PUB00068

• Year: 1952
• Title: A Hundred Years of Irrigatioin in Colorado, 100 Years of Organized and Continuous Irrigation
• Author: CWCB
• Description: Irrigation history of Colorado
• Publications - Doc Type: Historical

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This was a wasteful process but the adaptability of the Anglo-Americans
was great, and in the end the Colorado system that emerged was a very
efficient one--more efficient for the intensive use of water than the one
which the Spanish had developed. Because the Cache La Poudre Valley was
the first intensivelyirrigat&d-area=iilThe State most of the features
of the Colorado system were developed or advo<rated-oyits irrigators.

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Colorado irrigation, as far as commercial farming is concerned,
got its start from the gold rush of 1859. Such men as David K. Wall and
"Potato" Clark came out to raise crops for the mining camps, rather than
to look for gold. At that time there was only one settlement on the
Poudre~ Antoine Janis and a few of his French Canadian associates, found-
ed LaPorte in 1844. He became the first permanent settler north of the
Arkansas River. Fort Collins was established as a garrison in 1864, and
in that year, also, Ben Eaton came to th~ Valley and began farming on the
present site of Windsor. The irrigation in the valley prior to 1870 was
relatively insignificant.

The first ditch was taken out of the poudre in 1860 by G. R. Sander-
son. In 1863 he sold his squatter's rights to Joshua Yeager, and it is
under the name of the Yeager Ditch that the first priority was granted.
The City Ditch of Denver is the only ditch north of the Arkansas which
antedated the Yeager Ditch, and that only by 2 months. All together there
were thirty-four priorities granted before the establishment of the
Union Colony, but the generosity of the court was greater than the facts
warranted. Ben Eaton testified 10 years later that there was not a
thousand acres under cultivation in the Poudre in 1870 when the construc-
tion of Greeley Number Three was begun. The ditches were relatively
small and short, irrigating lands on only the first and second bottoms.
The chief crop produced was hay. It was thought that the uplands were
sterile lands, that they would produce little even with water. Ben
Eaton warned the Union Colony that it was senseless to take the ditches
up on the bench lands; that the land was so poor that it would fail
after a crop or two.

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The first major event in the history of irrigation in Colorado was
the establishment of the Union Colony at Greeley. This assertion can
be justified in several ways. In the first place the Union Colony brought
men to the state who were to make a fantastic impression on the
institution, and on the practice of, irrigation that is way out of
proportion to their numbers. N.C. Meeke.c, after a trip to Colorado in
1869 invisioned a colony united in purpose and ideals, which would be
financially able to build a community without going through the harsh,
primitive, backward phases of other frontier settlements. To achieve the
unity that was necessary to the success of such an effort, the members of
the colony were selected. I quote from N. C. Meeker's circular,

"The persons with whom I would be willing to associate must
be temperance men, and ambitious to establish good society, and
among as many as fifty, ten should have as much as nO,OOO,
twenty $,5,000, while others may have from ~:200 to $1,000 or up-
wards . . . My own plan would be to make the set~lement almost .
wholly in a village. And the lots should be sold that funds may

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