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

-3-

.

FORE/NORD

.

Charles A. Lory, President Emeritus
Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College

Archaeologists find irrigation was practiced in what is now Colorado
long before the region "as knoHn to the hunters and trappers who roamed
the mountain country in the first feH decades after Captain Pike1s ex-
ploration in 1807.

These early irrigators who left traces of their work before the
Indians occupied the territory, disappeared and left no history of their
times. There are no trustHorthy records that the Indians cuI ti va ted
crops under irrigation in Colorado.

Irrigation, as He know it, was first practiced by tHO groups of
settlers - one of Spanish Americans, racially experienced in irrigation
agriculture, who settled in southern Colorado in the Basin of the Rio
Grand Del Norte; the other group, Pioneers from the Eastern States and
Northern Europe, with no experience in irrigation, who settled in the
Basins of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers.

.

Spanish Americans were quite helpful to their American neighbors in
southern Colorado in growing crops under irrigation, but distance, primi-
tive means of travel and language limitations prevented effective exchange
of irrigation experience with the pioneers of northern Colorado.

,

Spanish American settlers founded the town of San Luis in the Culebra
Valley in 1851 _ the oldest t011l1 in Colorado. They began digging their
irrigation ditch the following year, using primitive hand tools and a
wooden plow drawn by a yoke of oxen. The quality of their work is shown
by the continuous use of this canal for a hundred years.

In due time they made the necessary filing for the appropriation of
Hater to the San Luis Peoples Ditch and for the adjudication of their
water right. In 1890 the District Court of Costilla County a,V'ardedthem
Priority No. 1 in Water District 24 of Water Division 3, dated April 10,
1852, with an allotment of 23 cubic feet per second for irrigating 900
acres.

This was the earliest priority in Colorado under the system of Hater
appropriation, adjudication and administration developed largely by
American pioneers in irrigation through experience gained in the rush of
development in the South Platte River Basin, which began 7 years after the
building of the San Luis Peoples Ditch.

.

Along with developments in canal construction and operation and
methods of crop irrigation came difficulties in developing an effective
system for the use of the waters of our streams, and administration of
this system by the state engineer; the provisions for storage reservoirs, .
composing conflicting claims for the Haters of our Interstate rivers -
first through State laH suits in the United States Supreme Court, and
later through more effective Interstate compacts; the establishing of the
right of transmountain diversion of water; the formation of irrigation

.

--~'--,-