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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies, School of 1-1-1992 Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 Kathryn T. Morse Utah State University This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies, School of at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@usu.edu. Recommended Citation Morse, Kathryn T., "Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916" (1992). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1248. htp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1248 Copyright: Kathryn Taylor Morse 1992 All Rights Reserved NATURE'S SECOND COURSE: WATER CULTURE IN THE MORMON COMMUNITIES OF CACHE VALLEY, UTAH, 1860-1916 by Kathryn T. Morse A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Approved: Hakr 'Profess'or Committee Member of MASTER OF ARTS in History Committee H~ber Dean of Graduate studies UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY Logan, Utah 1992 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Everyone who contributed to this project displayed impressive tact, patience, and good humor in awaiting its belated completion. Thanks go to Prof. Chas Peterson, who introduced me to the study of Mormon community, helped to define, and then re-define the topic, and provided a crucial reading of the first draft. Prof. Carol O'Connor assisted with my struggles to re-define the topic as well. Prof. Clyde Milner not only gave the thesis its title, but also provided skillful advice and encouragement at all stages. In the context of another project, Prof. Len Rosenband helped me grapple with 19th-century Mormon diaries, a skill which proved crucial to this thesis. Prof. Tom Lyon served on my thesis committee and helped with a careful reading of the first draft. Carolyn Fullmer and everyone at the Utah State History Department helped with the final details. Prof. Bill Cronon of Yale University chipped in a long conversation on various aspects of the thesis topic on the bus ride from Tacoma to Mt. Rainier and back at the 1989 WHA conference. My formal intellectual debts to Prof. Cronon are evident in the text. Profs. Richard White and John Findlay of the University of Washington kindly and tactfully encouraged me to finish this project, and supported my efforts to do so long distance. I am grateful to all. iii A. J. Simmonds, Brad Cole, and the staff of Special Collections at the Merrill Library graciously allowed me free run of their collections and helped me locate important documents, for which I thank them. All of the documents in this work come from their impressive archive, and my work would have been impossible without their support. utah state University provided financial assistance for my studies through its support of the Western History Association editorial fellowship program, a seeley-Hinckley scholarship in 1989, and through a summer thesis completion scholarship in 1990. All of my friends in Logan, including Prof. Anne Butler, Jay Butler, Lisa Godfrey, L. J. Godfrey, Catherine Milner, Charlie Milner, Clyde Milner, Chris Mitchell, Carol O'Connor, Grace ott, Ross Peterson, Jane Reilly, Renee Sentilles, Ona Siporin, and Barbara stewart provided advice, support, and love throughout this project, as well as recreational diversions and plenty of free meals. I thank them all. I am grateful to my parents, steve and Deanne Morse, and my housemates, Jerri Hoskyn and Cindy Cresap, for day-to-day and week-to-week encouragement. My personal connection to the stretch of Cache Valley watered by the irrigation systems discussed here grows out of hikes and bike rides around the valley, and from bike rides from my various homes in Logan to the various homes iv of my good friends Lisa and L.J. Godfrey in North Logan and Smithfield. It was in passing through that irrigated, beautiful landscape, in all seasons, at all hours, to join them for barbecues and movie-fests, that I first grasped the powerful sense of place that Mormon communities created in Cache Valley through the practice of irrigated agriculture. I thank Lisa and L. J. for sharing that place with me. Kathryn Morse v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ~ClCllO~EI)(;~ENT~ •..•••...•••.•...••.•••••••••........•.. ii LIST OF FIG'URES •...•.•••.......•.•.••....••••..•••...... vi ABSTRACT ..............•.....•••••••..••••...•••....••.. vii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ....••.•••.••••...•••••...•.•....•..... 1 II. NAT'URE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH ••.•••• · •.••.•.•.... 13 III. FROM LO(;AN RIVER TO LO(;AN TOWN ••••••••.••••.....•. 33 IV. (;ETTIN(; WATER: COMMUNITY SYST~S OF EXCHAN(;E •...• 76 V. WATER AND POWER: PATRIARCHY, (;EO(;RAPHY, AND HIERARCHIES OF WATER USE •.•••••••••••.••••...••... 99 VI. STRIKIN(; A BALANCE: NAT'URAL AND CULTURAL CYCLES OF WATER USE IN MORMON COMMUNITIES •••••••••..••.. 131 VII. WATER IN THE STREETS: VILLA(;E LOT IRRI(;ATION .••. 174 VIII. CONCLUSION .•.•••.•••••••••••••..•••••......•..... 209 BIBLIO(;RAPHY •••••••...•••..••••••••••••••••••••••••.•.. 218 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah- Idaho .......................................... 5 2 Cache Valley Basin with Inset ................... 41 2A Inset of Map 2. Logan River Canals .............. 42 3 Land Ownership Along Logan and Richmond Canal .. l04 4 Call Decree Chart .............................. 166 5 Logan River water Distribution Schedules .... 169-71 6 Logan City with Boundaries of Seventh Ward ..... 186 7 Detail of Seventh Ward, with Inset ............. 195 8 city Lot Arrangements in Salt Lake City ........ 201 ABSTRACT Nature's Second Course: water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 by Kathryn T. Morse, Master of Arts Utah State University, 1992 Major Professor: Dr. Clyde A. Milner II Department: History vii .Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism and a strong sense of community. They encountered a specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and practices developed out of the complex interchanges between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between 1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture. The season-to-season workings of irrigation institutions that distributed water from the Logan River, whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal viii cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's collective construction and upkeep of canals. The democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A small group of elite town fathers held most of the responsibility for irrigation administration, and used their influence -in disputes over water. Those town fathers also tended to own more land than other irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity to the canals themselves. Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in 1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate a water distribution system that allowed for both the growth of local communities and for continued adherence to the basic religious principles on which the communities were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of the rise and fall of the water level in the river. Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems constituted an interesting example of the ways in which ix culture and the environment come together to shape natural resource use, especially in the arid regions of the American west. (234 pages) CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION "I had my garden spot surveyed this day[.] Agnes was very sick."l So wrote Mormon settler and diarist John Borrowman on Tuesday, May 28, 1850. As of that date, Borrowman, a Scottish immigrant, had lived in Salt Lake City for just over a year and a half, and had been married for sixteen months. Given the crushing load of labor involved in establishing a home, clearing, fencing, plowing, and watering his land, and contributing to community projects, it is no wonder that Borrowman kept his . journal entries short. His brief words revealed much about his world, however. They spoke particularly to the crucial place of irrigation water in that world. Borrowman summed up the following day with equal brevity: "I watered my land this morning[i] William Park was born at a quarter to three 0' clock in the morning. ,,2 The order of his comments is telling. Though his wife had been in labor the previous day and most of the night, and had given birth to his first child, William Park Borrowman, I John Borrowman Journal, Extracts 1846-1860, 28 May 1850, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 3, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 2 Borrowman Journal, 29 May 1850. early that morning, he noted first that he had irrigated his farmland. 2 John Borrowman's conflation of those two events, the birth of his son and the watering of his land, spoke to the importance of irrigation water in his family's life, and in the life of early Mormon communities in utah. Not only did the watering of land merit frequent mention in daily records of individual and collective activities, but any work involving water and water ditches got top billing over young William Borrowman's tersely heralded arrival. The contrasting of these two events in a simple record of a single day pointed as· well to the complementary nature of the two acts. In bringing a child into the world of Salt Lake city in 1850, and in bringing water to their newly acquired farm plot, John and Agnes Borrowman took two closely linked steps toward the fulfillment of their earthly mission. That mission was to create a Mormon civilization in the valleys at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. They had to people what seemed an endless wilderness with like-minded servants of God, and they had to support their families with the resources that God had provided them in this new Zion. To give the watering of land and a birth equal weight, then, was no outlandish literary act. Water held a crucial place in the Mormon physical and spiritual 3 world. It symbolized the baptism of new members into the spiritual community, and it made food production possible. Folklorist Barre Toelken, in his work on the folklore of water in Mormon Utah, notes that as in the irrigation of an arid land, "so in baptism is water a mediator between life and death, a concept richly dramatized in many Mormon legends. "3 water held great meaning and power in 19th- and early 20th-century Mormon communities, as it does in the present. The structure of water flow in those communities reflected the fundamental tensions between individual gain and collective progress, both spiritual and material, that underlay Mormon culture. It reflected as well the patriarchal essence of that culture. Those two components of the Mormon world, the constant struggle for balance between the individual and the community, and the rule of the fathers, in family, community, and religion, were as evident in the social mechanisms of water use as in any other aspect of community life. The management of irrigation water by local canal companies provided a forum for expressions of the purpose and meaning of Mormon community, and of the place of that community in both the physical environment and the 3 Barre Toelken, "The Folklore of water in the Mormon West'," Northwest Folklore 7 (Spring 1989): 10. 4 spiritual universe. w~ter and its management were crucial not only to the material survival and prosperity of the town, but also to the residents' understanding of their individual and collective roles in the fulfillment of the Mormon mission. This thesis will explore the connections between water, religion, community, and nature along the Logan River in Cache Valley, Utah, from settlement in 1860 through the 1916 community-wide adjudication of water rights [see Figure 1]. The events of those years are informed by both earlier and later stages of Mormon settlement, as evident in John Borrowman's journal, and thus I consider examples of water use from widely varying moments of Utah's settlement. Though the management and infrastructure of water use changed over this 1860-1916 time-span, and continued to change thereafter, the Logan irrigators' tenacious commitment to traditional practices and institutions during this period indicated the cultural importance of a uniquely Mormon way of distributing water. In claiming that water held "cultural importance" in Mormon Utah, that water use was itself "cultural," I seek more than historical proof of the obvious. I investigate rather the detailed and subtle ways in which culture--the ever-shifting mixture of religious belief, social and economic structure, material subsistence, family and community life, divisions of labor, written and oral .... '1 \A q, ~~ Figure 1. Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, from The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956). ~. 01 6 traditions, and worldview--shaped the use of natural resources. All natural resource use is cultural, but the connections between nature and culture, and the ways in which culture mediates between human communities and the natural environment, vary widely, even within a single region or state. A detailed consideration of these connections from a cultural standpoint, as a case study of the interactions between nature and culture, is justified by the unique world of Mormon water use. Over the last few decades, growing numbers of historians have turned their attention to the place of water in the American West, and in the Mormon West as well. 4 Donald Worster's 1985 book, Rivers of Empire: water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, is perhaps the most provocative of these recent works. It is 4 The list is extensive, but includes: Robert G. Dunbar, Forging New Rights in Western Waters (Lincoln, 1983); Norris Hundley, jr., Water and the West: The Colorado River and the Politics of Water in the West (Berkeley, 1975); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles' Water Sqpply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley, 1982); Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall .Rejoice: Conflict, Growth, and Justice in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (Berkeley, 1984); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1986); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York, 1900); and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire; water, Aridity & The Growth of The American West (New York, 1985). in part a moral condemnation of the destruction that the hydraulic society of the modern West has visited upon rivers that were once natural systems, and upon communities that once felt some connection to those rivers. Worster defines three modes of societal water control: the local SUbsistence mode; the agrarian state mode; and the one currently operating in most western communities, the capitalist state mode. s Worster characterizes the early Mormon SUbsistence mode as an admirable monument to religious zeal, as an example of a 7 good fit between ideology and environment, and as evidence of an underlying, dictatorial church hierarchy. Mormon water systems were certainly all of those things, but they were much more as well. Worster only skims the surface of what is to be learned from a close examination of the local SUbsistence mode of water control in utah. This is not surprising, as neither utah nor SUbsistence water use are his main topic in Rivers of Empire. His discussion of the capitalist state mode of water development, however, by providing a contrast to local SUbsistence water systems, underlines much that is important about water in Mormon communities. The West's hydraulic society, according to Worster, S Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water. Aridity & The Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 31. 8 is built on "a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature. ,,6 That relationship with nature is evident in the infrastructure of dams, canals, and aqueducts, monolithic concrete fortresses which proclaim humankind's domination of, and separation from, the natural resources that support their consumer-oriented, socially divided culture. Water in these canals and behind these dams is not part of a natural system, but rather, in Worster's words, "simplified, abstracted water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to raise food, fill pipes, and make money.,,7 In evoking the profound alienation he perceives between the human community and water, Worster describes the Friant-Kern Canal, which waters the agribusiness empire of California's Central Valley: Along the Friant-Kern Canal, as along many others like it, tall chain-link fences run on either side, sealing the ditch off from stray dogs, children, fishermen (there are no fish anyway), solitary thinkers, lovers, swimmers, loping hungry coyotes, migrating turtles, indeed from all of nature and human life ..•• 8 At its core, then, Rivers of Empire asserts that the way in which any community in an arid environment controls its distribution of water reflects its social and 6 Worster, Rivers' of Empire,S. 7 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S. 8 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S. 9 political structure, and the fundamental tenets of its attitudes toward nature. In Worster's words, "the social order, the shape of western community ••• is reflected in the waters of the ditch. ,,9 That assertion, and those reflections, are nowhere more evident than in the Logan River communities of Cache Valley between 1860 and 1916. The following chapters will explore the social order reflected in the workings of village ditches, first from the wide-angled perspective of the Mormon spiritual worldview, then from the nearer vantage of the season-to-season workings of two major canal companies, and finally from a close-up look at water use on village house lots and in gardens. While Mormon water use was a thoroughly cultural activity, it involved nature as well. The development of irrigation institutions and distributions systems that met the agricultural demands of the villages involved a constant struggle to fit those demands into the limits of the water supplied by the Logan River. The Euro-American settlers who first diverted the waters of the Logan River alienated and abstracted that river from its "first" or original "state of nature," just as other westerners wrought havoc on the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia, and Colorado. 9 Worster, River of Empire, 5. 10 Cache Valley Mormons also "commoditized" irrigation water, bringing it within a system of economic exchange that defined and re-defined its value by different, and changing, criteria. The Utahns turned the river into networks of canals, and attempted to alter the annual cycles of natural water flow to match the cycles of agricultural demand and community water use. In Logan, Utah, however, this creation of a "second" nature, a second cycle of water flow, took place on a much less disruptive scale than elsewhere in the west. Mormon culture and the Cache Valley environment were different from other western cultures and places. The Mormon system of re-distributing river flow across time and space was thus distinctive. water in small Mormon communities was not "rigidly separated" from the human communities through which it ran by artificial cycles of dam-released flow, by steel and concrete, or by intellectual constructs of water as commodity or as capital. The system of exchange worked out by Logan water users--what and when they traded amongst themselves for water--proved less rigid, less cash-based, less technologically complex, than those of other, and later, western communities. Mormons certainly foisted intellectual constructs onto their water supply, and certainly altered its cycles of flow, but they were constructs and cycles of a different kind, based on their 11 drive for material success within the boundaries of community tenets. Far from alienating water from its own "nature" or from human society, Mormon settlers welcomed irrigation water into their communities, where it flowed in open streams down ditches and gutters, through yards and parks, providing long corridors of green vegetation, and lofting islands of cool air into the summer heat. The Latter-day saints filled their towns with the sound of running water. water, at least in some utah communities, had a meaning far different from that of water in other parts of the American west. This much is clear in the contrast between village canals and the hydraulic nightmare Worster describes in California. Where Rivers of Empire tells the story of Big Twentieth-Century Water, this thesis examines a smaller, more obscure and out-of-the-way genre of western water history, one of small communities using a small river to small ends. Water formed crucial, dynamic connections between members of those communities, and between the community and the natural environment. Those connections to water grew out of the unique culture that the Latter-day Saints developed in reaction to a specific western environment. Water joined them to nature and to each other in ways which evidenced not a timeless harmony between "man" and "nature," but rather the disjunctions 12 and tensions inherent in every attempt to shape nature to human designs, as well as the tensions within human communities created by such shapings. This discussion of Mormon water-use, then, is at its base a cultural study, an attempt to sketch the ways in which culture is both shaped by and reflected in the use of natural resources, and the ways in which culture can in turn influence social decisions concerning nature as a resource. 