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Irrigation's Eruption in Bingham County 1890-1900

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At the end of the nineteenth century, irrigation transformed the West from an area dependent on mining and grazing to an agricultural powerhouse, though Idaho lagged decades behind Colorado, Utah and California. Between 1890 and 1900, Bingham County was a big part of Idaho's agricultural explosion, its irrigated acreage jumping considerably due to the construction of new canals, including the Peoples. Below is a map indicating irrigated acreage in 1899, which at that time was concentrated more on the east side of the Snake River than the west.


Census Bulletin 185. Agriculture. Idaho.


Bingham County had 1160 farms in 1900 totaling 196,000 acres, though only 101,000 of those acres were "improved", i.e. farmed and likely irrigated. The county's farmers grossed $838,000 in income (multiply by forty to get a rough equivalent of its worth today) and their fertilizer expenditure, combined, was a whopping $1300—commercial fertilizer application was a long way off in the future.


Roughly ten percent of Idaho's farmers were tenants and not owners, a number that would reach a third thirty years later. Of the tenant farmers, there were 23 Chinese farmers in Idaho at the time, only two owning their property. Their yield per acre far outpaced white farmers' production, $90 an acre to $4.60 an acre, their crops likely row vegetables.


The census noted 159 native farmers on the Fort Hall Reservation, many "entirely self-supporting." One-third wore citizens' clothing and a quarter spoke enough English to carry on ordinary conversation, the report stated. The tribal members sold 150,000 pounds of dressed beef to the government in 1899.


Ninety percent of Bingham County farms were irrigated at the turn of the century, the water taken from 68 ditches totaling 466 canal miles. The canals cost nearly a million dollars to construct and irrigated 168 acres per ditch-mile. Farmers paid an average of just over eleven dollars an acre for their water rights, about a dollar and half less than the value of the same acreage.


Ten years later the 1910 Agriculture Census showed a number of dramatic changes. Irrigated areas jumped from 71,000 in 1899 to 193,000 acres in 1909, almost a tripling. Carey Act projects, the American Falls Canal in particular, were now irrigating 10,000 acres in the county with a potential of covering 51,000 more. No irrigation from flowing wells or pumps or even reservoirs was reported. Ditch numbers rose from 68 to a 116 in the ten previous years, the total canal mileage raising from 466 to 591. The cost of the ditches, in total, tripled to nearly a million dollars, with the operation costs raising from $4.18 to $9.61 an acre.


Statewide, the cost of irrigation projects rose from $3.79 to $17.15 acre, due to the fact that "low hanging fruit"—canals easily diverted to nearby land through terrain with few impediments—had already been taken. The early ditches, communally built, were primitive compared to the recent canals which required corporate or federal money and were, for the most part, far better constructed and covered a great deal more territory.


The Peoples Canal in Bingham County was one of the last canals built communally, its competitor the American Falls Canal (now the Aberdeen-Springfield) an example of the corporate/investor funded ditches that the Carey Act of 1894 promoted by making a grant of a million acres available to each Western state for irrigation projects. Only Idaho and Wyoming took full advantage of the Act, which was a response to decades-long cries for land from impoverished farmers exiting lands in the midwest and east—300,000 Americans were expected to immigrate to Canada in 1903 (fully five percent of Canada's population—an equivalent number now would be if fifteen million crossed into America in a single year), 15,000 from Iowa alone. Five thousand farmers had left Montana, Utah and Idaho in 1900 for Saskatchewan, looking for cheap land opened up by the Canadian government. Fifty thousand had left the next year. Idaho and other western states provided the only American alternative to the exodus, and Bingham County was one of the stopping points for those seeking land.


It's a commonplace statement these days—and perhaps has always been so—that these are tumultuous times, but stop for a moment and ponder the changes that were occurring a century ago in our locality and you'll lower your blood pressure a bit.




Ralph Thurston is the author of the recent local history The Great Pasture: Bingham County's Shifting Dreams. Grab your copy inside the door at Kesler's Market or online.


You can still get a copy of The Shanghi Plain at Kesler's, too, and soon to come is We, The People: Two Canals' Battle for Territory, the story of the Peoples Canal and its multi-year court battle with the opposing interest, The American Falls Canal. It's available online now and soon at Kesler's Market. Order here





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