Water Development, Extraction, and Diversion (page 3 of 6)

Mormon Settlement and the Dawn of Large-Scale Irrigation on the Colorado Plateau

The Mormon Mission in the West

Mormon-settled Bluff, Utah in 1909. Agricultural fields were irrigated using water from the nearby San Juan River. Image 1482a by Stuart Malcolm Young, courtesy of Cline Library Special Collections, Northern Arizona University.

The Mormon exodus from mid-Western religious persecution to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847 led to the settlement of a new "Zion" in Utah. This mass colonization marked the beginning of large-scale irrigation in the southwestern United States. The Mormon people, strongly driven by a deeply entrenched drive to establish a new and permanent home for their people, took arid land irrigation to a new level. One of the most basic precepts of the Latter Day Saints’ faith at the time was expansionism and colonization as an obligation to God’s will in order to secure an exclusive Mormon region to be the new Kingdom of God. In order to accomplish this, the church’s goal was to establish self-sufficient agricultural communities in every unoccupied arable valley in the greater region, in order to create a geographic domain socially, politically and economically independent of non-Mormon forces. Church leaders desired widespread settlement of the arid, challenging lands of the Colorado Plateau in the hope that non-Mormons would not want to compete for its relatively meager resources. This powerful community-wide belief, strengthened by the dominant doctrine of Manifest Destiny, laid "the foundation of the most ambitious desert civilization the world has seen" (Reisner 1993).

Upon arriving in their new home, Brigham Young and his followers immediately set about clearing land along the Wasatch Plateau, digging irrigation canals and designing large, canal-fed fields. Mormon families, subsidized by the highly organized and well funded church, spread out from the Salt Lake Valley as part of a fervent mission to gain access to the best resources: arable land, water supplies, and grazing pasture. By 1900, over 500 Mormon agricultural settlements had been founded throughout the Mountain West, and six million acres of land were under irrigation.

The Little Colorado River Valley Settlements

Mormon settlement and irrigation of the Little Colorado River Valley provides an excellent case study on the development of Mormon farming methods and their often hard-won success in the face of daunting adversity. Successful colonization at Kanab, Pipe Springs, and Lees Ferry secured a Mormons route for southern expansion. Although the first attempt at colonization of this valley in 1873 was a failure, in 1876, five hundred Mormon pioneers, well-prepared for an arduous colonizing experience, founded four settlements along the lower valley of the river. During the next few years, additional settlements were established along the upper river valley, along the river’s main tributary, Silver Creek, and in mountain valleys further south. By the turn of the century, approximately 20 Mormon agricultural settlements existed in the Little Colorado River Basin region, including Snowflake, Showlow, Heber and St. John's, towns that still exist today.

In this arid environment, agricultural subsistence depended upon manipulation of water by means of dams, irrigation canals and reservoirs, which the Mormons built in abundance. The earliest dams were low earthen levees, stabilized by rock, brush and logs. With time, colonists learned that larger constructions and the addition of a concrete shell were necessary to ensure longevity.

Success came at a high cost for these settlers; environmental instability and variability created many difficult challenges. Unpredictable precipitation, short growing seasons, marginal soils, silting of reservoirs, increasing saltiness of the river downstream, and overgrazing of grasslands created many problems. The most catastrophic obstacle was frequent washout of dams, a consequence of the highly irregular river flows and lack of firm foundations for dam building in the soft alluvial soils of the valley. St. Joseph, for example, constructed nine dams in the course of eighteen years due to repeated flooding.

By the time the Little Colorado drains into the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, the alkaline waters have bleached the silty bottom sediments white, creating the bright blue color of the river. Photo by Shannon Kelly.

The Little Colorado River has long been known as a highly variable river, making it a largely unreliable source of water for agriculture. Along the upper Little Colorado, geological conditions favored the construction of storage reservoirs which helped stabilize water availability for irrigation. In contrast, settlements to the north were unable to build reservoirs due to unfavorable geological conditions, and also had to deal with the river’s increasing silt load, which deposited in irrigation canals and ditches, requiring constant maintenance to keep them flowing. Water manipulation, including dam construction, re-building of washed out dams, and irrigation system maintenance, was by far the largest financial and temporal expense to individuals and communities during the colonizing years. The upper-valley town of St. Joseph again best exemplifies the difficulties faced by Little Colorado settlers. The town built its first dam in 1876, requiring its entire male population of 50 men to work for 2.5 months. The dam washed out with the first spring runoff. By 1882, six more dams had been destroyed and new ones rebuilt, at a total approximate cost of $35,000, and tens of thousands of precious man-hours.

As in their efforts in other areas of the Plateau, the settlement and agricultural development of this valley, a region characterized by volcanic deposits, sand drifts, and unforgiving desert, was exceptional in that the Mormons succeeded where others had failed. The hard-won success of Mormon colonization in the Little Colorado River Basin can be attributed to a system of resource redistribution between towns in order to mitigate the variability of agricultural success of individual towns from year to year. Operated and supported by the church, this system was based on tithing resources, which could then be stored and given to those in need, such as the residents of a town that had experienced a dam washout or failed crops. In addition, the success of the Little Colorado settlements was heavily dependent on large cash subsidies from the church to assist with dam and irrigation canal system construction and maintenance.

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