13 CHAPTER II NATURE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH In the villages of Cache Valley, Utah, water was part both of a natural system--the river--and a social, religious, and even spiritual system--Mormon culture. That culture combined elements of Jeffersonian agrarianism with a peculiar brand of millennial fervor. To find the place of water in this spiritual universe, one must follow its flow into and out of Mormon agrarianism. As the vanguard of Euro-American settlement in the Great Basin, the Utah migrants of the 1840s, '50s, and '60s brought with them the basic tenets of the American agrarian myth. Like other Americans, they held that the Biblical injunction to "replenish the earth, and subdue it" could best be fulfilled though agriculture. Through farming, God's true servants could remake the New World into a second garden of Eden. In his late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings, Thomas Jefferson combined Biblical agrarianism with the Enlightenmentinspired conviction that only the yeoman farmer, dependent solely on the soil and his own initiative, could properly participate in a democratic society. Jefferson wrote that "[t]hose who labor in the earth are the chosen people of 14 God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for sUbstantial and genuine v1. rt ue .... ,,1 This agrarian myth prevailed throughout America in the 19th century. It had particular power in regard to the American West, as established by Henry Nash smith in his classic work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. smith expanded Jefferson's general agrarian myth to include the "myth of the garden," the idea that the transformation of the continent should result in a settled pastoral landscape. "The master symbol of the garden," smith wrote, "embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow. ,,2 The Latter-day saints adhered to this garden-myth with a tenacity unmatched by any other group of Euro-American settlers. 3 They focused on the canonization and fulfillment of agriculture ideals with 1 As quoted in Donald Henriques Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism: A Touch of the Mountain Sod" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1980), 3. 2 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 123. 3 See Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 136, on the Mormon affinity for the "controlling images" of the agrarian myth. unprecedented energy. Generic American agrarianism deteriorated into a fuzzy secularity as the 19th century progressed, but Utah Mormons harnessed the fervor of puritanism, and of 1840s revivalism, to propel agrarian beliefs to new heights of piety. Historian Charles S. 15 Peterson described Mormon agrarian belief as "[c]osmic in its breadth," a conviction that: Man and the world in which he lived were in a wicked and ungodly state. The redemption of the righteous was the first imperative and implied the second, the redemption of the earth. 4 Brigham Young, who led the Mormon migration to Utah, with his fellow Mormon leaders incorporated this version of Christian agrarianism into scriptural texts. Their writings reveal an intensely practical agrarian faith, according to which human beings sought not to improve themselves for a non-earthly afterlife, but rather to improve the earth as they improved themselves. with the resurrection of Christ, they believed, the earth itself, the quality of the climate, soil, and crops would change, assuming an Edenic state. s Donald H. Dyal, whose 1980 study outlined the tenets of Mormon agrarianism, recorded that early Mormon leaders preached "the regeneration of .4 Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900 (Tucson, 1973), 7. S Parley Pratt, a Church apostle, as cited in Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 127. 16 the earth not only as a spiritual event, but also a physical or more specifically agricultural event."6 Thus Mormon farmers, like American farmers across the Midwest and the Great Plains, saw their work as essential to the creation of a good place, a democratic place, a place safe from the despotism of foreigners, the depredations of natives, and the unprincipled machinations of speculators. Agricultural labor was indeed the key element in the creation of a godly place in utah. Farm work provided the Mormons with their only true means of finding a place in God's kingdom.' This agricultural redemption of the earth, according to Leonard J. Arrington, the pre-eminent historian of Mormon Utah, constituted one of the seven basic principles of Mormon theology. such redemption, defined as lithe orderly development of local resources," implied that "[m]aking the waste places blossom as a rose, and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits, was more than an economic necessity; it was a form of religious worship."8 In previous stages of American settlement, the pursuit of . an ideal society peopled by yeoman farm 6 Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 128. , Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 133. 8 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. 1830-1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 25-26. 17 families had required only hard work, perseverance, a strong faith in God's obvious favor toward a white, democratic civilization, and, of course, an abundance of fertile land. In Utah, that was not enough. About 15 inches of rain fell annually on the benchlands and valley floors of the sloping foothills of the Wasatch Front. Even with their hard work, steel-willed leadership, and unswerving confidence in God's favor, the Utah Saints also needed water. The arid environment provided the backdrop against which Utah settlers developed a strong set of connections between the creation of ideal agricultural communities and the bringing of irrigation water to their farms. The deterministic power of aridity frequently plagues students of American western history. Did western history unfold along certain lines because the land received less than twenty inches of annual rainfall and thus prohibited humid-land agriculture? Donald Worster and Wallace stegner, two of the finest scholars of the West, see aridity as an essential factor in the region's history. The West is as it is, stegner declares, because "Anyone who wants to live in the West has to manage water to some degree." They must obey a law of water scarcity, and live 18 "within the country's rules of sparseness of mobility.,,9 In the Mormon west the water question is heightened by the unique characteristics of utah as a sub-region. The saints' West sprang up differently from everything that came after. Does aridity account for the Mormons' distinctive modes of settlement? Is water the absolute key to understanding Mormon Utah? Worster, stegner, and others who have addressed that question have established beyond all doubt that the Mormon's beliefs concerning their arid environment are as, or more, important in understanding Utah's history, than the lack of rainfall itself. Utah Mormons incorporated their encounters with the arid Great Basin into their history, their belief system, and their vision of themselves, and those images of dryness reveal much about the role of water in the Mormon past. The creation of an Edenic agricultural civilization in a barren desert was a central myth of 19th- and early 20th-century Utah Mormon culture. That myth grew out of the parallels between the saints' migration to Utah and the Biblical exodus, and out of the Mormon leaders' post-settlement exaggerations of the aridity of the land along the Wasatch Front. It turned on the belief that the east 9 Wallace stegner, The American West as LiVing Space (Ann Arbor, 1987), 36. 19 side of the Salt Lake Valley was so dry and infertile that it could not have supported just any group of EuroAmerican settlers; only the chosen could have built an oasis in that environment. "'I am thankful to a fulness [sic]," declared Young in 1847, "that the Lord has brought us to these barren valleys, to these sterile mountains, to this desolate waste, where only the Saints can or would live .... "w This exaggeration began as a tool for group motivation and celebration, a way of encouraging settlers to conquer new deserts by invoking wastelands already banished. 11 It became, however, a fundamental building block of collective Mormon identity: the belief that the first settlers had brought water to an unproductive land and made the world anew. In reality, as geographer Richard Jackson has proven, the first utah settlers settled an admittedly challenging environment that was in no way barren. They had planned it that way. Brigham Young reviewed all available information on the Great Salt Lake region prior to the beginning of the Mormons' 1847 overland trek. He read trappers' and explorers' accounts of the region, w Journal of Discourses, 4 (Liverpool, 1847), 344, as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 198. 11 See Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality: Environmental Perception of the Mormons, 1840-1865, An Historical Geosophy" (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1970), 84, 188. 20 which described it in turn as possessing "more than ordinary fertility and productiveness," as "most beautiful country ..• intersected by a number of transparent streams. ,,12 Explorer and legendary self-promoter John C. Fremont wrote of the northern Salt Lake Valley that "[t]he bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient; the soil good, and well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to such an elevated region •••• "u Migrants to the Wasatch Front in the 1850s and 1860s did not settle a parched land, but rather a "narrow oasis" in the foothills of the Wasatch mountains. w The initial wave of settlers, Jackson established, described their new home not as a forbidding wasteland, but as abundant and fertile, well-suited to agricultural pursuits. They found an environment fortuitously suited to their understanding of how nature should support 12 On the Bear River Valley, Lanford W. Hastings, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California (1845; repr. Princeton, NJ, 1932), 19; and fur trader Daniel Potts in Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley (Barre, MA, 1960), 63, both as quoted in Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 67, 74. 13 John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains and to Oregon and Northern California (Washington, DC, 1845), 144, as quoted in Jackson, . "Myth and Reality," 81. 14 Dan L. Flores, "Islands in the Desert: An Environmental Interpretation of the Rocky Mountain Frontier" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1978), 238. certain kinds of community life. surveying numerous diaries kept by first generation settlers, Jackson found few if any references to the environment as a "desert" a "wasteland," or "barren."lS Instead, Jackson concluded, 21 Brigham Young and his fellow leaders fostered a set of myths in the years following successful settlement that caused the larger Mormon community to integrate into their own history and consciousness a conviction that they had, with the assistance of divine power, transformed a desert into an oasis. 16 The Journal of Discourses, a collection of the writings of Mormon leaders, offered convincing examples of the instillation of the belief that the Wasatch Front had, in 1847, been little more than, in the words of George A. smith, "a desert, containing nothing but a few bunches of dead grass, and crickets enough to fence the land."n This idea that the well-governed, hard-working populace, and the green, thriving, well-watered fields could not have been possible in the desert without divine intervention held fast in Mormon culture, to be applied again and again as settlers struck out for new colonies lS Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 135, 134, 172. 16 See Jackson's discussion of these myths in "Myth and Reality," 190. n Journal of Discourses, 1 (Liverpool, 1852), 44, as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 190. 22 beyond the core region. Non-Mormon visitors enhanced the mythology. After glimpsing the verdant valleys and comparing them with other western locales, travelers came away with a distinct sense of the Mormons as a favored population. 18 God's particular care in fostering the saints' survival has remained a viable tenet of Mormon history for over a century.~ Irrigation was the single activity most key to the transformation of the landscape from which these environmental myths were formed. It was also the key to the actual work done by settlers in the building of the Mormon kingdom. The di-version of water from mountain streams to gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures was important to the Mormon understanding of the human place in nature, and of nature in history. As decades passed and the memories of those who had actually seen presettlement Utah faded, the power over nature achieved by both God and Mormon settlers continued to increase. Pioneer history moved beyond the litany of the blossoming desert toward a belief in the actual improvement of the Utah climate itself. As Great Plains settlers believed that rain followed the plow, so Mormons came to believe that irrigation enhanced river flow. A writer in the 18 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 207. 19 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 166. 23 Millennial star, a Mormon periodical claimed in 1884 that "Many streams have been greatly increased in volume, and in some places new springs have burst forth in the desert ..•• The rainfall has greatly increased in some localities. ,,20 water was a dynamic participant in the mythic transformation of the desert into a garden. Each Mormon irrigator, from 1847 on, saw himself or herself to be participating in, and re-enacting, that transformation. The water itself connected them to their higher religious mission. The Utah settlers' administration of natural resources, most notably land, timber, and water, embodied other theological aspects of the Mormon belief system. Mormons held that the earth's resources belonged to God, and were held by human beings only in a temporary state of stewardship. Stewardship meant that the church, through the community, allotted each individual only the amount of land and resources that he could use for the benefit of the community. Like the redemption of the earth, stewardship comprised a basic tenet governing Mormon Utah. 21 Collective stewardship as expressed in Mormon Utah 20 J. H. Ward, "Utah, Past and Present," Millennial star 46 (1884): 520-22, as quoted in Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission, 158. 21 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25. 24 implied a collective or cooperative mastery over nature. Because they were stewards of their land and resources, rather than outright individual owners, Mormon settlers bore a specific set of obligations to the community and to the church. Only through full and beneficial use of the earth's bounty, they believed, could the kingdom grow. Each individual, in maximizing the production of a single family's allotment, could support that growth. In addition, ten percent of a family's annual production was given to the Church to support its activities. Mormon communitarianism demanded that the interests of the community come before those of the individual. That collective legacy has come under much scholarly scrutiny in recent decades, as historians have tested the degree to which Mormon communities actually practiced the communal ideals that they preached. The debate over communalism has included considerations of the nature of Mormon self-sufficiency, of their system of economic distribution, and of their modes of economic production. In a 1978 study of the political economy of Spring City, a central utah town, Michael scott Raber contrasted local modes of production with modes of distribution. Raber worked from the premise that where village- and territorywide distribution of farm and village products were 25 communitarian, modes of production were not.n Raber concluded that the individual family, not the community, formed the basic unit of production and of the theological quest for salvation through labor on the land. Donald oyal reached a similar conclusion in his study of agrarian values in Mormonism, noting that, in Mormon communities, U[t]he individual or individual family is the basal unit of all activity.un The family existed as a self-contained production unit and a microcosm of ·God's universal family, but according to religious and economic ideals, the domestic unit was expected to work and produce not primarily not only for their own benefit, but for that of the collective as well. In contrasting the family with the community as important utah institutions, Michael Raber raised a number of important points concerning the linkage between agricultural labor, nature, and community. Raber claimed that the Mormon settlement system, with centralized direction of colonization and collective ownership and development of natural resources for the common good, did not persist beyond the most initial stages of the colonization process. Those early years saw the 22 Michael Scott Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978), 11. n Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 163. 26 conversion of common, public resources into privately held allotments. Those allotments became the domain of individual households, and those households were responsible for the production of most of the goods necessary to sustain themselves. In Mormon communities, Raber contends, there were two levels of production: the household level, and the suprahousehold, or community level.u As a single entity, the community cleared fields, built fences, and dug irrigation canals. These were not tasks of actual economic production.~ These centrally organized projects, Raber points out, were for the most past one-time efforts to create the infrastructure of production, which would then support each family's independent quest to support itself. The individual laborer contributed his time and effort to these collective tasks only to the extent that he would personally benefit. In fact, the individual was assigned community labor--a length of fence or a stretch of canal-in direct proportion to the size and demands of his individual holdings. In Raber's version of Mormon village labor, an aggregate group of individuals sacrificed fragments of their valuable time to assist in the breaking U Raber, "Religious Policy and Local Production," 288. ~ Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 289. up of common resources into usable pieces. Once the fences were built and the ditches dug, each family could depend on protected fields and a sufficient allotment of water. Little need remained for further communal labor. Raber concludes that the most striking feature of the Mormon political economy was not its cooperative nature but "the relative lack of corporate arrangements for production at levels of operation above or beyond the household, and the self-conscious containment within the household of as much labor as needed on individual farm tasks .... ,,26 Raber's analysis of these underlying economic patterns rightly emphasizes the importance of family in 27 the Mormon community. Like John Borrowman and his journal record of his first son's birth, the individual utah settler understood and expressed his or her attachments to God, land, and community through the lens of family. Raber does not consider, however, the ways in which the individual family remained connected to the community, especially to its ideals, its work, and its resources, after the initial community projects were completed. One of the ways they remained connected was through their continued use of irrigation water. water in Mormon 26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 288. 28 communities flowed out of canyons, which were public spaces, through main-line canals, which were owned and managed by community groups, and, finally, into fields and yards, which were worked by families for family survival. water connected those different realms, and thus connected families to the community. It also caused conflicts between families and the community. The larger purpose of the irrigation system, as Raber pointed out, was indeed to bring water to family spaces, to private spaces.v But it passed out of nature and through the community to get to those spaces, and thus both nature and community played a role in family water use. In addition, Mormon family activities of building and beautifying a home and garden, and raising children to further the religious community, were inherently connected to larger communal goals. Raber's conclusion that the collective construction of economic infrastructure of production was a one-time happening after which the individual family took over the bulk of economic activity is tempered by his admission that water was a resource different in quality and use from land, animals, timber, homes, and churches. The creation of an irrigation system did not immediately produce anything, but instead created a means for v Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 190. 29 producing from fields, gardens, and orchards. "The difference was," Raber admitted, "that irrigation involved continuing renewal of this act of creation, while the less fluid elements of crop production did not. ,,28 Community irrigation construction efforts could last for years, and the repairs could last forever. In this "continual renewal" of the "act of creation," the annual planning and carrying out of the repair and use of the irrigation canals and ditches, lay the crux of these linkages between individual Mormon families and the Mormon spiritual universe. Cooperative economic activity sometimes did decline sharply after the early years of settlement, but each individual family remained tied to the legacy of that cooperativism by continuing ties to irrigation systems, to which they still contributed labor or taxes, and from which they drew water. Those ties to their community were not always welcome, or peaceful, or productive, but they remained. And every spring, with the start of the irrigation season, Mormons re-affirmed the connections between their labor, their community, their mastery of nature in the proving of God's bounty, and their redemption of the earth. Water and work gave substance to these connections. 