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Show 33 were the emergence of incorporated farmers' companies on the one hand and for- profit corporations on the other. Both the mutual companies and the speculative corporation are the focus of the pages that follow. The Mutual Irrigation Company Starting as a cooperative effort among pioneers, what can be termed local irrigation companies had functioned since 1847. As we have seen, Mormon colonizing and church subsidy gave form and pattern to this process. Once communities were established, on- site water had to be managed locally, first within the church organization itself and later in the county court era by cooperative effort of water users. Water users of this early era lived in a self- contained environment which enabled informal user associations to work. It was a great experiment in community effort, coverning a broad geographic area but individually tailored to the natural environment and the technical and social means of the people. The cooperative effort established a multitude of small systems. Participants in early territorial time, bound by a common interest and mutual respect, operated without benefit of incorporation; after the Act of 1880 most eventually incorporated. These neighborhood irrigation organizations were well suited to management of ongoing local enterprises, but natural conservatism and the local nature of the common problems that bound members together made them poorly suited to develop larger projects. 43 When the Act of 1880 provided for incorporation of water companies, however, Mormon strategy shifted. Previously their defense from gentile influence had been in isolation and informal cooperation. Private profit oriented enterprise had been viewed as a threat to Mormon isolation, carrying as it did, an invitation to non- Mormon infiltration. 44 In the late 1800s an emerging political strategy looked increasingly to the law and legal procedures. Legal provision for water as property was a step toward a new economic policy in which the church would eventually embrace free enterprise wholeheartedly. 45 For a good description of mutual irrigation companies operation and organization see FJwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions, pp 233- 239. ^ George Lofstrom Strebel, " Irrigation as a Factor in Western History, 1847- 1890" ( Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1965), p 271. By the end of the civil war when the crusade against polygamy... was resumed, the Mormon Church saw their isolation and solidarity seriously threatened. Mining had been started in Utah with the support of gentile capital. Widi the prospect of the early completion of the transcontinental railroad, Brigham Young and other Church leaders saw an immediate need to implement a program to strengthen the solidarity and self sufficiency of the Mormons. The focal point of all the non- Mormon activity was the ' gentile' commercial interests in the Utah. To inaugurate his extended program of cooperation among the Mormons, Brigham Young declared an official boycott against these commercial interests. 45 Leonard J. Arlington, Great Basin Kingdom, p 380. The surrender of die church on issues of polygamy, political control, and economic intervention which followed the Supreme Court decision approving the Edmunds- Tucker Act meant a change of direction and diminished acceleration, but not a complete halt in church activity in these fields And the church did not give anyone to understand that it would discontinue its efforts to promote economic development, although there seems to have been a definite understanding that the old Mormon- Gentile dividing lines would be obliterated Another factor was producing the same result -- ' the end of the frontier' in the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain regions.... Most of the new Mormon colonies founded at the end of the century were near non- Mormon communities. Mormon settlers usually found it necessary to accommodate their ways to those of the Gentiles around them. With ' outsiders' attracted in ever greater numbers to Utah, and with Mormons settling in increasing numbers in non- Mormon communities and neighborhoods, the days of the proud, isolated, self- sufficient Kingdom were at an end. |
