The Struggle to Green the Desert
Before the giant irrigation companies arrived, Yakima pioneers hand-dug their own ditches through harsh winters to save their thirsty land.
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.
Before the major corporations, settlers of the Konnewock area, or Piety Flat, organized their own ditch company. Because they were poor, they acted as their own contractors and builders. Men like I.N. Lord, Joseph Bartholet, Sr., O.V. Fowler, Matt Bartholet, and Robert Dunn endured great hardships to bring water to their soil. Captain Dunn recounted working in the dead of winter without gloves, subsisting on little more than potatoes and salt. Their perseverance eventually led to the acquisition of their ditch by the Northern Pacific, Yakima & Kittitas Irrigation company, which initiated a massive engineering project to irrigate the Sunnyside country using storage reservoirs in the mountains, such as Lakes Cle-Elum, Kachess, and Bumping.
“Captain Dunn relates how he worked on the ditch in the dead of winter with no covering for his hands, through being too poor to buy gloves, and subsisting almost entirely on potatoes and salt.”
The massive reclamation projects described in 1892 transformed the Yakima Valley into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Today, the management of those same mountain reservoirs and the legacy of these irrigation rights remain the central point of tension in Pacific Northwest water policy and tribal water-rights litigation.
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