Pioneers Face Ruin as Irrigation Fails
Early White Bluffs settlers struggle with crop failure, water shortages, and financial desperation.
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.
Owing to the disappointments of first year cultivation as irrigationists, the unusually unfavorable weather which prevailed this season, the temporary suspension of water supply through destruction of the power plants, some of the owners of local acreage have joined in asking the land company for an extension of time in meeting their payments. It is an assured fact that few, if any, pioneers in an irrigated region have ever met with as many trying conditions as have confronted our people this season. And be it recorded to their everlasting credit that they met the disasters bravely, strenuously objecting to being buffeted by fate and other things where men should object, but all the time meeting more than an equal share of life’s battle without the quiver of an eyelash. That is nerve—the kind of nerve that has ever been characteristic of the frontier.
“None escape, and the battle goes to the strong.”
The precarious nature of agricultural survival in the Columbia Basin remains a defining feature of the region. Today's high-tech irrigation infrastructure masks a long history of early settlers who were sold on a dream of fertile land that was often thwarted by the harsh, semi-arid reality of the high desert.
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