28 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 289. 30 Mastery of nature and the purifying of the land served as powerful motivating ideals, but most Mormon families devoted their lives to muddy physical labor. The history of that labor is distinctive not because of the doctrine of stewardship or the injunction to master nature, but because of the clarity and faith with which the people themselves understood stewardship, mastery, neighborly relations, and the day-to-day meaning of their work. Henry Ballard, a Cache Valley settler, reported a gathering of neighbors in the "well crowded" Logan schoolhouse on the undoubtedly chilly evening of February 4, 1860. "It was a time of rejoicing," Ballard wrote. "Brother Hammon[d] Advised us not to forget our Dutys when the Spring opened but to be Alive to our Duty at all times in the Kanyon and in our fields and in all our movements.,,29 Forty-five years later an editorial in the agricultural periodical Deseret Farmer claimed that "One of the greatest joys of the farmer's life should come from a realization of the relation of his work to that of his Creator. He is co-operating with nature--which is the handiwork of God--and from lifeless, . useless things he creates articles for which a hungry, dependent world is 29 Henry Ballard Journal, 4 February 1860, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vols. 1-2, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 31 longing. ,,30 That Henry Ballard and his fellow saints strove to be alive to their duty while cutting timber or digging ditches, or that they thought about their duty to their community and their God, gave them a connection to the land and water with which they worked. They understood themselves to be cooperating with nature, even when they had no conception of the autonomous ecological processes which they interrupted. Their labor had layers of symbolic meaning; like water, it tied them to nature, to each other, and to God. Physical labor, of course, had much to do with the bringing of water to the newly carved out croplands along the Wasatch benches. The act of working together to build and maintain ditches reinforced the connections between nature, community, and the religious mission. Long after utah was integrated into mainstream America and its culture of rampant individuality, irrigation systems continued to require the aggregate labor of individual water users, and continued to reinforce those linkages. The paradoxes of being an individual both separate from the community, and connected by labor and water to the physical community and the spiritual universe, permeated 30 "The Other Side of Farming," Deseret Farmer 1 (15 June 1905). Mormon life. Those paradoxes found one avenue of expression in the myriad uses of water. 32 33 CHAPTER III FROM LOGAN RIVER TO LOGAN TOWN Prior to 1859, water flowed out of the high limestone confines of Logan canyon and into Cache Valley without crossing any major thresholds other than the gradual slope of the valley floor . . with rapid Mormon settlement in the early 1860s, the Logan River became part of a new ecology, a new system of encounters and exchanges in which the river itself played a crucial part. with its shaping of, and integration into, the villages of the east side of the valley, the river was channelled in new directions, for new purposes, across new thresholds. As the villages of Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield sprang up, and as their citizens dug canals between them, the water flowed out of the canyon, a "natural" realm, into the towns, which were spiritual communities with a specific millennialist purpose, and a distinctive physical structure which reflected that spiritual goal. Within those communities, water diverted from the Logan River flowed between the larger social world of the village into the smaller domains of individual families. In doing so it flowed from the patriarchal world where male heads of household worked with, controlled, and directed water, to 34 the familial world of the house and garden. In the main "trunk" canals which crossed the benches, pastures, and grain fields, water flowed between the separate villages, connecting them in ways no other shared resource could. The Logan River possessed natural characteristics that attracted Mormon settlers and structured the ways in which they used water. In comparison with other drainages, it was easily exploited. Any understanding of community water use must first take the river itself, and the landscape, into account. From its headwaters northeast of the town of Logan, the Logan River runs twenty-odd miles through the Bear River mountains, a spur of the Wasatch mountains, and down Logan Canyon to the floor of Cache Valley, where it joins the Bear River. The river drains 223 square miles of watershed, a topography that ranges from elevations of just over 4,000 feet above sea level to nearly 10,000 feet.l The Bear River mountains are predominantly limestone, with sandstone and dolomite in places. None of those rock formations readily absorb water. 2 Large glacial deposits at the center of the watershed do absorb water, and their storage capacity 1 Frank W. Haws, "A critical Analysis of Water Rights and Institutional Factors and their Effect on the Development of Logan River" (Master's thesis, utah state University, 1965), 4. 2 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 9. 35 supplies the river's continuous flow. 3 The geology of the region thus insures that most of the precipitation that falls on the watershed ends up in the river. The key climatological aspect of the valley's dependence on the Logan River watershed is the sharp discrepancy in precipitation between the valley floor and the nearby mountains. Annual precipitation in Cache Valley averages just over sixteen inches. The high peaks of the Bear River range just east of the valley, average over fifty inches in a year, most of it in the winter, in the form of snow. Because the Logan watershed is, in the words of water economist Frank Haws, a "tightly closed hydrologic system," it allows minimum loss or gain of water to or from invisible sources. The river thus efficiently conveys a sUbstantial volume of water out of the ' inaccessible mountains and canyon and onto the valley floor. There the annual surface runoff is quite easily harnessed by hand-dug irrigation systems. 4 The keys to that water management are the seasonal patterns of precipitation and river flow, which must be manipulated to provide water according to human, rather than natural, patterns. After emerging from the mountains at the mouth of 3 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11. 4 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11. 36 Logan Canyon, the river cuts through the benches on the eastern slopes of the valley, and across the flat valley floor, meeting the Bear River in the middle of lowlying wetlands at the valley's center. Like the Great Salt Lake Valley, Cache Valley is a legacy of Lake Bonneville, the great inland sea of which Salt Lake is a surviving remnant. About 18,000 years ago, the ancient lake reached its highest level at an elevation of just over 5,000 feet. Streams entering the lake formed deltas of sand and gravel which became high benches at the mouths of canyons; as the lake's level dropped, new deltas formed out of "sandy, porous chestnut soils, fertile and rich in lime."s This successive formation of deltas and fans at different levels left a series of flat, raised steps that climbed down the valley's walls. As it receded further, the lake left layers of alluvial deposits which now form the valley floor. 6 The nineteenth-century Mormon immigrants settled in the transition zone of the Wasatch mountain range, an area environmental historian Dan Flores characterizes as a "narrow, rich, alluvial piedmont of fans, deltas, and S Dan L. Flores, "Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review 7 (Winter 1983): 328. 6 A. J. Simmonds, "Lake Bonneville Sculpted Cache Valley Landscape," [Logan, UT] Herald Journal, 26 March 1989, Bridgerland section, 90-91. 37 terraces, through which meandered the sweet clear water of the mountains."7 Receiving between 13 and 18 inches of rain and snow in a year, this corridor of fertile soils was, in Cache Valley even more than along the Great Salt Lake, particularly suited to Mormon social, religious, and economic goals of agrarian communitarianism, selfsufficiency, and isolation. As settlers gravitated toward the confluence of water, timber, fertile soil, and grazing bottoms at the mouths of the canyons, they remade the transition zone into a Mormon settlement zone. The villages that the Utah pilgrims located on and near the Logan river, like others along the Wasatch Front, evidenced a perceptive environmental strategy, a consciousness of the value of the resources available in those particular places. That consciousness was reflected in the organization and form of the villages themselves, as well as in their location against the dramatic backdrop of the Wasatch foothills. The structure of Mormon communities, like the structure of the Logan River watershed, or of the soils of Cache Valley's alluvial benches, is crucial to an understanding of the flow of water between the two. The Mormon village, according to Leonard J. Arrington, held a venerable place, with the redemption of the earth and the 7 Flores, "Zion in Eden," 327. 38 stewardship of property, as an underlying economic ideal of the Saints' mission, one of the key foundation stones in the edifice of the Kingdom. 8 The village pattern was based on the Plat of the city of Zion, a plan first put forth by church founder Joseph smith in the early 1830s when he planned settlements for Jackson County, Missouri. smith's plan called for a mile square village with blocks of ten acres divided into twenty lots, each a half acre in size. streets ran east/west or north/south. House lots included room for a garden and lawn, or orchard. Farmland was located outside the residential areas of the town. 9 This Missouri-born plan continued to guide village planning once the Mormons left the Midwest for Utah. Though conceived long before the saints' plans to move to the arid west, the four-square, compact village surrounded by crop fields proved, as Leonard Arrington pointed out, "peculiarly adapted" to Mormon goals for life in the Great Basin. 10 The tightly concentrated housing pattern kept settlers close together, providing for a wealth of social and religious activities, easy regulation of community projects, and collective defense against displaced groups of Shoshone-Bannocks. In addition, Arrington noted, the 8 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24-25. 9 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 10. 10 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24. village as it developed on the Wasatch Front and throughout Utah, "permitted effective irrigation culture."n 39 The compact settlement pattern that characterized Mormon villages, though evolved from ideal images of early New England towns, contributed significantly to the success of Utah irrigation. with homes and gardens concentrated in a small area, a few main canals branching from the local river were split into networks of smaller ditches. These in turn brought water to each family, with the water itself traveling as little distance as possible. The same main canals could carry water to agricultural fields both before and after they passed through the residential areas of the village. Those same canals could continue beyond the boundaries of the village and its fields to serve the next village to the north or south along the base of the foothills. The Mormon village pattern thus encouraged efficiency of ditch-digging and of water use, though efficiency was not always the result. The importance of water and its flow within the village grid itself will be taken up in the next chapter. Water outside that grid, in canals and between villages, held different meanings. Samuel Fortier, a hydrographer and engineer who n Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25. 40 surveyed Cache Valley's water resources in the late 1890s, drew a detailed map of the region, showing the irrigation canals and ditches and the land they watered [Figures 2, 2AJ. Fortier's map demonstrates the marked contrast between the path of Logan River canals between the separate village grids of Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield, and their trajectories within the villages themselves. Outside the rigid geometry of the towns, the canals looked somewhat like tributaries to the rivers, curving with the topography of the valley's sloping floor. within the gridS, especially in Logan, the canals followed the straight lines and right angles the village streets, conforming to the order that the Mormons brought to their wilderness. The flow of water outside towns and between towns looked different, looked more river-like, more "natural." The canals' curving paths appeared somewhat analogous to that of the river itself. Folklorist Austin Fife noticed the contrasts between natural patterns of river flow and strict angles of the village grid. He wrote in 1979 that "the rectangular grids followed by the fenced property lines and roads did not synchronize with the terrain features that had to be followed in order to always keep the naturally flowing water where it could I Figure 2. Cache Valley Basin with Inset [see Figure 2A] Showing Logan River Canals, Including Logan and Richmond, and Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canals. From Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley (Logan, 1897). i! ~ ..... 42 N 43 reach the cultivatable land."n Beyond village boundaries, irrigation canals were more like rivers. They were, in fact, new, human-made rivers, directed toward community ends, but eternally plagued by non-human nemeses such as mountain topography, muskrats, mudslides, moss, and floods. In a recent history of Chicago, western and environmental historian William Cronon uses the Hegelian and Marxist ideas of "first nature" and "second nature" to explore how 19th-century Chicagoans defined, and redefined, the "natural. "13 In Chicago, "first nature," the original, naturally created landscape, embodied a range of different possibilities open to Euro-American settlers and developers. out of "their vision of what it should be" early Chicagoans built on top of that first landscape, "[a] kind of 'second nature,' designed by people and 'improved' toward human ends. "14 In doing so, they imposed "their own order ••• on the world of first 12 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned, Horse Powered, Irrigated, Multiple Produce Farms of the Intermountain West," TS, 1979, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT, 13. 13 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), xvii. Nature's Metropolis explores the city's meteoric development through the transformation of its western hinterland, and in the commoditization of the goods--grain, wood, and meat--produced in that transformation. W Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 55-56. 44 nature ••.• ,,15 That human order remained "natural," though, because it conformed to human visions of what should happen in that particular place, the trajectory of the appropriate course of events. Furthermore, "second nature" so thoroughly obscured "first nature" that it took its place. That which was man-made was taken to be a gift of nature, so easily, so "naturally," had it arisen in nature's place. According to this idea of second nature, the railroads which passed through Chicago seemed natural. The flat landscape around the city and in it,s hinterland was "peculiarly suited" to railroads, much as the fringes of the Wasatch Front seemed so "naturally" adapted to compact Mormon villages and their irrigation systems. 16 That either of them--Chicago railroads or utah irrigation canals--sprang up and thrived, seemed entirely natural, as did their transformation of the surrounding landscape. In addition, Cronon points out, the bison and pine trees, which had once been part only of "first nature," became something entirely different when drawn into the humanconstructed world of "second nature. ,,17 They became commodities of the market, "things priced, bought, and 15 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 146. 16 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 72. n Cronan, Nature's Metropolis, 266. sold within a system of human exchange. ,,18 water in utah followed much the same path. 45 Cronon also proposes that the distance between first nature and second nature, is, in the history of Chicago and its hinterland, a measure of the movement from "local ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy. ,,19 In other words, the extent to which human construction of second nature obliterates first nature signals the degree of a place's integration into a larger economic system. It is that larger system, one of global markets, that redefines the "local" as something that is no longer local, that reshapes the first nature that made a city or a hinterland what it was to begin with, into something entirely different. Cronon's discussions of first and second nature, though focused on a topic far from Mormon irrigation canal systems, make a number of important points about any human manipulation of a natural landscape. First of all, the canals that Cache Valley Mormons built to carry water from the Logan River to their houses, yards, and fields constituted a form of second nature. They caused water to flow to places it had not flowed before, changing not only the n·ewly-watered land, but the river itself. To the 18 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 266. 19 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 267. 46 settlers who oversaw that process, the canals became, literally, second nature, an obvious, "natural" solution to their need to redistribute the river to meet human needs. The canals became elements of a landscape destined for a full-fledged flowering of the Mormon kingdom and for the fulfillment of the land's bounteous agricultural and "natural" potential. The water that flowed out of the Logan River and into irrigation canals was thus redefined, culturally, and economically. It was made part of a unique system of human exchange, given all of the spiritual, cultural, and historical meanings that Mormons bestowed upon water. The water of the Logan, as it flowed through Cache Valley villages, became part of a second nature. It was irrevocably separated from the water that continued on, uncaptured, across the valley to the Bear River, and into the Great Salt Lake. As irrigation water, it was measured, timed, commoditized, distributed, stored, and fought over in ways that changed its meaning and identity. While irrigation canals formed a vital and distinct second nature, imposed by human artifice, they did not subsume the Logan River itself. The Logan continued to flow, even if diminished, much as it .always had. First and second nature co-existed to a certain degree, both remaining visible, both struggling with the other to 47 assert its own order and dominance. According to Cronon's formulation, this "failure" of second nature to obliterate first nature was an indication of the enduring localism of this particular cultural and economic use of nature. In Cache Valley, second nature was built on top of first nature without causing first nature to be completely lost. Both "natures" were natural, but neither gained the upper hand, neither came to completely dominate the other. Mormon settlers lived and irrigated in Salt Lake Valley for a dozen years before Church President Brigham Young dispatched colonizers north to Cache Valley. Young's scouts had termed Cache "the most beautiful valley that they had seen," on an initial survey in August 1847 .20 Grazers took church cattle herds north to graze in Cache Valley in 1855, but harsh conditions--colder winters than the Salt Lake area--discouraged settlement until 1856, when Peter and Mary Ann Maughan and their family founded Wellsville. Skirmishes with Shoshone cattle rustlers and the threat from the federal army in the Utah War further delayed a proper foothold of villages W Thomas Bullock Pioneer Camp Journal No.2, 1847, quoted in Joel E. Ricks, Forms and Methods of Early Mormon Settlement in Utah and the Surrounding Region. 1847 to 1877 (Logan, UT, 1964), 43. until 1859. 21 Over 2,000 settlers, many of them northern European immigrants, flooded in over the next two years, establishing a string of towns at the base of the 48 mountains including Paradise, Millville, Logan, Hyde Park, Mendon, and Smithfield. This impressive rate of colonization continued through the early 1860s, with Logan reaching a population of 1,727 by 1870, and Smithfield of 676 by 1867.n That growth continued. Over 5,700 people lived in Logan by 1895, and over 1,400 in Smithfield. In only 35 years, 18,286 people settled in Cache Valley, rapidly transforming its landscape and the flow of water across that landscape. n When the newly arrived citizens of Logan first diverted the waters of the Logan River in mid-May of 1860, they baptized themselves and the river into a new set of hierarchies--beliefs, laws, and practices--concerning water use. The basic tenets of religious belief that 21 Ricks, FOrms and Methods of Early Mormon Settlement, 64-65; and Feramorz Young Fox, "The Mormon Land System: A Study of the Settlement and Utilization of Land Under the Direction of the Mormon Church" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932), 65. n Logan population figure from Haws, "Development of .Logan River," 42; Smithfield population figure from The History of Smithfield (Smithfield, UT, 1927), 8. n Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley, Utah Agricultural Experiment station Bulletin no. 50 (Logan, UT, 1897), 16. 