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" .' In the early days of September 1881, a bugler for the U,S. Army issued a series of shrill blasts signaIHng that the land that bad once belonged to the Ute Indians was now open for settlement by the whites. The bugle bad barely silenced when the stampede began: a flood of settlers entered the Grand Valley, This multitude soon demanded a supply of water to transform the barren land into towns, farms, ranches, and orchards.9 Work began on the Grand Valley Ditch later that same year, and on the Pioneer Ditch and the Pacific Slope Ditch in 1882. The story of irrigation development in the Grand Valley is reminiscent of irrigation development in many other parts of the West. Small ditches serving the most accessible low- lying lands were built first, using largely local labor and capital, The far more ambitious Grand Valley Ditch went through a series of stages before and after reaching completion in 1884: work was begun in 1881 using local capital and labor; the project then was taken over in January 1883 and enlarged in scope by an ambitious promoter from the Gunnison area, Matt Arch; later that year, outside financial interests took over (first T.C. Henry and the Colorado and Trust in August 1883 and then the Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut in 1885); finally. in 1897, the private project turned into a water user-owned ditch company, the Grand Valley Irrigation Company (GVIC).10 Today, GVIC provides water to about 38,000 acres of land and 3,000 users within its service area. In the Grand Valley, as in most other places in the West, private efforts to get water to the higher elevation lands failed. Orchard Mesa is a good case in point.lI Orchard Mesa is an elevated area of land about _ miles long and _ miles wide, sitting about _ feet above the south side of the Colorado River in the east end of the Grand Valley, Fruit trees grow well on much of this land, and there bad been at least five private efforts to pump water from the river up onto the benchlands that all ended in failure because the diversion facilities · Don Davidson, 'The Grand River Ditch,' I J. of tile Western Slope J (Winter 1986). " Mary Rail, 'Development of Grand Junetiion and tile Colorado River Valley to Palisades from 1881 to 1938. Part I,' 3 J. of tile Western Slope (No.3) 7,16 (Summer 1988) (hereafter 'Rail, Part I'). " This discussion is drawn primarily from Mary Rail, Development of Grand Junetion and tile Colorado River Valley to Palisade from 1881 to 1931-Part 2,3 J. of tile Western Slope (No.4) 4, 38-41 (Autumn 1988) (hereafter 'Rail, Part 2"). 5