The Fight for the Palouse
Senator Ankeny and Representative Jones clash with the federal government over the abandonment of the Palouse irrigation project.
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.
Protests against the abandonment of the Palouse irrigation project were received at reclamation service headquarters today from Senator Ankeny and Representative Jones. Senator Ankeny's protest was in the form of a brief telegram but Mr. Jones wrote a letter. The land which it was proposed to irrigate, Mr. Jones says, will be worth from $400 to $500 an acre after it is put under water, and he thinks the government ought not to hesitate under the circumstances to reclaim this land, even at a cost exceeding $35 an acre, which was the original estimate. Representative Jones also urged the reclamation service to go ahead with the Tieton-Cowiche project, which contemplates the irrigation of a comparatively small but potentially valuable area. It is unfair in both cases, Mr. Jones says, that the settlers who have taken up land in good faith, in reasonable belief that the government was going ahead, should be made to suffer hardship through the abandonment of the plans.
“It is unfair in both cases that the settlers who have taken up land in good faith... should be made to suffer hardship through the abandonment of the plans.”
The tension between federal reclamation goals and local settlers in 1905 mirrors today's ongoing debates over water rights, drought management, and land development in Eastern Washington. Settlers were essentially betting their future on government infrastructure, a risk still faced by agricultural communities managing scarce water resources.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.