49 influenced water use have been outlined, but the structure of actual irrigation practice that grew from those beliefs and from the settlers' goals for their community are of equal importance in unravelling the place of water in that community. The history of Utah irrigation institutions has been told numerous times since the late 19th century by skilled historians and engineers armed with massive documentary evidence of, and direct experience with, state-wide patterns of water administration.~ A firm consensus on the basic characteristics of the Mormon system runs through those histories. This consensus holds that Brigham Young formulated a water policy by combining the principle of divinely granted stewardship of the earth's resources with knowledge gained form Hispanic water systems. Drawing from those sources, he decreed that water was a public resource, owned in common by all ~ This work includes: Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in Utah (Baltimore, 1895); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York, 1900>'; George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York, 1920); Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigations Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment Stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1903); and John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the Evolution of Institutions Dealing with Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989). 50 members of the community.~ Water rights were grounded in the dual doctrines of beneficial" use and prior appropriation. The first to divert water from its natural course and put it to work in a manner useful to the community established rights to the amount diverted. Only a lapse of beneficial use abrogated those rights. Another key element of water use concerns the Mormon Church hierarchy, which controlled water rights until well into the twentieth century, and in informal ways does so today. As a result, "beneficial use" meant "beneficial" in the eyes of the church, beneficial to the progress of the community as they defined both "progress" and "community. ,,26 This meant that any use of water not sanctioned by the church could be relegated to secondary status. A. J. Simmonds, in his history of non-Mormon settlers in Cache Valley, described how this led, at least initially, to a segregation of agricultural pursuits. Mormons, with their community-constructed water canals, raised grain crops on irrigated farmland. Gentiles, ~ On the influence of Hispanic water law, Dan L. Flores, in "Zion in Eden," 330, noted that church leaders borrowed the idea of public ownership of water combined with priority rights to diversion from Hispanic communities of the Southwest. Richard Jackson notes that the Mormon battalion sent to fight the Mexican War studied irrigation systems in "Myth and Reality," 120. 26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 168. 51 locked out of those canal systems by religious separatism, settled less irrigable parts of the valley, and supported themselves by raising livestock.v These principles of public supervision, beneficial use, and ecclesiastical control distinguished Mormon water systems from those of other western regions. other qualities contributed to their distinctness as well: their cooperative nature; their diminutive scale in comparison to other projects across the West; the simple tools used in their construction; and the speed, simplicity, and frugality of that construction. In 1865, even with ever-mounting numbers of Utah settlers demanding new and larger canals, the 277 existing canals in the territory averaged a mere 3.7 miles in length. 28 The over 800 cooperatively owned ditches carrying water in Utah in 1920 had an average capacity of 24.5 second-feet, compared to the over 70 second-feet of water that ran in ditches in California, Idaho, and Colorado.~ Whatever magic made v See A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley: A Study of the Logan Apostasies of 1874 and the Establishment of Non-Mormon Churches in Cache Valley. 1873-1913 (Logan, UT, 1976). 28 Leonard J. Arrington and Dean May, "'A Different Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in NineteenthCentury Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975),8. 29 Fox, "The Mormon Land System," 5. the Mormon irrigation system successful, that magic had nothing to do with scale. The Mormon genius for distributing water lay in their consistent ability to manage small volumes of water. 52 The pioneers' rapid construction of the first canals has become legendary in utah, and is chronicled in innumerable community histories. Leonard Arrington recorded the Cache Valley tale of how 28 men and boys from the town of Hyrum, south of Logan, spent most of the month of May, 1860 digging a nine mile long, four-foot deep irrigation ditch, by hand, while the town shored them up with daily deliveries of food and milk.~ Just to the north, Logan settlers labored from late March to mid-May of 1860 scraping out enough of the Logan and Hyde Park canal to water 2000 acres that first summer. 31 Each farmer contributed labor in proportion to his land holdings, which were limited by family size, and doled out in twenty acre parcels by church leaders. Most of the ditch work was done with picks, shovels, and wooden plows pulled by ox-teams. Milk-pails and home-made plumb lines ~ Leonard J. Arrington, "Life and Labor Among the Pioneers," in The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956), 149- 50. 31 Joel E. Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, Twelfth Annual Faculty Research Lecture, Utah State Agricultural College (Logan, UT, 1953), 23. 53 served as surveying tools. There is no denying the cooperative nature of this work, the almost total lack of capital investment, or the speed with which water reached the croplands. The centrality of the first act of communal ditch-digging to pioneer narratives underscored the parallel between the birth of the community and the first watering of the land. 32 While this general picture of pioneer irrigation provides an accurate account of the cooperation demanded of Utah settlers in the face of isolation and starvation, it lacks depth. Most Utah historians, and water historians, invoke this basic outline without providing much detail to color in the picture. This lack of specificity is rooted in a point that Leonard Arrington and Dean May made in their 1975 discussion of irrigation as '" A Different Mode of Life.' ,,33 "The most striking aspect of the institutions devised for the control of 32 For other pioneer accounts, see Marlyn L. Fife, "Irrigation water Values in Cache County, Utah" (Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1967), 15i Ricks, ed., History of a Valley, 149, and Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, 32; Isaac Sorensen, "History of Mendon, 1857-1919," TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 1, Utah state University Library, 3; History of Smithfield, 47; and Richmond Bicentennial Committee, The History · of Richmond. UT (Richmond, UT, 1976), 17. 33 Arrington and May, '" A Different Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975). 54 water," May and Arrington wrote, "would seem to be that they were, for the most part, informal and unarticulated-barely institutions in the strictest sense.,,34 Given the milieu of religious beliefs that surrounded these water "institutions," it is not hard to understand that they were "unarticulated," and that historians find it difficult to pin them down, or to move beyond an invocation of their standard characteristics into a closer look at the place of water at various levels of community life. The celebrated process by which irrigation canals came into being, this cooperative labor in the interest of group survival, held within itself the tension that remained central to the later administration of the systems. An individual farmer's contribution of his own labor to the digging and maintenance of a canal, whether through labor or taxes, was the key means by which he secured a private right to have water turned onto his land. This labor established personal water rights, becoming, as historian John Harvey writes, lithe most crucial element in transforming a portion of the public 34 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life, '" 19. 55 domain into usable (semi-private) property. ,,35 An individual family, once in possession of land and a water right, and dependent on that land and water for survival, was forced to straddle an ill-defined line between their own best interests and that of the community which, through the ditch, had made their individual freehold possible, and which sustained them in numerous other material and spiritual ways. This system of securing one's place in the community, on the land, and along the ditch, made perfect sense to those attuned to Brigham Young's exhortations on manual labor as crucial to the progress of the community and the Kingdom.~ Just as individual Mormons devoted themselves to physical labor to gain membership in the post-resurrection world, so they labored on irrigation canals to gain their place in the agricultural approximation of that world in utah. Salvation and farming were individual pursuits, however, and therein lay the true challenge of community irrigation. The three major canals that ran water from the Logan river north through Logan toward Hyde Park and smithfield 35 John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the EVolution of Institutions Dealing with water Resource Use and Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989), 19. 36 Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 154. 56 were the Logan and Hyde Park, begun in 1860, the Logan and Richmond (later Logan Northern), begun in 1864, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, begun in 1881. As was common in foothill settlements, irrigators dug the lowest canal first, the one furthest from the mouth of the canyon and closest to the center of the incipient town. There, the gentler slope and easier-managed river banks made the cutting of headgates fairly simple. Diversion from the river on a relatively flat plain was the first settlers' only viable option, as they lacked the time and equipment to begin ditch construction up in the rocky canyon itself. within Cache Valley's simple gravity flow irrigation systems, main canals branched into smaller ditches, and then into crop rows and village gardens. Water could be diverted only onto land that lay downhill from the canal, and thus irrigators referred to their land as being "under" the canal. The first Logan canal, the Logan and Richmond, watered land below it, leaving large tracts of irrigable land above the canal waterless until irrigators dug the higher, or "high-line" canals. Irrigators started the later ditches as soon as the rapidly growing population laid claim to enough land and demanded water. Since the three main Logan River canals ran down, or west, from the their diversion points and then swung north toward Hyde Park and Smithfield, each brought the new swath of land below it, but above the lower canal, into cultivation. As folklorist Austin Fife pointed out, the lines of the canals marked patterns of land use. Land above the canal, without water, was used for grazing or dry-farming, and had a distinct, unwatered appearance. "Below" the canal, the greener orchards, gardens, and fields evidenced an entirely different regime. TI In 57 bringing land under a canal, Mormon villagers transformed it from desert to garden. They brought it into their kingdom, a realm of order and civilization. Each canal, in bringing another level of the valley's fertile borders into that realm, constituted an enormous gain, both materially and spiritually. Samuel Roskelley of Smithfield reported such a gain in his journal for 1885, the year in which the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal was completed as far as Smithfield. "On Tuesday 16 June," he declared in larger-than-usual handwriting, indicating his excitement, "the water first reached my land east of my farm through the Upper Logan Canal [ ,'] which is a source of great rejoicing to me, to know that the water will run through from Logan. ,,38 37 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned Farms," 13. 38 Samuel Roskelley Diary, 20 June 1885, MS, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 58 with this pattern of parallel ditches built at increasing elevations came a hierarchy of water diversion. The higher canals, built later than the original, lower-elevation canals, took water from the Logan River at points further upstream from the headgates of the earlier canals. The high-line ditches had the power to take water first, to affect the water supply of all downstream diverters. In the late 1890s the Logan, Hyde Park and Smithfield Canals, the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and Thatcher Canal ranked first, second, and fourth in order of elevation, but in opposite order for priority of diversion. 39 This ascendancy of elevation over community-sanctioned priorities of water right required water users under the higher canals to heed the social restrictions on their favored geographical position. The members of each canal company had social and economic relationships with those of the other companies, much like the relationships among farmers with land along the same ditch.~ Ideally, those relationships worked to nullify the natural advantages held by higherelevation diverters who could take water before it reached . 39 Samuel Fortier lists all Logan diverters in order of elevation in The water Supply of Cache Valley, 19. ~ Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ... and the Desert Shall Rejoice; Conflict. Growth. and Justice in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 2. the headgates of lower canals. The tension between the social imperatives of the Mormon irrigation system and those geographic advantages played an important role in community water use. The two lower Logan River canals, Logan and Hyde Park, and Logan and Richmond, came into being under the 59 auspices of the local county court, the first formal legal institution charged with the allocation of water resources, and the first administrative structure to give some shape to the "informal and unarticulated" world of water use. 41 Peter Maughan, founder of Wellsville--Cache Valley's first town--and a bishop, or ward leader appointed by the Church, took his position as probate judge of Cache County at its creation in 1856, well before permanent settlement. In doing so he became both civil and religious leader of the community.~ As county judge, Maughan had direct control over the allocation of natural resources. He was directed in that function by an 1852 territorial law which read: The country courts shall ••• have control of all timber, water privileges, or any watercourse or creek, to grant mill sites, and exercise such powers as in their judgment shall best preserve the timber 41 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life,'" 19. 42 Craig Woods Fuller, "Development of Irrigation in Wasatch County" (Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1973), 28. 60 and subserve the interests of the settlements in the distribution of water for irrigation or other purposes. 43 This law embodied Mormon ideals of stewardship and community development, and contained according to early analyst Elwood Mead, "some of the best features of the highest development of irrigation law."44 In lauding Mormon policy, Mead may have had in mind the inherent localism of administration, as well as the underlying principle of public ownership of water and timber. Despite the centralized power inherent in church-directed Mormon colonization, the probate judge's powers over water resources represented anything but dictatorship to Cache Valley settlers. It was more a system of accepted custom, by which the water flowing through the community canal could not be taken, or rights to it challenged by anyone outside the community. Town leaders, holding the powers granted by both church and court, decided what was good for the collective. They assured everyone who worked within the local system the benefits of that system. Because community benefit involved the pursuit of an equal distribution of natural resources, the ~ Quoted in Elwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions: A Discussion of the Economic and Legal Questions Created by the Growth of Irrigated Agriculture in the West (New York, 1903), 221. 44 Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 221. county court had to weigh petitions for water and timber according to that ideal. It rarely adjudicated direct conflicts over a particular amount of water or stand of timber, however. Those fights were settled outside the legal structure by the parties involved, by watermasters of irrigation companies, or by local bishops, who, admittedly, often served as probate judges and town councilmen. The imperatives of community and of shared 61 wealth dictated that Mormons turn to church institutions, and to their well-enforced sense of mission and community, to settle disputes.~ From 1852 until 1880, the county court heard petitions for rights to irrigation water and mill sites, and timber and grazing lands. Hyde Park founder William Hyde applied to the court in December 1862 for "a grant of one fourth of the water running in the north fork of Logan River enlarging the present water ditch by which the farms at Hyde Park are irrigated."~ In June of 1863 the court granted a mill right to Thomas Smart and Samuel Parkinson for use of the waters of the Cub River west of Franklin.~ 45 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 174. ~ Cache County Court, "'A'County Book of the County of Cache, Organized April 4, 1857," 'TS, Utah state University Library, 18. ~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 37. 62 The entire town of Smithfield acquired rights in March 1874 to "the big bend on Bear River" for grazing purposes. 48 Probate judges also granted individuals or groupS franchises on certain community projects, including timber harvesting, the running of saw and grist mills, and road construction. The county court defined borders of new towns, and appointed town watermasters and road supervisors, and other guardians of the infrastructure. until the Irrigation District Law of 1865 took effect in Cache Valley, the county court also controlled the appointment of boards of directors, and the organization of community irrigation districts and companies, among them the Logan and Richmond Canal Company, founded in 1864. The Logan and Richmond Canal got its start in the usual Mormon way. In 1864, new lands were surveyed above the towns on the east side of the valley, and Ezra Taft Benson, church leader for all of Cache Valley, called a meeting to point out "the benefits that naturally would arise" from a second, higher Logan River canal. 49 Soon thereafter, another important segment of the valley's ~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 221. 49 Lydia T. Nyman and Venetta K. Gilgen, "Miscellaneous Papers on the History of North Logan, UT," TS, 1959-60, utah state University Library, Logan, UT, 3. 63 "second nature" came into being. Benson appointed five men--one each from Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, Richmond, and Franklin, Idaho--to oversee the project and coordinate laborers. A professional surveyor ran a line for the canal from the mouth of the canyon, along the steep slope of the Logan bench, or "sidehill," and then north out of Logan toward Hyde Park. 5o Given the rocky conditions at the canyon mouth, and the gradient of the sidehill, this second canal posed greater challenges than had the Logan and Hyde Park in 1860. In an extension of the each-farmer-digs-inproportion- to-his-Iand-holdings labor formula, each town was assigned a section of the difficult sidehill in proportion to the acreage that it, as a town, expected to water from the new canal. 51 Digging began that fall and continued off and on through the winter. Newly-arrived immigrants taking up the newly-surveyed lands joined the previous settlers in digging the canal, and thus earned their right to irrigate from its flow. By the end of 1865 they had 2000 acres under the new canal. 52 As always, farmers and gardeners under the new canal established rights to the "new" water by putting that 50 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3. 51 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3. 52 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 45. 64 water to community-defined beneficial uses. Those uses were, as usual, defined by the small group of men holding positions of church and community leadership. The impetus to begin the second canal had come from a powerful, prominent church leader whose vision for the community was perceived as having divine sanction. The group charged with the canal's direction included Samuel Roskelley and Marriner Merrill, both town bishops--prominent church and community leaders. Though this small group of men controlled the construction and administration of the Logan and Richmond, they turned to the county court for official recognition of their activities. The legal structure governing their efforts shifted slightly however, with passage of the Irrigation District Law in 1865. The 1865 law empowered the residents of any geographical area, a valley, village, or neighborhood, to, with the approval of the county court, organize and tax themselves for the construction and management of canals. 53 Under this measure, the court assured that only those citizens who wanted water, and wanted to contribute to the construction and upkeep of a canal, would bear its costs. This spared older groups, already drawing water from previous canals, the burdens of 53 Arrington and May, II 'A Different Mode of Life, III 10. 