A Valley of Perennial Wealth: The Excursion That Sold the Yakima Boom

(From the Puyallup Herald.)

Great interest is centering in the Yakima country at present, and what some are pleased to call a real estate boom is in progress. Among the number of Puyallup citizens who have become enamored of that country and bought property there is Pete Belles, proprietor of the Hotel Puyallup. Mr. Belles purchased the Hotel Yakima at a cost of $26,000, and closing the deal last week advertised a grand opening on Friday, and in conjunction with Mr. Knox secured a special car to run from Puyallup on Thursday evening. The fare was low, and many availed themselves of the opportunity to see this much-talked-of country. Friday morning nearly every rig in the city was ordered to the hotel by James Knox, and the party drove to the Sunnyside country.

This drive was a grand treat to our people of western Washington. The roads are simply immense, and a drive of forty or fifty miles a day is not too heavy work for any team. It is not the place of this article to attempt to give a complete description of this country, but we will say that in the valley of the Yakima are thousands of acres of sage brush land that needs but to be watered to make it the richest farming land in the fertile state of Washington. For a number of years enterprising farmers in that portion of the state have been cultivating the soil, and by working on a small scale have irrigated many acres of land, and shown by the immense crops what the soil is capable of doing when well watered; but irrigation on an extensive scale has never been realized until the present time. In the Sunnyside district a canal has been constructed that is in its average dimensions thirty feet wide at the bottom and sixty feet wide at the top. It is nearly twenty-two miles long at present, and, as may be imagined, is capable of thoroughly irrigating, with the assistance of smaller ditches, thousands of acres of land in its vicinity. This, it would seem, would render the land very valuable, but we were surprised to learn that the company offered land for sale directly under this immense ditch at the low price of $45 per acre with perpetual water right. The intake, as it is called, or the place where the great ditch receives the water from the Yakima river, is a few miles below Yakima City. At this point it is intended to build a dam across the river at a certain height, and thus prevent a decrease of water supply in the ditches should the winters in the mountains be mild to furnish the usual flow in the river. Four immense gates at the intake regulate the amount of water taken into the ditch, or closed, shut off the flow entirely.

Fred Thompson, son of Senator Thompson, has a very fine farm in this section, which was visited by the party. Further on Mr. Bicknell is able to show what may be accomplished on Yakima land by a little work and plenty of water. We may say without hesitancy that he has the finest orchard in the state. There are between 26 and 30 acres of peach, apple, plum and other trees, and the whole is at present a most lovely sight to behold. Of the party who visited it on that occasion, none could be seen who could say that they had ever before seen anything in that line to equal it. Mr. Bicknell will have over 10,000 boxes of fruit this year from this orchard, where seven years ago not one tree was planted. On this trip we drove for nearly 20 miles through a beautiful farming country, interspersed with occasional fine cultivated farms, and one thing noticed by the writer was that the character of the soil, the lay of the land, etc., were no better on the cultivated farms than the thousands of acres of uncultivated land now for sale, showing that these fine farms are not freaks of nature, but that hundreds more just as good may be opened out by people who buy.