Excerpt from The New Nevada, What It Is and What It Is to Be: The Era of Irrigation and the Day of Opportunity

The American has vigor and adaptability; he knows a good thing when he sees it, and he is quick to act, and to-day Nevada is taking on new life. The wonderful mining developments unite in point of time with the digging of great canals and the taking up of irrigable tracts, and every branch of industry and achievement is feeling the pulse of new life. Soon great areas of wild land will be converted into diversified farms and orchards of fine fruit, and the plains and valleys of Nevada will be the homes of thousands of prosperous and enterprising farmers.

Always the permanent growth of cities, of manufactures and of commerce rests back upon the land. When the country fillup with farmers and the homes of farmers; when fields and orchards begin to yield support for the population, then the prosperity of towns and cities is assured. But in Nevada the extension of the farming interests waited upon the coming of an irrigation age. It was useless to multiply small farms until water could be had to insure the growth of crops, and this in turn waited for government action. Convictions about the value of our arid lands had to grow; the wisdom of arti ficial irrigation had to make its way; the lessons of experience had to be conned; the anglo-saxon had to unlearn some prejudices against cloudless skies and scanty rainfall. We were accustomed to depend upon the bounty of the clouds; all of our systems of laws, our customs and our traditions were based upon an ample rainfall, and had to do with drainage rather than irrigation. We were not used to dry and elevated plateaus, but to the valleys, the prairies, and the rolling country of the Middle West, and the hills of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New England. The habits and customs of a people are not changed in a day or a decade. It takes time. And when little by little, through long years, the value of irrigation had made its way into our convictions, and the general government was ready to take up the problem of supplying water for the arid lands, a new era was at hand.

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