65 new projects. 54 As new canals benefitted certain segments of growing communities more than others, the 1865 law sanctioned the creation of residential and farm districts, or sub-communities, based on canals. The irrigation districts had great powers of exclusion or inclusion. Their claims to water had the effect of reserving a certain water supply for the use of a very specific group of people in a specific geographic area. In 1875 the Cache County Court approved an irrigation district set up by a group of citizens from the towns of Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, and Richmond. The district included [a]ll the tract of land lying between the base of the mountains and the Logan and Hyde Park Canal in Logan Precinct ••• and ••• in Hyde Park Precinct with all that tract of land known as the New North and South fields in smithfield Precinct as well as the New South field in Richmond Precinct •••• 55 The county court had to approve district boundaries and 54 George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York, 1920), 52. 55 Cache County 'A' Book, 26 April 1875, 262. The same year, the court approved the Providence and Millville Irrigation District, south of Logan, granting it "power to construct dams and to have controll [sic] of all springs, streams, and rivers for irrigating purposes located in said district, and to make canal for the distribution of said waters, and a further grant of 4/5 of the water running in the Blacksmiths fork River." Cache County 'A' Book, 1875, 253. the boards of directors in order to assure community benefit. The 1865 law, by splitting villages into districts, encouraged greater decentralization of water development. It also demanded greater democracy within the irrigation community, as members had to vote to approve the district's taxes, policies, and actions. 56 Given the power that the districts were granted over the 66 water within their boundaries, however, irrigators living outside district boundaries had reduced chances of gaining full access to water. The next territory-wide attempt to regulate water use and development came in 1880, when a new water law removed the powers of water grants and district supervision from the county court. In place of the probate judge the county selectmen became water commissioners, charged with adjudicating all water claims, and recording those claims in official county document,s.57 The 1880 law recognized that much of the water in small community streams had long ago been claimed and put to use, but that little of it had been measured, recorded, or in any way legally quantified. The governmental burden shifted from one of granting water to one of trying to formalize previous grants and 56 Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in utah (Baltimore, 1895), 36. 57 Wells A. Hutchins and Dallin W. Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights (Salt Lake City, 1965), 12. 67 adjudicate contests over water long-ago committed to someone's ditch or someone else's mill. This divested the county court of its authority to grant water according to the criteria of beneficial use, and left Utahns without a way to appropriate "new" water. 58 The 1880 water law held sway over Utah irrigators only until 1897 when statehood brought about yet another reformulation of policy. In the seventeen years between 1880 and 1897, however, the 1880 measure effected a revolution in conceptions of water ownership and use, if not in the actual irrigation practice. The revolution exhibited a certain schizophrenia. It moved away from, yet also affirmed, Mormon religious and community ideals. Water was public property in pioneer Utah, its use inseparable from the land it watered. Water rights could not be bought and sold as private property separate from that land. In 1880 the territorial legislature reversed those provisions. Thereafter a water right was an individual's private property, to be bought or sold as such, without reference to land. 59 The text of the 1880 law read that such [water] rights may be appurtenant to the land 58 Hutchins and Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights, 14. 59 George Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 144. 68 upon which it is used or it may be personal property, at the option of the rightful owner of such rights and a change in the place of use of water shall in no manner affect the validity of any person's right to use water ..•. 60 This provision did not radically change Utahns use of water; irrigation practices remained much the same. 61 What changed was the structure of authority into which the water "owner" entered when disputing a substance that had now become his private property. Rather than community groups presenting proposals for water use to probate judges, individuals now turned to county selectmen, who settled disputes over individual rights, rather than group claims. 62 The changes brought on by the 1880 irrigation law had their roots in the growing conflict between Utah Territory and the U. S. federal government. Among other attempted subversions of Mormon regional dominance, the United states was busy curbing the powers of Utah's county officials. The growing numbers of non-Mormons in Utah also challenged Mormon control of water resources. It seems plausible that the 1880 law was an attempt to assure 60 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 54. 61 Maass and Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall Rejoice, 343. 62 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 54. Mormons continuing control of the water by making water into private property.63 The law switched the foundation of water rights from a community basis to an individual basis, but in doing so it worked toward maintaining the status quo of community control over water. 69 The second revolution of Utah's 1880 water law, which confirmed its schizophrenic nature, harked back to pioneer ideals and water rights whil~ at the same time adjusting the legal structure to the necessity of continued growth. The 1880 law confirmed the doctrine of prior appropriation, the rule of "first in time, first in right." within the structure of priority rights, though, the legislature designated two classes of rights--primary and secondary rights--based on the volume of the river flow. Those holding primary rights could draw water from a stream no matter what its level of flow. Holders of secondary rights drew water only when the river rose above its lowest average level. M Secondary appropriators were allowed no water once the river dropped below a certain level. This provision opened opportunities to post-1880 settlers in areas where earlier diverters had sealed up the use of available water, but those opportunities lasted only as long as the excess seasonal flow. The law also 63 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 82. M Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 228. 70 allowed holders of secondary rights to divert water during the off-season, when primary rights were not claimed for summer irrigation. 65 It reduced the ability of on~ group of water users to block appropriation of excess resources by others, and thus appeared to serve the growth and equality of the community within the tradition of Mormon ideals. M As Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson commented, the idea of an absolute priority, such as that applied in Colorado, was "incompatible" with the Mormon's "cooperative community approach." In Utah, "the idea of proportioning limited flows was a natural outgrowth of the common community interest. The church could not allow some settlers to have a full supply of water while others were denied access to it. ,,67 This principle would be solidly reiterated in the early twentieth century with the first full legal adjudication of the waters of the Logan River, which called into question the place of primary and secondary water rights in the Mormons "cooperative community approach" to water use. The territorial water laws of 1865 and 1880 may have had little actual effect on the means by which the 65 Hutchins and Jensen, Utah Law of water Rights, 36. M FOX, "Mormon Land System," 140. 67 Maass and Anderson, ••• and the Desert Shall Rejoice, 347. 71 individual Cache Valley farmer diverted water through his lateral ditches to his crops, but they provided the overarching structure to the smaller patterns and negotiations that surrounded those diversions. As state power grew, the Mormon church withdrew from formal involvement in community water use, but its ideals remained central to that use. Most importantly, the patterns of community thinking and behavior that it developed in its members proved, at least in smaller villages, crucial to the ways in which they dealt with, and thought about, water. The structure of water use began as a religious ideal of cooperation. In becoming a more secular process and in adjusting itself to state laws such as those of 1865 and 1880, it maintained much of its original cast. The laws, even when trying to break away from church-created principles, continued to reflect community values. When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, the larger governmental structure continued, with legislation and new bureaucratic institutions, to assert pressure on local control over water. In the small towns of Cache Valley, however, at least through 1920, the attempt to separate legal order and community order appeared to have little effect. Local irrigation companies, aided by a continued abundance of water, simply adapted legal structures to their own needs. Even when incorporating themselves into 72 new legal entities outside the church, and in using nonchurch means to resolve their disputes, water users remained inherently tied to church-created structures of thought and action. Those structures included a fundamental unwillingness to turn to powers outside the immediate group for financial support, legal advice, or legal adjudication of conflict. They included as well an unswerving commitment to the idea that the individual should contribute to the collective system in proportion to his benefit from that system. And it included the conflicts and tension inherent in a system where religious ideals demanded both individual and community success, and where each irrigator had to balance his contributions to the collective with his pursuit of individual advancement. Water in Mormon Utah flowed flow from the first nature of the river to the second nature of the canal systems and the village, the infrastructure that both defined the community and provided the tapestry against which Mormons wrestled with their goals and ideals, both individual and collective. The community did not produce these CUltural, water-based ideals on its own, however. Nature played a role. This second nature of canals and towns, like all such human-constructed second natures, was rarely free from the vagaries of first nature, from the unexpected complexities of its own workings, or from the 73 cultural imperatives that brought it into being. In July of 1890, at the height of the irrigation season, a mud slide careened down the slope of the raised alluvial bench at the mouth of the canyon, filled in the Logan and Richmond canal, and tore a 200 foot break in the canal's bank. with over 200 city lots and about 2,600 acres of farmland thirsting for their due, the landholders of the Logan and Richmond irrigation district spent a dry three weeks repairing the damage and building a wooden flume so that water could again reach their yards and crops. They then spent a year wrangling with officials of Utah state Agricultural College, a two-year-old institution whose application of irrigation water to farmland on top of the bench, just above the canal, softened the soil along the sidehill, and caused the mud slides. In early July of 1891, a year later, it happened again. At an emergency meeting on July 11th, district stockholders debated their next move. James Adams, who owned 14 acres of farmland and one city lot in the Logan precinct of the irrigation district, declared to the assembled group that "the reason we are here is that the canal is broke and we want to know if all are willing to go to work and fix it, alIso [sic] what are we going to do with the College for destroying our Canal.,,68 The struggle between the Logan and Richmond district and the Agricultural College, which continued, as did the mud slides, into the twentieth century. It provides a microcosm of the first set of connections important to 74 water use in Mormon communities: the flow of water out of its natural water courses and into community-managed canals, and the conflicts over management of and responsibility for those canals. Here, first nature--the rich, porous soils of that land formation--impinged on the second nature of the canal system and the farms it served, as, for example, when two sets of irrigators attempted simultaneous July waterings of land on top of the bench and below the canal. This particular conflict also emphasized some important features of the canal systems: their generally unplanned nature, at least in relation to each other; their technological simplicity; their low level of capitalization. The stories of the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the two major irrigation thoroughfares that I will examine here, illustrate the flow of water through Mormon 68 Minutes, 11 July 1891, Logan 'and Richmond Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 1, Bound MS 28, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan and Richmond I], 414. 75 communities, beginning with the initial flow from a "natural" structure into a community structure, from first to second nature. 76 CHAPTER IV GETTING WATER: COMMUNITY SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE The struggle within and among Mormon communities to harness water for shared and individual purposes took place not on the level of territorial water law (though these laws certainly played a role), but on the level of day-to-day and season-to-season water use. The tensions rooted in the struggle to put water to God's purpose grew out of the mundane, and often muddled proces's of appropriating, measuring, distributing, paying for, and controlling water. Through these processes, irrigators measured their share of the community resource, and defined their individual contributions to the upkeep of the ditches. At its core, irrigation was a system of exchange between the individual and the community. Canal companies, representing the water community, based the rate of exchange on a direct proportion. Everyone gave to the system in proportion to the amount of water they needed. The simplicity of that system was confounded, though, by the patriarchal nature of the society which gave small groups of leaders greater power over communityregulated resources, and by every individual's struggle to better his family's condition within the community. The 77 ideal of the system was complicated as well by the illdefined, always-changing exchanges themselves, and by nature itself. water flowed downhill, from one geographic point to another, and thus different water users, upstream, and downstream, no matter how democratic their intentions, bore unequal relationships to one another, and to the canal. The conflicts that arose out of these exchanges between individual and community prove that Mormons did fight over water. Less obvious, however, and more subtly apparent in' the inner workings of Logan River canal collectives, were the ways and the reasons that they fought over water, and the routes they took in surmounting the barriers raised by those conflicts. The need to manage water kept the problems of community purpose and individual salvation at the center of daily life. Water, for this reason and others, took on powers and meanings well beyond its salutary effects on agricultural production. The resolution of water conflicts continued, into the twentieth century, to reflect the insularity and ~ solidarity of early Mormon villages. Although the 1880 water law made it possible to redefine a water right as a piece of private property rather than as a community-granted, church-granted, or Godgranted usufruct, Cache Valley irrigators in the last two 78 decades of the 19th century defined and dealt with water in very practical, non-legislative ways. The community used water in myriad ways, to power mills, water stock, cook, clean, and, eventually, generate electricity. The pre-eminent use of canal water, however, was irrigation of ~ food crops. The process by which water was channeled to crops, rather than legal definitions of water right, dominated collective understanding of how water should be measured and distributed. The result of this agricultural mindset was a fluidity of exchange in which irrigators traded labor, grain, and cash for water according to mutually agreed-upon rates of exchange. The leadership of the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, for instance, spent much of its time administering these various arrangements, recording the amount of labor and cash that each member contributed to the collective, and attempting to regulate the amount of water taken in return. The landowners under the canal met annually to vote on standards of eXChange, to set wage rates, yearly tax assessments, and haggle over the worth of everyone's work and water. Not everyone in the community was required to contribute labor, cash, or crops, however. widows and men in "poor circumstances" were provided with water tax-free by the community, a practice which underscored the extent to which the irrigation district was a ' community, rather 79 than commercial institution. 1 In March 1879 Robert and James Meikle of Smithfield, who were not at the time landholders in the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, but would by 1884 own 28 acres between them, petitioned the district trustees for use of water from the canal based on labor they had done on the canal in 1865, 1866, and 1867, over ten years earlier. The trustees figured out that the Meikles labor had been worth $133, which entitled them to enough water for six and a half acres of land. 2 Thus labor on a canal, even if accomplished long ago, remained the key means of access to water, the immediate fruit of that labor. Robert and James Meikle may not have needed water from the Logan and Richmond Canal in 1865, but when they did need it later, their labor guaranteed them that right. Although different methods of measuring irrigation water sprang up everywhere as more and more claimants and regulators sought to divide river flows, here the volume of water remained, for the time being, measurable only by 1 Log~n and Richmond I, 5 March 1881, 87. 2 Logan and Richmond I, 8 March 1879. water taxes and acreages cited, and calculations of average payments and number of acres owned, are derived from Logan and Richmond accounts for the years 1879 and 1884, found in the first volume of records, pp. 4-24, 188-215, and the years 1891 and 1896, found in the second volume of Logan and Richmond records, pp. 2-20, 172- 93. the area of the fields it could irrigate. The "water of six and a half acres," was clearly measured in terms of agricultural land. 80 In 1879, then, the Logan and Richmond landholders thought of water in terms of their fields, and in terms of the crops those fields produced. In October of that year the annual stockholders meeting bogged down in a debate over the price to be accorded a bushel of grain in the paying of annual water assessments. The water taxes were set at 10 cents per acre of agricultural land, and 20 cents per city lot. After "considerable discussion" the group agreed on a price of 75 cents for a bushel of wheat, in the paying of water assessments. 3 A landholder with one city lot and 20 acres of land, owing $2.20 to the district for the year, could pay in cash, in labor, or in grain--just under three bushels. Water users paid water assessments based not on the actual volume of water they used, but on the amount of land and the kind of land they watered. Water was not really taxable apart from its use for irrigation; it was part and parcel of the way in which it was put to use. When irrigators looked at and thought of water they saw water, certainly, but they also saw their own labor, their investment in the land and the community, and they saw grain. with assessments paid in 3 Logan and Richmond I, 13 October 1879, 33. 81 grain, the exchange came full circle. The product of the water itself--the crops--could pay for the water. Any system of exchange, however, that attempted to balance water on one hand, and land, labor, and grain on the other, all of which had different values in different seasons and years, generated its share of confusion. Questions of how to measure and distribute water came up again and again in the 1880s and 1890s. For Robert and James Meikle, the Logan and Richmond district trustees measured water according to acres of land. How much water that actually involved was never specified, but rather regulated by the farmers and watermasters, according to commonly held conceptions of hoW much water was needed for each acre of crops. The standard unit of distribution was the "irrigating stream," a somewhat vague volume considered to be the largest free flowing stream of water that a single irrigator (with a shovel) could distribute over his crops.4 In June of 1882, Smithfield's watermaster complained that Hyde Park, whose irrigators got water before it got to Smithfield, were cutting through the canal banks and taking more than their share. The trustees discussed the issue and, in an attempt to even out the distribution of water, "ordered that the 4 Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 109. 