9369

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9369
• Author: Colorado Water Workshop.
• Title: 12th & 13th Annual Colorado Water Workshop.
• USFW Year: 1987.
• USFW - Doc Type: Western State College of Colorado.
• Copyright Material: NO

As more people moved to Colorado, it became apparent that good farmland
was available only at greater distances from the streams, which meant building
more elaborate canals. Individual farmers, or even small groups of farmers,
seldom had the capital to undertake these projects, so ways had to be found to
construct them. One popular approach in the 1870's was the formation of
agricultural colonies in which a number of farmers would pay membership fees
to purchase land together. Each farmer got a small plot of land and
irrigation works were constructed collectively. The first, and most famous,
of these agricultural colonies was the Union Colony, which purchased land on
the Cache la Poudre River near Greeley, under the auspices of Horace Greeley,
the New York newspaper publisher. By 1872, the colonists had constructed two
ditches, the second over 27 miles long, thirty feet wide, and four and a half
feet deep, that watered 25,000 acres (Abbott, 1976).
By the late 1870's, irrigation works were being financed by out-of-state
and foreign corporations. English investors, for example, built the 50-mile
long Larimer and Weld Canal in the Cache la Poudre watershed, the Loveland and
Greeley Canal out of the Big Thompson, and the $2.5 million High Line Canal
that wanders 44 miles from the mouth of the South Platte to Cherry Creek above
Denver (Abbott, 1976). There were literally hundreds of such canals on all
the major river drainages in the State. For example, on the Arkansas there
was the 105-mile Fort Lyon Canal and the 48-mile Catlin Ditch that watered
land around Rocky Ford, La Junta and Lamar. The Travelers Insurance Company
financed canal construction across the mountains in the Del. Norte and Monte
Vista areas (Abbott, 1976). Most of these ventures failed within a few years
of their construction, usually because the availability of water did not
necessarily lead to population in-migration sufficient to make the ventures
profitable and because farmers who were there resisted paying royalties in
addition to buying water rights (Abbott, 1976). Practically all the systems
were eventually reorganized by farmers as mutual irrigation companies (Maass,
1978).
By 1880, the demand for water along the most heavily populated rivers was
greater than could be supplied by ditch diversions alone and the construction
of reservoirs began (Foss, 1.978). The initial reservoir built in the State
was a small one on Coal Creek in Jefferson County in 1859. The first of the
relatively large irrigation projects was the Chambers Lake Reservoir on the
upper reaches of the Cache la Poudre, started in 1882 (CWCB, 1952).
About this same time, interbasin and transmountai.n diversions were
started, primarily to move water to the eastern side of the Continental
Divide. Among the earliest were those built by the same mutual irrigation
company working on the Chambers Lake Reservoir. The Sky Line Ditch, completed
in 1893, diverted water out, of the Laramie River Basin and into the Poudre.
The Grand Ditch, which diverted water out of the Colorado River Basin, was
completed in 1895. The largest transmountain diversion in this part of
Colorado, before the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, was the Laramie-Poudre
Tunnel with a capacity of 1,500 cubic feet per second. The project was
completed in 1912 and prompted Wyoming to file suit to protect the amount of
water flowing into that state.
The markets for these early agricultural regions were in the mountain
mining communities. The railroads spurred the development of agriculture by
providing farmers access to these markets. By the 1890'x, additional
irrigation systems had greatly increased the quantity of agricultural products
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