When Greeley went Westm irrigation followed

By Berny Morson

The Statue of Liberty wouldn't come to the harbor for 16 more years, but by 1870, New York was already filled with huddled masses, crammed into tenements, working 12-hour shifts in factories.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

Thomas Jefferson, appalled by the abject poverty he saw in European cities, had envisioned an America of independent farmers living close to the soil.

The quest for open land on which to transform Eastern slum-dwellers into farmers drove public policy throughout the 19th century. It was the impetus for the homestead act and the transcontinental railroad, the greatest building project of its day.

By the end of the 19th century, the tide of settlement would roll over eastern Colorado, turning even semiarid high plains counties into agricultural land and transforming the culture of the state.

The emergence of farms on land viewed by early travelers as habitat good only for rattlesnakes represented the triumph of stubborn Jeffersonian ideology over common sense. Rainfall rarely amounted to more than 20 inches a year on the eastern plains, less than half the amount that fell east of the 100th meridian, which runs through central Nebraska.

Stephen Long, a U.S. Army lieutenant who passed through Colorado in 1822, giving his name to the most visible peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, wrote off the entire block of real estate that included Kansas, eastern Colorado and the Texas panhandle as ``the great American desert.''

Benjamin Silliman, writing about Long's expedition for the American Journal of Science and Arts, called the region a ``vast, sandy desert which, for the distance of 500 miles from the feet of the Rocky Mountains, presents a frightful waste.''

Their views influenced policy-makers for more than a generation.

But Colorado began looking better as land in the East and the Midwest filled with settlers. The government led the westward drive, promoting slogans such as ``rain follows the plow'' - start busting the sod, and the rain will come. Another curious myth was that steam along railroad tracks would produce humidity and rainfall for crops.

Among those who liked Colorado was Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley, who saw the results of rapid urbanization all around him in New York, was an avid proponent of Western expansion.

Greeley had passed through the state by stagecoach during a Western tour in 1859, and it didn't look like a desert to him.

``Greeley saw things that others didn't see,'' University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh says.

As the stagecoach plodded along the South Platte River, Greeley saw water - mostly small streams near the present-day Nebraska border, but then larger torrents rolling in from the mountains.

``All of a sudden, you start getting into big rivers - the Big Thompson, the Cache la Poudre, the St. Vrain,'' Welsh said. Water didn't come down as rain, as it did in the East, but it was there for the taking.

``The biggest thing was, (Greeley) knew what irrigation could do,'' says Coy Cross, a U.S. Air Force historian who has written extensively about Greeley and the West.

The idea of establishing a farm colony on the high plains was first suggested by Nathan Meeker, the Tribune's agriculture editor, in 1869. But the idea had its roots in an era 30 years before, when Greeley and Meeker were both young.

The second quarter of the 19th century was the great age of utopian colonies throughout the East and the Midwest.

Meeker had lived in an agricultural colony in Ohio in the 1840s. Greeley did not live in a colony but had friends in several.

By 1870, the utopian movement was dead. Adherents graduated to the middle class, just like the hippies of the 1960s. The Tribune became a mainstream paper, with the biggest circulation in America.

But Greeley never recanted his earliest beliefs, and when Meeker proposed establishing an agricultural colony in Colorado, Greeley bought in at once - and he knew just the spot to put it.

On April 12, 1870, the Tribune announced the purchase of 12,000 acres where the Cache La Poudre meets the South Platte, a spot Greeley had seen on his trip West 11 years before. Within a year, 3,000 people were living in Union Colony, later renamed Greeley.

While Greeley had always sold Western expansion as a relief valve for the urban poor, Union Colony was nothing of the kind. The new community attracted settlers from New York's leafy suburbs and the Midwest, and they were decidedly middle-class, says Welsh, the UNC historian.

Colonists needed to demonstrate liquid assets of $1,000 and had to pay a membership fee of $155 - this at a time when factory wages averaged $1 a day.

The Colorado colonists pooled their abundant funds and moved quickly to build irrigation ditches. Ten miles of ditch were completed the first summer, 27 more miles the following year, irrigating 25,000 acres.

The colonists lived in the new town and commuted to their farmland.

The community not only prospered, but it became genteel.

``The middle-class families had middle-class women, and they brought middle-class women's values,'' Welsh says.

They formed social service clubs and promoted music, literature, drama and art. They plucked a plum from the legislature in the form of the state teachers college, which evolved into UNC.

A year after the town was formed, the library was subscribing to 117 newspapers, Welsh says, some in foreign languages.

Soon the ``Greeley model'' was being followed along the Front Range.

Longmont grew out of ditch projects on the Boulder, St. Vrain and Left Hand creeks. The Lyons Canal irrigated a chunk of the Arkansas River drainage area.

Not that Stephen Long was entirely wrong when he called Colorado a desert, as Greeley residents soon learned.

During the dry summer of 1874, irrigation in the new colony of Fort Collins dried up ditches downstream at Greeley.

Eastern Colorado would go through several cycles of drought and prosperity until the construction of water diversions from the Western Slope in the 1930s and the invention of the pivot sprinkler in the '50s brought stability.

Weld and Larimer counties would consistently place among the nation's top 10 agricultural communities.

July 6, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
© Copyright, Denver Rocky Mountain News