82 water be divided so as to give each one hundred acres a stream all through the district. tls Presumably, this water would be distributed on a set schedule, everyone or two weeks. This attempt to match specific volumes of water with specific acreages indicated that such co-ordination required special effort, and that the irrigators' conception of equal distribution was based in the idea that a given amount of water was best measured by the amount of land it irrigated. The Logan and Richmond district account books kept records of water use according to the number of acres and number of city lots each subscriber watered, and assessed water taxes accordingly. Actual volumes of water rarely entered into the proceedings. This agriculturally-based system of measurement would change, however. In October of 1879., Thomas X. Smith, the Logan city Watermaster, and a local ward bishop, approached the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District on behalf of Logan City with a request for a grant of year-round water rights to one square foot of the canal's water, a specific volume equivalent to 100 acres of water right. The agreement that followed signaled a slight shift in the inseparability of water and land. In its contract with Logan City, the irrigation district required the city to S Logan and Richmond I, 24 June 1882, 118-19. 83 pay taxes on 100 acres of water right, even though Logan city was not watering 100 acres of land but rather supplying its residents with water for various other purposes. This deal also signaled a geographic division between water users that changed community relationships. The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District was taking form as an entity separate from the town of Logan itself. The Logan and Richmond canal flowed only through part of Logan, and then out of Logan, to serve other communities. The community of Logan residents and the community of irrigators along the Logan and Richmond Canal emerged as distinct factions with distinct interests and distinct ways of using the same water source. Growing demands for water thus complicated the accepted systems of exchange for water, and increased the chances for conflict. The intricate details of neighborly water-sharing realm, whether between individuals or villages, required a constant hammering out, as irrigators sought fair solutions to the dilemmas posed by clashes between the river itself and the uses to which they put it. In December of 1896 members of the Smithfield Precinct challenged a district by-law that directed Hyde Park water users to pay an additional ten percent on their annual taxes, and smithfield water users an additional twenty percent. Proponents of the extra tax held that the canal 84 had longer to travel to supply water to the towns farther north, and thus those towns should contribute a greater proportion to the canal's upkeep. This challenged the cherished system of directly proportionate water exchange. By May of 1899 James Cantwell, long-time representative of smithfield water users, reported that his village planned a lawsuit to challenge the 20% "local expenses" tax. 6 The suit materialized the following December, with Smithfield claiming that the by-laws, along with the extra local taxes, had been drafted by the wrong party. The towns came to an out-of-court agreement however, and the trustees agreed to draft a new set of by-laws, eliminating the offensive taxes. 7 Despite the seeming prevalence of inter-town water disputes, the majority of conflicts described in irrigation district account books, and in the literature of local water history, demonstrate that much of the tension involved in district administration arose from struggles over the individual water users responsibilities to the collective infrastructure, and the various canal companies' . contributions and responsibilities to its 6 Minutes, 16 May 1899, Logan and Richmond Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 2, Bound MS 29, Utah state University Library, Logan Utah [hereafter Logan and Richmond II], 277; Logan and Richmond II, 25 February 1899, 272-73. 7 Logan and Richmond II, 4 December 1899, 286. 85 individual members. In 1887 a legal conflict arose concerning the Logan Irrigation District, the district surrounding the Logan and Benson Canal, built in 1860. Farmers in the tiny outlying village of Benson had dug an extension to the original canal to serve their fields. The trustees of the Logan Irrigation District took no responsibility for the canal extension or the distribution of water from it. By 1887 the Benson irrigators found themselves deeply frustrated by internal battles over individual water rights. In 1898 they sued to force the Logan Irrigation District to acknowledge the Benson extension as part of their canal and take over its administration. 8 In doing so, they turned to a higher, but wholly community based, collective power to mediate individual conflicts, a common pattern in Mormon village life. The local court denied this request, asserting that the Benson farmers "constructed the Benson extension to the canal without any suggestion or aid from the Logan farmers, while the Logan section was constructed by all in common. ,,9 This followed 8 George L. Swendsen, "Appropriation of water from Logan River," in Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigation Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 312. 9 Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan River," 312. 86 the Mormon community rationale that the labor involved in canal construction or maintenance was the only true tie to that canal, and the only tie that carried rights to and obligations toward use of that canal. The state supreme court, however, overturned the local decision, stating that the trustees of an irrigation district cannot arbitrarily set limits on its services within the geographic boundaries of the district. tO within the area designated as a water community, the community was obligated to meet the needs of all of its members, at least to a certain point. These issues of individual and community obligations arose at different times in different forms. Since members of each precinct had shared certain interests, petitions to the trustees often took the form of collective demands. At the annual landowners meeting of December 1894, William Hyde of Hyde Park suggested that the votes to elect the board be cast by precinct. James Adams of Logan countered with a move to give each landowner one vote. Rasmus Nielsen pointed out that according to law, they were bound to vote according to acreage watered under the canal, and the group agreed to to Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan River," 312. 87 do SO.l1 This debate concerning how each individual was to represent himself within the group, how he measured his power in collective decision making, demonstrated, to some degree, the basic hierarchy at work. The individual water user was not to be considered merely a member of his irrigation precinct, nor as a voter equal to all other voters in the district. The village, or community, was not considered capable of representing each individual's interest, nor was each individual's interest considered equal. The established practice of voting by acreage gave each water user power over group decisions according to his degree of interest, the amount of land he had to water with the resources controlled by the group. This affirmed the tradition of the individual/community exchange governed by direct proportion. The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District's traditional system of exchange for water was complicated in the 1890s by the possibility of re-constituting the canal as a corporate stock company. The struggle to come to a communal decision to incorporate the irrigation district began in 1882, and waxed and waned for many years. It came to a head at several points, including the winter of 1894-95. At that time, out of concern to place the organization on firm legal ground, and follow the 11 Logan and Richmond II, 3 December 1894, 123. 88 letter of the law, the landowners voted to incorporate. This decision was followed however, by a long debate over the method by which to distribute stock in the new corporation, whether by "Dollars and cents expended on the Canal" or "according to waterright pre Acreage as shown on the Books of the Company. ,,12 Though the argument that followed ended as the majority of attenders wandered out of the meeting, it demonstrated that the question of what gave the individual water user rights to interest in the company--his individual contributions in labor and cash, or the amount of land he needed watered--remained an issue. A year later, in January of 1895, the landowners abandoned the idea of a stock company and unanimously voted to maintain their current status, to legally organize themselves as an irrigation district. 13 In the final decision they rejected the sUbstitution of an exchange system based on financial stock in favor of their traditional system of taxes and communal labor. The recasting of water rights as shares in a corporation would have constituted a further abstraction of a natural entity--water--into a financial entity. That the Logan and Richmond District turned away from that abstraction 12 Logan and Richmond II, 4 January 1895, 125. 13 Logan and Richmond II, 11 January 1895, 126. 89 pointed to their favoring of the more concrete, hands-on, local administration provided by the irrigation district. It underlined as well the cultural importance of these exchanges based on labor and land. similar debates and conflicts over water use plagued the water users under the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the third and highest of the Logan canals running north from the canyon. The Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield began as a private, for-profit enterprise. The challenges of diverting water from the river in the canyon itself and running it through a canal carved in a ledge in the canyon wall proved too much for the initial investors. In the early 1880s a community organization took over, completed construction, and began operations as an incorporated cooperative irrigation company by the end of the decade. The articles of incorporation of the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield declared a capital stock of $20,000, consisting of 4000 shares sold at $5 each. The initial subscribers were required to pay for only 10% of their stock in order to have the corporation acknowledged by the county court, which retained authority over canal incorporation. Cash played a larger role as the arbiter of water use, but initially it remained secondary to the standard currencies of canal finance--Iabor, crops, and 90 water. In the first year of operation, the canal directors granted credits in corporate stock to irrigators who had worked to complete the construction. Thus stockholders gained further shares through their labor and non-stockholders earned water rights in the traditional Mormon way, by helping to finish and repair the ditch. Laborers were often paid half of their wages in cash and half in stock. w Despite the new language of shares and stock, the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield remained a small, local operation. The trustees, or board of directors, reported the net worth of the company in February 1891 as consisting of 40 acres of land, .a cooking stove, four and a half barrels of cement, a tent, some tools, and a dump cart. The total cash value of these items amounted to just over $500.15 The inflow of tax money and .outflow of cash for materials and labor left the corporation with little in the way of liquid capital. Though the canal itself was worth about $14,000, wealth in and of itself 14 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal Company Minutes and Account Book, Bound MS 26, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield], 10 February 1890, 1 March 1890, 15 March 1890, 39-45. 15 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 21 February 1891, 73. was neither a corporate goal, nor a reality.~ stockholders voted their shares in company business, and paid for their water at a lower rate than nonshareholders. In 1890 shareholders paid 12 1/2 cents an 91 acre to water farm land, and $1.00 for city lots, compared to the 40 cents per acre and $1.50 per city lot paid by non-shareholders. Shareholders, of course, held first rights to available water. Though the owning of stock distinguished members from non-members, and thus served as a criteria for full participation in this particular water community, all irrigators paid water taxes according to acres and lots watered. The old standards of exchange remained very much in evidence. The need for and use of water was based on land and crops, as usual, and not on corporate status. The advent of corporate stock, a measure of water-community membership and, indeed of water, however, was new to irrigators, and required some adjustment. Shares in the corporation could be earned, bought, and sold with no reference to the land or the water they represented. For the first few years, shareholders wavered over what in fact distinguished them from other water users-those with more stock, those with less, and those with 16 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 23 February 1891, 75. 92 none. Board President Hyrum Maughan raised this issue to the presiding group in March 1892. -He "suggested the propriety of having some relation established between the shares held and the water used by stockholders ..•. ,,17 Maughan felt that they should review the records and find the total amount expended on "cleaning, repairing, and enlarging the canal from the beginning of the present ownership .... ,,18 After figuring as well the amount that water users had paid in taxes, they could ascertain who was using less or more than their share. A similar question arose the next week, when a shareholder asked that some standard be set for "how much waterrright was required to water an acre of land or rather how much stock it was necessary to hold to water one acre."~ Irrigator Marrinus Anderson added that "I think that if we knew how much water right was required for 5 or 10 acres use [we] could govern ourselves accordingly."w The measure of, and relationships among, land, water, time, and corporate stock remained mysterious and confused. Anderson added 17 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 8 March 1892,
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Title | Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 |
Description | Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 by Kathryn T. Morse. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, 1992. |
Abstract | Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism and a strong sense of community. They encountered a specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and practices developed out of the complex interchanges between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between 1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture. The season-to-season workings of irrigation institutions that distributed water from the Logan River, whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's collective construction and upkeep of canals. The democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A small group of elite town fathers held most of the responsibility for irrigation administration, and used their influence -in disputes over water. Those town fathers also tended to own more land than other irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity to the canals themselves. Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in 1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate a water distribution system that allowed for both the growth of local communities and for continued adherence to the basic religious principles on which the communities were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of the rise and fall of the water level in the river. Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems constituted an interesting example of the ways in which culture and the environment come together to shape natural resource use, especially in the arid regions of the American west. |
Creator |
Morse, Kathryn T. |
SubjectLCSH |
Canals--Cache Valley (Utah and Idaho)--History Canals--Utah--History Water rights--Utah--Cache County--History Water resources development--Utah--History Mormons--Utah--Social life and customs Logan River (Utah)--Water rights |
Genre |
Theses |
Publisher | Utah State University |
Original Date | 1992 |
Geographic locations |
Cache Valley (Utah and Idaho) Cache County (Utah) Utah United States Logan River (Utah) |
Time periods |
1860-1869 1870-1879 1880-1889 1890-1899 1900-1909 1910-1919 19th century 20th century |
Language | eng; |
Source | Morse, Kathryn T. Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916. Thesis (M.A.)--Utah State University, Dept. of History, 1992. |
Physical Collection Information | Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections and Archives, Book Collections |
Call No. | Public use copy in microfiche, filed by author. Archival copy in USU Special Collections and Archives under call no. BOOK COLL 42 No. 38 |
Additional versions | Also available online at: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1248/ |
Rights | Reproduction for publication, exhibition, web display or commercial use is only permissible with the consent of the author. |
Digital History Collection | Regreening of Cache Valley |
Digital Publisher | Digitized by : Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library |
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Text |
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application/pdf |
Query Tag |
Grazing Logging Irrigation |
Identifier | SCABOOK042No038.pdf |
Search Date | 1992 |
Checksum | 590449577 |
What do you know about this item? | Click this link to tell us more about this item: http://library.usu.edu/main/forms/diginfo.php?id=2866&collection=regreening |
Transcript | Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies, School of 1-1-1992 Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 Kathryn T. Morse Utah State University This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies, School of at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@usu.edu. Recommended Citation Morse, Kathryn T., "Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916" (1992). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1248. htp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1248 Copyright: Kathryn Taylor Morse 1992 All Rights Reserved NATURE'S SECOND COURSE: WATER CULTURE IN THE MORMON COMMUNITIES OF CACHE VALLEY, UTAH, 1860-1916 by Kathryn T. Morse A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Approved: Hakr 'Profess'or Committee Member of MASTER OF ARTS in History Committee H~ber Dean of Graduate studies UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY Logan, Utah 1992 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Everyone who contributed to this project displayed impressive tact, patience, and good humor in awaiting its belated completion. Thanks go to Prof. Chas Peterson, who introduced me to the study of Mormon community, helped to define, and then re-define the topic, and provided a crucial reading of the first draft. Prof. Carol O'Connor assisted with my struggles to re-define the topic as well. Prof. Clyde Milner not only gave the thesis its title, but also provided skillful advice and encouragement at all stages. In the context of another project, Prof. Len Rosenband helped me grapple with 19th-century Mormon diaries, a skill which proved crucial to this thesis. Prof. Tom Lyon served on my thesis committee and helped with a careful reading of the first draft. Carolyn Fullmer and everyone at the Utah State History Department helped with the final details. Prof. Bill Cronon of Yale University chipped in a long conversation on various aspects of the thesis topic on the bus ride from Tacoma to Mt. Rainier and back at the 1989 WHA conference. My formal intellectual debts to Prof. Cronon are evident in the text. Profs. Richard White and John Findlay of the University of Washington kindly and tactfully encouraged me to finish this project, and supported my efforts to do so long distance. I am grateful to all. iii A. J. Simmonds, Brad Cole, and the staff of Special Collections at the Merrill Library graciously allowed me free run of their collections and helped me locate important documents, for which I thank them. All of the documents in this work come from their impressive archive, and my work would have been impossible without their support. utah state University provided financial assistance for my studies through its support of the Western History Association editorial fellowship program, a seeley-Hinckley scholarship in 1989, and through a summer thesis completion scholarship in 1990. All of my friends in Logan, including Prof. Anne Butler, Jay Butler, Lisa Godfrey, L. J. Godfrey, Catherine Milner, Charlie Milner, Clyde Milner, Chris Mitchell, Carol O'Connor, Grace ott, Ross Peterson, Jane Reilly, Renee Sentilles, Ona Siporin, and Barbara stewart provided advice, support, and love throughout this project, as well as recreational diversions and plenty of free meals. I thank them all. I am grateful to my parents, steve and Deanne Morse, and my housemates, Jerri Hoskyn and Cindy Cresap, for day-to-day and week-to-week encouragement. My personal connection to the stretch of Cache Valley watered by the irrigation systems discussed here grows out of hikes and bike rides around the valley, and from bike rides from my various homes in Logan to the various homes iv of my good friends Lisa and L.J. Godfrey in North Logan and Smithfield. It was in passing through that irrigated, beautiful landscape, in all seasons, at all hours, to join them for barbecues and movie-fests, that I first grasped the powerful sense of place that Mormon communities created in Cache Valley through the practice of irrigated agriculture. I thank Lisa and L. J. for sharing that place with me. Kathryn Morse v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ~ClCllO~EI)(;~ENT~ •..