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Show RECLAMATION OF THE ARID LANDS 665 upon land reserved for irrigation purposes until the unit of acreage, the fixed water charges, and the date when the water could be applied had been announced. This later provision was included to prevent, if possible, settlers moving upon desert land intended to be included in an irrigation project before the time when the water could be provided. Opposition to the measure came from Oscar Underwood of Alabama who insisted in bringing out all that was wrong with reclamation. Despite all that had been said about reclamation being intended to bring arid lands of the government into farming, he showed from statistics provided by Newell that in six of the project areas there was not an acre of public land, including the largest and most expensive, Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River, that on all 30 projects there were only 1,063,111 acres owned by the Federal government as against 1,402,-702 acres privately owned and 136,815 acres owned by states. He was convinced that the original act and the measure of 1910 were designed to benefit mostly private holders of land.88 Underwood's spirited opposition and that of a few others did not prevent the passage of the bill in the House by an overwhelming vote of 255-20.89 The Senate passed the bill with only slight discussion, after striking out the provision that a board of Army Engineers should first pass upon all projects to which the fund for accelerating construction could be used. After two conferences the section was restored and the measure enacted. In his annual report for 1912, Director Newell analyzed in a less critical way than had Congress the errors that had been made, and the factors which had largely increased the costs of construction over original estimates. It had been an error to think that all dry soil needed was water, **Ibid., pp. 8684-89. 89 Ibid., p. 8698. that it needed no fertilizer, no drainage, no protection aaginst the underlying alkali, that markets existed for crops, that anyone could succeed in irrigation farming, and that there would be a rush of people to take up and improve the land when water was available. There were plenty who wanted to speculate in land but not many who had the capital and the knowledge necessary to make a success of farming on irrigated land. The high construction costs were attributed partly to high wages, the 8-hour day, and workmen's compensation costs, rather than to misjudgments, engineering errors, and unexpected and destructive Hoods. As a result, the cost per acre for construction had become much higher than anticipated and if the projects were to pay the water rents the price had to be high. Newell deplored the unwillingness of the settlers within a project to construct their own laterals, as earlier irrigators had done, thereby increasing the overall costs. Poor planning had opened up and irrigated land in some projects without settlers to make use of it and in other areas the land locators had brought in settlers to the desert localities which would not receive water for many years. A final error made by most settlers had been their insistence on filing for 160 acres when the Reclamation authorities were urging that they be content with 40 or 80 acres, knowing they would not be able to use more. Newell by 1912 had thus raised many of the questions that for the next generation were to plague the planners of the Reclamation Service, lead to drastic controls by Congress over the operations of the agency, and compel the adoption of numerous relief measures for settlers who could not meet their water payments.90 Dorothy Lampen, writing from the vantage point of 1930, when the weaknesses of government reclamation planning were 90 Reclamation Service, Eleventh Annual Report, 1912, pp. 1-11. |