The Oasis in the Arid Belt
How irrigation transformed the Yakima Valley from desert to a model of agricultural productivity and speculative ambition.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There are twenty miles of irrigation ditches in this little city of North Yakima. They are owned by the city, and when a man buys a lot, the right to free water from the ditch in front of his home goes with the title. Looking from the center of the city, one sees avenues with shade trees growing thriftily along both sides of the roadway—a rarity for a four-year-old settlement in the arid belt. Because rainfall is scarce, the region is wholly dependent upon irrigation, which Mr. L. S. Howlett describes as a chemical process: the water combines with the local volcanic ash soil to restore its strength. While current irrigation is small-scale, new investment is changing that. A syndicate including Chicago and Helena capitalists has formed to build a 100-mile canal to bring water to 100,000 acres, marking a shift toward large-scale, corporate-led land development. Meanwhile, the Moxee model farm, bankrolled by profits from Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone inventions, serves as a high-tech demonstration of what the land can yield when water is applied with scientific precision.
“The water combines with the properties peculiar to the volcanic ash and the result is restoration of the strength of the land.”
The transition from public ownership of irrigation to large-scale, corporate-led land speculation echoes the historical tensions between communal infrastructure and the commodification of water rights that defined the growth of the American West.
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