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Show 176 miles in length, and the ruins of many of them give evidence of the expenditure of vast labor in their construction."144 The Mesa Canal is a restoration by the Mormons of such a pre- historic canal.145 Likewise, the ruins left in Arizona are said to have first suggested the reclamation of the valleys to settlers in the early 1870's.146 In the Salt River Valley alone, the amount of land practically covered by the canals in the ancient irrigation system totaled over a quarter of a million acres, and the population supported by the ditches has been estimated at a half million people.147 This was the approximate popula- tion of Arizona in 1940.148 In their early wanderings through valleys in the Southwest, the Spaniards also played a part in early irrigation. For ex- ample, it has been reported that an effort was made by Cruzate in 1684 to relocate the village of Santa Fe to a point near the Pueblo of El Paso, hoping to enlarge an existing irrigation canal and make it available to the people.149 Another writer, referring in 1630 to the village of Santa Fe, the residence of government officials and some 250 Spaniards, said: 15° Proceeding westward toward the Rio del Norte * * * begins the Teoas [Texas] Nation. * * * The land is very fertile because a Religious has brought it water for the irrigation of its seed lands. Later, he pointed out that the soil was fertile and "they have harvested very good crops from the stubble of the year before without having given it any other working than a little irrigat- 1441 Kinney, Irrigation and Wateb Rights, § 82, p. 120 (2d ed. 1912). iaIUd. 148 Id. §86, p. 125. ™IMd. 148 Statistical Abstracts of the: United States, p. 33 (1949). 149 Hughes, The Beginnings of Spanish Settlement in the El Paso Dis- trict, University of California Publications in History, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 328 (1914). With respect to the El Paso crop and food shortage of 1684, due in part to the limited means of irrigation, see id. p. 361. The Pueblo of El Paso, today known as Ouidad Juarez, Mexico, is on the Rio Grande opposite El Paso, Texas. 180 The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Venavides, 1630, pp. 23-24 (Ayer's Translation, privately printed, Chicago, 1916). |