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<br />As more people moved to Colorado, it became apparent that good farmland <br />was available only at greater distances from the streams, which meant building <br />more elaborate canals. Individual farmers, or even small groups of farmers, <br />seldom had the capital to undertake these projects, so ways had to be found to <br />construct them. One popular approach in the 1870's was the formation of <br />agricultural colonies in which a number of farmers would pay membership fees <br />to purchase land together, Each farmer got a small plot of land and <br />irrigation works were constructed collectively. The first, and most famous, <br />of these agricultural colonies was the Union Colony, which purchased land on <br />the Cache la Poudre River near Greeley, under the auspices of Horace Greeley, <br />the New York newspaper publisher. By 1872, the colonists had constructed two <br />ditches, the second over 27 miles long, thirty feet wide, and four and a half <br />feet deep, that watered 25,000 acres (Abbott, 1976). <br /> <br />By the late 1870's, irrigation works were being financed by out-of-state <br />and foreign corporations. English investors, for example, built the 50-mile <br />long Larimer and Weld Canal in the Cache la Poudre watershed, the Loveland and <br />Greeley Canal out of the Big Thompson, and the $2.5 million High Line Canal <br />that wanders 44 miles from the mouth of the South Platte to Cherry Creek above <br />Denver (Abbott, ]976). There were literally hundreds of such canals on all <br />the major river drainages in the State, For example, on the Arkansas there <br />was the 105-mile Fort Lyon Canal and the 48-mile Catlin Ditch that watered <br />land around Rocky Ford, La Junta and Lamar. The Travelers Insurance Company <br />financed canal construction across the mountains in the Del Norte and Monte <br />Vista areas (Abbott, 1976). Most of these ventures failed within a few years <br />of their construction, usually because the availability of water did not <br />necessarily lead to population in-migration sufficient to make the ventures <br />profitable and because farmers who were there resisted paying royalties in <br />addition to buying water rights (Abbott, 1976), Practically all the systems <br />were eventually reorganized by farmers as mutual irrigation companies (Maass, <br />1978). <br /> <br />By 1880, the demand for water along the most heavily populated rivers was <br />greater than could be supplied by ditch diversions alone and the construction <br />of reservoirs began O'oss, 1978). 'fhe initial reservoir built in the State <br />was a small one on Coal Creek in Jefferson County in 1859. The first of the <br />relatively large irrigation projects was the Chambers J.ake Reservoir on the <br />upper reaches of the Cache la Poudt'e, started in 1882 (CWCB, 1952). <br /> <br />About this same time, int.erbasin and transmount.ain diversions were <br />started, primarily to move water to the eastern side of the Continental <br />Divide. Among t.he earliest were those built by the same mutual irrigation <br />compW1Y working on the Chambers Lake Reservoir. The Sky Line Ditch, completed <br />in 1893, diverted water out. of the I.aramie River Basin and into the Poudre, <br />The Grand Ditch, which diverted water out of the Colorado River Basin, was <br />completed in 1895. The largest transmountain diversion in this part of <br />Colorado, before the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, was the Laramie-Poudre <br />Tunnel with a capacity of 1,500 cubic feet. per second. The project was <br />completed in 1912 and prompted Wyoming to file suit to protect the amount of <br />water flowing into that state. <br /> <br />The markets for these early agricult.ural regions were in the mountain <br />mining communities. The railroads spurred the development of agriculture by <br />providing farmers access to these markets. By the 1890's, additional <br />irrigation systems had greatly increased the quantity of agricultural products <br /> <br />- 5 - <br />