Water on Mortgage: A Seattle Man Offers to Irrigate Kittitas — If the Farmers Sign Away Ten Years
J. W. Wells proposes a ditch across the east end of the Kittitas valley at $1 to $1.25 an acre a year. At the mass meeting only 6,500 acres sign on, and the deal is left to W. H. Peterson to sell.
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.
J. W. Wells, of Seattle, offers to build an immense ditch around the east end of Kittitas valley, carrying water sufficient to give one-half inch to each acre of land under the ditch, to be commenced by August 1st, 1892, and finished by June 1st, 1893 — provided that the settlers mortgage their lands for ten years, to pay $1 and $1.25 per acre annual water rental, and the pro rata cost of the ditch at the end of the ten years, when, if the conditions are fulfilled, it will be turned over to them.
The proposition was made at a mass meeting, but the farmers were slow to sign; the representative of only 6,500 acres signed the agreement. The matter was left in the hands of W. H. Peterson to enlist the farmers.
“The proposition was made at a mass meeting, but the farmers were slow to sign; the representative of only 6,500 acres signed the agreement.”
Then as now, the question in the Yakima and Kittitas valleys was not whether the water existed but who would own the ditch and who would sign away years of income to get it. The 1892 bargain — private capital builds, farmers mortgage the ground and buy the works back at the end of a decade — is the template for the irrigation districts and reclamation projects that followed, and for the water-rights fights still being litigated in the basin today.
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