but perhaps he did not intend to convey the impression that there was sufficient water available for this land. He thought that half the irrigable land had already passed into private hands, "mainly . . . for speculative purposes, for a rise in the value of the lands." Later, however, he took a more realistic position, reducing the amount of land that could be irrigated with known water sources by nearly two-thirds.28 To gain a 27 Century Magazine, XXXIX (March 1890), 766-76. 18 Powell's acceptance for a time of 100 million acres as the quantity that could be irrigated doubtless had a major part in leading the public generally to accept this figure. Davison, "The Leadership of the Reclamation Movement," pp. 114 ff.; Cong. Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., July 26, 1890, p. 7776. Stegner, John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, p. 315. John Noble, Secretary of the Interior in 1891, little perspective it should be said that in 1959 after the expenditure of a number of billion dollars by the Bureau of Reclamation and by private individuals and land companies, 25,716,738 irrigated acres were in crops and 5,021,379 acres in pasture. Of this total of 30,738,115 acres, 6,798,751 were in Federal projects.29 In his Century article Powell had made much of the necessity of completing the topographic survey and the hydrographic survey his bureau was carrying out but had given no indication when they would be completed. No matter how essential these basic investigations were for any program of irrigation development, western promoters were impatient with such scientific work which, they feared, would postpone construction for years. They listened, therefore, more readily to Hinton who argued that such surveys were not needed. In 1893 at the second Irrigation Congress meeting in Los Angeles, Hinton sharply attacked Powell, who had preceded him at the Congress, for warning against the overly optimistic views concerning the amount of water available for irrigation. Powell had retreated into a more cautious mood, discarded his exaggerated statistics of the Century article, and shown his grave doubts about the amount of water available for irrigation.30 Sufficient interest in irrigation had been aroused by 1890 that the Census Office asked F. H. Newell of the Geological Survey to prepare a census of the number of farms being irrigated, the acreage being watered, the size of irrigated farms, the value of the land as enhanced by the water, publicly maintained that 120 million additional desert acres could be irrigated. He was more restrained, however, as to the acreage then irrigated, estimating it at 3 million to 3,500,000 acres. 29 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1960, p. 53; United States Census of Agriculture, 1959, Vol. 3, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands, 1961, p. 5. 30 Davison, "The Leadership of the Reclamation Movement," pp. 151 ff. |