•••...•••.•...••.•••••••••........•.. ii LIST OF FIG'URES •...•.•••.......•.•.••....••••..•••...... vi ABSTRACT ..............•.....•••••••..••••...•••....••.. vii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ....••.•••.••••...•••••...•.•....•..... 1 II. NAT'URE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH ••.•••• · •.••.•.•.... 13 III. FROM LO(;AN RIVER TO LO(;AN TOWN ••••••••.••••.....•. 33 IV. (;ETTIN(; WATER: COMMUNITY SYST~S OF EXCHAN(;E •...• 76 V. WATER AND POWER: PATRIARCHY, (;EO(;RAPHY, AND HIERARCHIES OF WATER USE •.•••••••••••.••••...••... 99 VI. STRIKIN(; A BALANCE: NAT'URAL AND CULTURAL CYCLES OF WATER USE IN MORMON COMMUNITIES •••••••••..••.. 131 VII. WATER IN THE STREETS: VILLA(;E LOT IRRI(;ATION .••. 174 VIII. CONCLUSION .•.•••.•••••••••••••..•••••......•..... 209 BIBLIO(;RAPHY •••••••...•••..••••••••••••••••••••••••.•.. 218 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah- Idaho .......................................... 5 2 Cache Valley Basin with Inset ................... 41 2A Inset of Map 2. Logan River Canals .............. 42 3 Land Ownership Along Logan and Richmond Canal .. l04 4 Call Decree Chart .............................. 166 5 Logan River water Distribution Schedules .... 169-71 6 Logan City with Boundaries of Seventh Ward ..... 186 7 Detail of Seventh Ward, with Inset ............. 195 8 city Lot Arrangements in Salt Lake City ........ 201 ABSTRACT Nature's Second Course: water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916 by Kathryn T. Morse, Master of Arts Utah State University, 1992 Major Professor: Dr. Clyde A. Milner II Department: History vii .Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism and a strong sense of community. They encountered a specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and practices developed out of the complex interchanges between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between 1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture. The season-to-season workings of irrigation institutions that distributed water from the Logan River, whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal viii cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's collective construction and upkeep of canals. The democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A small group of elite town fathers held most of the responsibility for irrigation administration, and used their influence -in disputes over water. Those town fathers also tended to own more land than other irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity to the canals themselves. Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in 1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate a water distribution system that allowed for both the growth of local communities and for continued adherence to the basic religious principles on which the communities were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of the rise and fall of the water level in the river. Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems constituted an interesting example of the ways in which ix culture and the environment come together to shape natural resource use, especially in the arid regions of the American west. (234 pages) CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION "I had my garden spot surveyed this day[.] Agnes was very sick."l So wrote Mormon settler and diarist John Borrowman on Tuesday, May 28, 1850. As of that date, Borrowman, a Scottish immigrant, had lived in Salt Lake City for just over a year and a half, and had been married for sixteen months. Given the crushing load of labor involved in establishing a home, clearing, fencing, plowing, and watering his land, and contributing to community projects, it is no wonder that Borrowman kept his . journal entries short. His brief words revealed much about his world, however. They spoke particularly to the crucial place of irrigation water in that world. Borrowman summed up the following day with equal brevity: "I watered my land this morning[i] William Park was born at a quarter to three 0' clock in the morning. ,,2 The order of his comments is telling. Though his wife had been in labor the previous day and most of the night, and had given birth to his first child, William Park Borrowman, I John Borrowman Journal, Extracts 1846-1860, 28 May 1850, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 3, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 2 Borrowman Journal, 29 May 1850. early that morning, he noted first that he had irrigated his farmland. 2 John Borrowman's conflation of those two events, the birth of his son and the watering of his land, spoke to the importance of irrigation water in his family's life, and in the life of early Mormon communities in utah. Not only did the watering of land merit frequent mention in daily records of individual and collective activities, but any work involving water and water ditches got top billing over young William Borrowman's tersely heralded arrival. The contrasting of these two events in a simple record of a single day pointed as· well to the complementary nature of the two acts. In bringing a child into the world of Salt Lake city in 1850, and in bringing water to their newly acquired farm plot, John and Agnes Borrowman took two closely linked steps toward the fulfillment of their earthly mission. That mission was to create a Mormon civilization in the valleys at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. They had to people what seemed an endless wilderness with like-minded servants of God, and they had to support their families with the resources that God had provided them in this new Zion. To give the watering of land and a birth equal weight, then, was no outlandish literary act. Water held a crucial place in the Mormon physical and spiritual 3 world. It symbolized the baptism of new members into the spiritual community, and it made food production possible. Folklorist Barre Toelken, in his work on the folklore of water in Mormon Utah, notes that as in the irrigation of an arid land, "so in baptism is water a mediator between life and death, a concept richly dramatized in many Mormon legends. "3 water held great meaning and power in 19th- and early 20th-century Mormon communities, as it does in the present. The structure of water flow in those communities reflected the fundamental tensions between individual gain and collective progress, both spiritual and material, that underlay Mormon culture. It reflected as well the patriarchal essence of that culture. Those two components of the Mormon world, the constant struggle for balance between the individual and the community, and the rule of the fathers, in family, community, and religion, were as evident in the social mechanisms of water use as in any other aspect of community life. The management of irrigation water by local canal companies provided a forum for expressions of the purpose and meaning of Mormon community, and of the place of that community in both the physical environment and the 3 Barre Toelken, "The Folklore of water in the Mormon West'," Northwest Folklore 7 (Spring 1989): 10. 4 spiritual universe. w~ter and its management were crucial not only to the material survival and prosperity of the town, but also to the residents' understanding of their individual and collective roles in the fulfillment of the Mormon mission. This thesis will explore the connections between water, religion, community, and nature along the Logan River in Cache Valley, Utah, from settlement in 1860 through the 1916 community-wide adjudication of water rights [see Figure 1]. The events of those years are informed by both earlier and later stages of Mormon settlement, as evident in John Borrowman's journal, and thus I consider examples of water use from widely varying moments of Utah's settlement. Though the management and infrastructure of water use changed over this 1860-1916 time-span, and continued to change thereafter, the Logan irrigators' tenacious commitment to traditional practices and institutions during this period indicated the cultural importance of a uniquely Mormon way of distributing water. In claiming that water held "cultural importance" in Mormon Utah, that water use was itself "cultural," I seek more than historical proof of the obvious. I investigate rather the detailed and subtle ways in which culture--the ever-shifting mixture of religious belief, social and economic structure, material subsistence, family and community life, divisions of labor, written and oral .... '1 \A q, ~~ Figure 1. Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, from The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956). ~. 01 6 traditions, and worldview--shaped the use of natural resources. All natural resource use is cultural, but the connections between nature and culture, and the ways in which culture mediates between human communities and the natural environment, vary widely, even within a single region or state. A detailed consideration of these connections from a cultural standpoint, as a case study of the interactions between nature and culture, is justified by the unique world of Mormon water use. Over the last few decades, growing numbers of historians have turned their attention to the place of water in the American West, and in the Mormon West as well. 4 Donald Worster's 1985 book, Rivers of Empire: water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, is perhaps the most provocative of these recent works. It is 4 The list is extensive, but includes: Robert G. Dunbar, Forging New Rights in Western Waters (Lincoln, 1983); Norris Hundley, jr., Water and the West: The Colorado River and the Politics of Water in the West (Berkeley, 1975); William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles' Water Sqpply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley, 1982); Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall .Rejoice: Conflict, Growth, and Justice in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Donald J. Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (Berkeley, 1984); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1986); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York, 1900); and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire; water, Aridity & The Growth of The American West (New York, 1985). in part a moral condemnation of the destruction that the hydraulic society of the modern West has visited upon rivers that were once natural systems, and upon communities that once felt some connection to those rivers. Worster defines three modes of societal water control: the local SUbsistence mode; the agrarian state mode; and the one currently operating in most western communities, the capitalist state mode. s Worster characterizes the early Mormon SUbsistence mode as an admirable monument to religious zeal, as an example of a 7 good fit between ideology and environment, and as evidence of an underlying, dictatorial church hierarchy. Mormon water systems were certainly all of those things, but they were much more as well. Worster only skims the surface of what is to be learned from a close examination of the local SUbsistence mode of water control in utah. This is not surprising, as neither utah nor SUbsistence water use are his main topic in Rivers of Empire. His discussion of the capitalist state mode of water development, however, by providing a contrast to local SUbsistence water systems, underlines much that is important about water in Mormon communities. The West's hydraulic society, according to Worster, S Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water. Aridity & The Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 31. 8 is built on "a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature. ,,6 That relationship with nature is evident in the infrastructure of dams, canals, and aqueducts, monolithic concrete fortresses which proclaim humankind's domination of, and separation from, the natural resources that support their consumer-oriented, socially divided culture. Water in these canals and behind these dams is not part of a natural system, but rather, in Worster's words, "simplified, abstracted water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to raise food, fill pipes, and make money.,,7 In evoking the profound alienation he perceives between the human community and water, Worster describes the Friant-Kern Canal, which waters the agribusiness empire of California's Central Valley: Along the Friant-Kern Canal, as along many others like it, tall chain-link fences run on either side, sealing the ditch off from stray dogs, children, fishermen (there are no fish anyway), solitary thinkers, lovers, swimmers, loping hungry coyotes, migrating turtles, indeed from all of nature and human life ..•• 8 At its core, then, Rivers of Empire asserts that the way in which any community in an arid environment controls its distribution of water reflects its social and 6 Worster, Rivers' of Empire,S. 7 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S. 8 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S. 9 political structure, and the fundamental tenets of its attitudes toward nature. In Worster's words, "the social order, the shape of western community ••• is reflected in the waters of the ditch. ,,9 That assertion, and those reflections, are nowhere more evident than in the Logan River communities of Cache Valley between 1860 and 1916. The following chapters will explore the social order reflected in the workings of village ditches, first from the wide-angled perspective of the Mormon spiritual worldview, then from the nearer vantage of the season-to-season workings of two major canal companies, and finally from a close-up look at water use on village house lots and in gardens. While Mormon water use was a thoroughly cultural activity, it involved nature as well. The development of irrigation institutions and distributions systems that met the agricultural demands of the villages involved a constant struggle to fit those demands into the limits of the water supplied by the Logan River. The Euro-American settlers who first diverted the waters of the Logan River alienated and abstracted that river from its "first" or original "state of nature," just as other westerners wrought havoc on the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia, and Colorado. 9 Worster, River of Empire, 5. 10 Cache Valley Mormons also "commoditized" irrigation water, bringing it within a system of economic exchange that defined and re-defined its value by different, and changing, criteria. The Utahns turned the river into networks of canals, and attempted to alter the annual cycles of natural water flow to match the cycles of agricultural demand and community water use. In Logan, Utah, however, this creation of a "second" nature, a second cycle of water flow, took place on a much less disruptive scale than elsewhere in the west. Mormon culture and the Cache Valley environment were different from other western cultures and places. The Mormon system of re-distributing river flow across time and space was thus distinctive. water in small Mormon communities was not "rigidly separated" from the human communities through which it ran by artificial cycles of dam-released flow, by steel and concrete, or by intellectual constructs of water as commodity or as capital. The system of exchange worked out by Logan water users--what and when they traded amongst themselves for water--proved less rigid, less cash-based, less technologically complex, than those of other, and later, western communities. Mormons certainly foisted intellectual constructs onto their water supply, and certainly altered its cycles of flow, but they were constructs and cycles of a different kind, based on their 11 drive for material success within the boundaries of community tenets. Far from alienating water from its own "nature" or from human society, Mormon settlers welcomed irrigation water into their communities, where it flowed in open streams down ditches and gutters, through yards and parks, providing long corridors of green vegetation, and lofting islands of cool air into the summer heat. The Latter-day saints filled their towns with the sound of running water. water, at least in some utah communities, had a meaning far different from that of water in other parts of the American west. This much is clear in the contrast between village canals and the hydraulic nightmare Worster describes in California. Where Rivers of Empire tells the story of Big Twentieth-Century Water, this thesis examines a smaller, more obscure and out-of-the-way genre of western water history, one of small communities using a small river to small ends. Water formed crucial, dynamic connections between members of those communities, and between the community and the natural environment. Those connections to water grew out of the unique culture that the Latter-day Saints developed in reaction to a specific western environment. Water joined them to nature and to each other in ways which evidenced not a timeless harmony between "man" and "nature," but rather the disjunctions 12 and tensions inherent in every attempt to shape nature to human designs, as well as the tensions within human communities created by such shapings. This discussion of Mormon water-use, then, is at its base a cultural study, an attempt to sketch the ways in which culture is both shaped by and reflected in the use of natural resources, and the ways in which culture can in turn influence social decisions concerning nature as a resource. 13 CHAPTER II NATURE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH In the villages of Cache Valley, Utah, water was part both of a natural system--the river--and a social, religious, and even spiritual system--Mormon culture. That culture combined elements of Jeffersonian agrarianism with a peculiar brand of millennial fervor. To find the place of water in this spiritual universe, one must follow its flow into and out of Mormon agrarianism. As the vanguard of Euro-American settlement in the Great Basin, the Utah migrants of the 1840s, '50s, and '60s brought with them the basic tenets of the American agrarian myth. Like other Americans, they held that the Biblical injunction to "replenish the earth, and subdue it" could best be fulfilled though agriculture. Through farming, God's true servants could remake the New World into a second garden of Eden. In his late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings, Thomas Jefferson combined Biblical agrarianism with the Enlightenmentinspired conviction that only the yeoman farmer, dependent solely on the soil and his own initiative, could properly participate in a democratic society. Jefferson wrote that "[t]hose who labor in the earth are the chosen people of 14 God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for sUbstantial and genuine v1. rt ue .... ,,1 This agrarian myth prevailed throughout America in the 19th century. It had particular power in regard to the American West, as established by Henry Nash smith in his classic work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. smith expanded Jefferson's general agrarian myth to include the "myth of the garden," the idea that the transformation of the continent should result in a settled pastoral landscape. "The master symbol of the garden," smith wrote, "embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow. ,,2 The Latter-day saints adhered to this garden-myth with a tenacity unmatched by any other group of Euro-American settlers. 3 They focused on the canonization and fulfillment of agriculture ideals with 1 As quoted in Donald Henriques Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism: A Touch of the Mountain Sod" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1980), 3. 2 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 123. 3 See Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 136, on the Mormon affinity for the "controlling images" of the agrarian myth. unprecedented energy. Generic American agrarianism deteriorated into a fuzzy secularity as the 19th century progressed, but Utah Mormons harnessed the fervor of puritanism, and of 1840s revivalism, to propel agrarian beliefs to new heights of piety. Historian Charles S. 15 Peterson described Mormon agrarian belief as "[c]osmic in its breadth," a conviction that: Man and the world in which he lived were in a wicked and ungodly state. The redemption of the righteous was the first imperative and implied the second, the redemption of the earth. 4 Brigham Young, who led the Mormon migration to Utah, with his fellow Mormon leaders incorporated this version of Christian agrarianism into scriptural texts. Their writings reveal an intensely practical agrarian faith, according to which human beings sought not to improve themselves for a non-earthly afterlife, but rather to improve the earth as they improved themselves. with the resurrection of Christ, they believed, the earth itself, the quality of the climate, soil, and crops would change, assuming an Edenic state. s Donald H. Dyal, whose 1980 study outlined the tenets of Mormon agrarianism, recorded that early Mormon leaders preached "the regeneration of .4 Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900 (Tucson, 1973), 7. S Parley Pratt, a Church apostle, as cited in Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 127. 16 the earth not only as a spiritual event, but also a physical or more specifically agricultural event."6 Thus Mormon farmers, like American farmers across the Midwest and the Great Plains, saw their work as essential to the creation of a good place, a democratic place, a place safe from the despotism of foreigners, the depredations of natives, and the unprincipled machinations of speculators. Agricultural labor was indeed the key element in the creation of a godly place in utah. Farm work provided the Mormons with their only true means of finding a place in God's kingdom.' This agricultural redemption of the earth, according to Leonard J. Arrington, the pre-eminent historian of Mormon Utah, constituted one of the seven basic principles of Mormon theology. such redemption, defined as lithe orderly development of local resources," implied that "[m]aking the waste places blossom as a rose, and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits, was more than an economic necessity; it was a form of religious worship."8 In previous stages of American settlement, the pursuit of . an ideal society peopled by yeoman farm 6 Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 128. , Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 133. 8 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. 1830-1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 25-26. 17 families had required only hard work, perseverance, a strong faith in God's obvious favor toward a white, democratic civilization, and, of course, an abundance of fertile land. In Utah, that was not enough. About 15 inches of rain fell annually on the benchlands and valley floors of the sloping foothills of the Wasatch Front. Even with their hard work, steel-willed leadership, and unswerving confidence in God's favor, the Utah Saints also needed water. The arid environment provided the backdrop against which Utah settlers developed a strong set of connections between the creation of ideal agricultural communities and the bringing of irrigation water to their farms. The deterministic power of aridity frequently plagues students of American western history. Did western history unfold along certain lines because the land received less than twenty inches of annual rainfall and thus prohibited humid-land agriculture? Donald Worster and Wallace stegner, two of the finest scholars of the West, see aridity as an essential factor in the region's history. The West is as it is, stegner declares, because "Anyone who wants to live in the West has to manage water to some degree." They must obey a law of water scarcity, and live 18 "within the country's rules of sparseness of mobility.,,9 In the Mormon west the water question is heightened by the unique characteristics of utah as a sub-region. The saints' West sprang up differently from everything that came after. Does aridity account for the Mormons' distinctive modes of settlement? Is water the absolute key to understanding Mormon Utah? Worster, stegner, and others who have addressed that question have established beyond all doubt that the Mormon's beliefs concerning their arid environment are as, or more, important in understanding Utah's history, than the lack of rainfall itself. Utah Mormons incorporated their encounters with the arid Great Basin into their history, their belief system, and their vision of themselves, and those images of dryness reveal much about the role of water in the Mormon past. The creation of an Edenic agricultural civilization in a barren desert was a central myth of 19th- and early 20th-century Utah Mormon culture. That myth grew out of the parallels between the saints' migration to Utah and the Biblical exodus, and out of the Mormon leaders' post-settlement exaggerations of the aridity of the land along the Wasatch Front. It turned on the belief that the east 9 Wallace stegner, The American West as LiVing Space (Ann Arbor, 1987), 36. 19 side of the Salt Lake Valley was so dry and infertile that it could not have supported just any group of EuroAmerican settlers; only the chosen could have built an oasis in that environment. "'I am thankful to a fulness [sic]," declared Young in 1847, "that the Lord has brought us to these barren valleys, to these sterile mountains, to this desolate waste, where only the Saints can or would live .... "w This exaggeration began as a tool for group motivation and celebration, a way of encouraging settlers to conquer new deserts by invoking wastelands already banished. 11 It became, however, a fundamental building block of collective Mormon identity: the belief that the first settlers had brought water to an unproductive land and made the world anew. In reality, as geographer Richard Jackson has proven, the first utah settlers settled an admittedly challenging environment that was in no way barren. They had planned it that way. Brigham Young reviewed all available information on the Great Salt Lake region prior to the beginning of the Mormons' 1847 overland trek. He read trappers' and explorers' accounts of the region, w Journal of Discourses, 4 (Liverpool, 1847), 344, as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 198. 11 See Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality: Environmental Perception of the Mormons, 1840-1865, An Historical Geosophy" (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1970), 84, 188. 20 which described it in turn as possessing "more than ordinary fertility and productiveness," as "most beautiful country ..• intersected by a number of transparent streams. ,,12 Explorer and legendary self-promoter John C. Fremont wrote of the northern Salt Lake Valley that "[t]he bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient; the soil good, and well adapted to the grains and grasses suited to such an elevated region •••• "u Migrants to the Wasatch Front in the 1850s and 1860s did not settle a parched land, but rather a "narrow oasis" in the foothills of the Wasatch mountains. w The initial wave of settlers, Jackson established, described their new home not as a forbidding wasteland, but as abundant and fertile, well-suited to agricultural pursuits. They found an environment fortuitously suited to their understanding of how nature should support 12 On the Bear River Valley, Lanford W. Hastings, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California (1845; repr. Princeton, NJ, 1932), 19; and fur trader Daniel Potts in Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley (Barre, MA, 1960), 63, both as quoted in Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 67, 74. 13 John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains and to Oregon and Northern California (Washington, DC, 1845), 144, as quoted in Jackson, . "Myth and Reality," 81. 14 Dan L. Flores, "Islands in the Desert: An Environmental Interpretation of the Rocky Mountain Frontier" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1978), 238. certain kinds of community life. surveying numerous diaries kept by first generation settlers, Jackson found few if any references to the environment as a "desert" a "wasteland," or "barren."lS Instead, Jackson concluded, 21 Brigham Young and his fellow leaders fostered a set of myths in the years following successful settlement that caused the larger Mormon community to integrate into their own history and consciousness a conviction that they had, with the assistance of divine power, transformed a desert into an oasis. 16 The Journal of Discourses, a collection of the writings of Mormon leaders, offered convincing examples of the instillation of the belief that the Wasatch Front had, in 1847, been little more than, in the words of George A. smith, "a desert, containing nothing but a few bunches of dead grass, and crickets enough to fence the land."n This idea that the well-governed, hard-working populace, and the green, thriving, well-watered fields could not have been possible in the desert without divine intervention held fast in Mormon culture, to be applied again and again as settlers struck out for new colonies lS Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 135, 134, 172. 16 See Jackson's discussion of these myths in "Myth and Reality," 190. n Journal of Discourses, 1 (Liverpool, 1852), 44, as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 190. 22 beyond the core region. Non-Mormon visitors enhanced the mythology. After glimpsing the verdant valleys and comparing them with other western locales, travelers came away with a distinct sense of the Mormons as a favored population. 18 God's particular care in fostering the saints' survival has remained a viable tenet of Mormon history for over a century.~ Irrigation was the single activity most key to the transformation of the landscape from which these environmental myths were formed. It was also the key to the actual work done by settlers in the building of the Mormon kingdom. The di-version of water from mountain streams to gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures was important to the Mormon understanding of the human place in nature, and of nature in history. As decades passed and the memories of those who had actually seen presettlement Utah faded, the power over nature achieved by both God and Mormon settlers continued to increase. Pioneer history moved beyond the litany of the blossoming desert toward a belief in the actual improvement of the Utah climate itself. As Great Plains settlers believed that rain followed the plow, so Mormons came to believe that irrigation enhanced river flow. A writer in the 18 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 207. 19 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 166. 23 Millennial star, a Mormon periodical claimed in 1884 that "Many streams have been greatly increased in volume, and in some places new springs have burst forth in the desert ..•• The rainfall has greatly increased in some localities. ,,20 water was a dynamic participant in the mythic transformation of the desert into a garden. Each Mormon irrigator, from 1847 on, saw himself or herself to be participating in, and re-enacting, that transformation. The water itself connected them to their higher religious mission. The Utah settlers' administration of natural resources, most notably land, timber, and water, embodied other theological aspects of the Mormon belief system. Mormons held that the earth's resources belonged to God, and were held by human beings only in a temporary state of stewardship. Stewardship meant that the church, through the community, allotted each individual only the amount of land and resources that he could use for the benefit of the community. Like the redemption of the earth, stewardship comprised a basic tenet governing Mormon Utah. 21 Collective stewardship as expressed in Mormon Utah 20 J. H. Ward, "Utah, Past and Present," Millennial star 46 (1884): 520-22, as quoted in Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission, 158. 21 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25. 24 implied a collective or cooperative mastery over nature. Because they were stewards of their land and resources, rather than outright individual owners, Mormon settlers bore a specific set of obligations to the community and to the church. Only through full and beneficial use of the earth's bounty, they believed, could the kingdom grow. Each individual, in maximizing the production of a single family's allotment, could support that growth. In addition, ten percent of a family's annual production was given to the Church to support its activities. Mormon communitarianism demanded that the interests of the community come before those of the individual. That collective legacy has come under much scholarly scrutiny in recent decades, as historians have tested the degree to which Mormon communities actually practiced the communal ideals that they preached. The debate over communalism has included considerations of the nature of Mormon self-sufficiency, of their system of economic distribution, and of their modes of economic production. In a 1978 study of the political economy of Spring City, a central utah town, Michael scott Raber contrasted local modes of production with modes of distribution. Raber worked from the premise that where village- and territorywide distribution of farm and village products were 25 communitarian, modes of production were not.n Raber concluded that the individual family, not the community, formed the basic unit of production and of the theological quest for salvation through labor on the land. Donald oyal reached a similar conclusion in his study of agrarian values in Mormonism, noting that, in Mormon communities, U[t]he individual or individual family is the basal unit of all activity.un The family existed as a self-contained production unit and a microcosm of ·God's universal family, but according to religious and economic ideals, the domestic unit was expected to work and produce not primarily not only for their own benefit, but for that of the collective as well. In contrasting the family with the community as important utah institutions, Michael Raber raised a number of important points concerning the linkage between agricultural labor, nature, and community. Raber claimed that the Mormon settlement system, with centralized direction of colonization and collective ownership and development of natural resources for the common good, did not persist beyond the most initial stages of the colonization process. Those early years saw the 22 Michael Scott Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978), 11. n Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 163. 26 conversion of common, public resources into privately held allotments. Those allotments became the domain of individual households, and those households were responsible for the production of most of the goods necessary to sustain themselves. In Mormon communities, Raber contends, there were two levels of production: the household level, and the suprahousehold, or community level.u As a single entity, the community cleared fields, built fences, and dug irrigation canals. These were not tasks of actual economic production.~ These centrally organized projects, Raber points out, were for the most past one-time efforts to create the infrastructure of production, which would then support each family's independent quest to support itself. The individual laborer contributed his time and effort to these collective tasks only to the extent that he would personally benefit. In fact, the individual was assigned community labor--a length of fence or a stretch of canal-in direct proportion to the size and demands of his individual holdings. In Raber's version of Mormon village labor, an aggregate group of individuals sacrificed fragments of their valuable time to assist in the breaking U Raber, "Religious Policy and Local Production," 288. ~ Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 289. up of common resources into usable pieces. Once the fences were built and the ditches dug, each family could depend on protected fields and a sufficient allotment of water. Little need remained for further communal labor. Raber concludes that the most striking feature of the Mormon political economy was not its cooperative nature but "the relative lack of corporate arrangements for production at levels of operation above or beyond the household, and the self-conscious containment within the household of as much labor as needed on individual farm tasks .... ,,26 Raber's analysis of these underlying economic patterns rightly emphasizes the importance of family in 27 the Mormon community. Like John Borrowman and his journal record of his first son's birth, the individual utah settler understood and expressed his or her attachments to God, land, and community through the lens of family. Raber does not consider, however, the ways in which the individual family remained connected to the community, especially to its ideals, its work, and its resources, after the initial community projects were completed. One of the ways they remained connected was through their continued use of irrigation water. water in Mormon 26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 288. 28 communities flowed out of canyons, which were public spaces, through main-line canals, which were owned and managed by community groups, and, finally, into fields and yards, which were worked by families for family survival. water connected those different realms, and thus connected families to the community. It also caused conflicts between families and the community. The larger purpose of the irrigation system, as Raber pointed out, was indeed to bring water to family spaces, to private spaces.v But it passed out of nature and through the community to get to those spaces, and thus both nature and community played a role in family water use. In addition, Mormon family activities of building and beautifying a home and garden, and raising children to further the religious community, were inherently connected to larger communal goals. Raber's conclusion that the collective construction of economic infrastructure of production was a one-time happening after which the individual family took over the bulk of economic activity is tempered by his admission that water was a resource different in quality and use from land, animals, timber, homes, and churches. The creation of an irrigation system did not immediately produce anything, but instead created a means for v Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 190. 29 producing from fields, gardens, and orchards. "The difference was," Raber admitted, "that irrigation involved continuing renewal of this act of creation, while the less fluid elements of crop production did not. ,,28 Community irrigation construction efforts could last for years, and the repairs could last forever. In this "continual renewal" of the "act of creation," the annual planning and carrying out of the repair and use of the irrigation canals and ditches, lay the crux of these linkages between individual Mormon families and the Mormon spiritual universe. Cooperative economic activity sometimes did decline sharply after the early years of settlement, but each individual family remained tied to the legacy of that cooperativism by continuing ties to irrigation systems, to which they still contributed labor or taxes, and from which they drew water. Those ties to their community were not always welcome, or peaceful, or productive, but they remained. And every spring, with the start of the irrigation season, Mormons re-affirmed the connections between their labor, their community, their mastery of nature in the proving of God's bounty, and their redemption of the earth. Water and work gave substance to these connections. 28 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 289. 30 Mastery of nature and the purifying of the land served as powerful motivating ideals, but most Mormon families devoted their lives to muddy physical labor. The history of that labor is distinctive not because of the doctrine of stewardship or the injunction to master nature, but because of the clarity and faith with which the people themselves understood stewardship, mastery, neighborly relations, and the day-to-day meaning of their work. Henry Ballard, a Cache Valley settler, reported a gathering of neighbors in the "well crowded" Logan schoolhouse on the undoubtedly chilly evening of February 4, 1860. "It was a time of rejoicing," Ballard wrote. "Brother Hammon[d] Advised us not to forget our Dutys when the Spring opened but to be Alive to our Duty at all times in the Kanyon and in our fields and in all our movements.,,29 Forty-five years later an editorial in the agricultural periodical Deseret Farmer claimed that "One of the greatest joys of the farmer's life should come from a realization of the relation of his work to that of his Creator. He is co-operating with nature--which is the handiwork of God--and from lifeless, . useless things he creates articles for which a hungry, dependent world is 29 Henry Ballard Journal, 4 February 1860, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vols. 1-2, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 31 longing. ,,30 That Henry Ballard and his fellow saints strove to be alive to their duty while cutting timber or digging ditches, or that they thought about their duty to their community and their God, gave them a connection to the land and water with which they worked. They understood themselves to be cooperating with nature, even when they had no conception of the autonomous ecological processes which they interrupted. Their labor had layers of symbolic meaning; like water, it tied them to nature, to each other, and to God. Physical labor, of course, had much to do with the bringing of water to the newly carved out croplands along the Wasatch benches. The act of working together to build and maintain ditches reinforced the connections between nature, community, and the religious mission. Long after utah was integrated into mainstream America and its culture of rampant individuality, irrigation systems continued to require the aggregate labor of individual water users, and continued to reinforce those linkages. The paradoxes of being an individual both separate from the community, and connected by labor and water to the physical community and the spiritual universe, permeated 30 "The Other Side of Farming," Deseret Farmer 1 (15 June 1905). Mormon life. Those paradoxes found one avenue of expression in the myriad uses of water. 32 33 CHAPTER III FROM LOGAN RIVER TO LOGAN TOWN Prior to 1859, water flowed out of the high limestone confines of Logan canyon and into Cache Valley without crossing any major thresholds other than the gradual slope of the valley floor . . with rapid Mormon settlement in the early 1860s, the Logan River became part of a new ecology, a new system of encounters and exchanges in which the river itself played a crucial part. with its shaping of, and integration into, the villages of the east side of the valley, the river was channelled in new directions, for new purposes, across new thresholds. As the villages of Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield sprang up, and as their citizens dug canals between them, the water flowed out of the canyon, a "natural" realm, into the towns, which were spiritual communities with a specific millennialist purpose, and a distinctive physical structure which reflected that spiritual goal. Within those communities, water diverted from the Logan River flowed between the larger social world of the village into the smaller domains of individual families. In doing so it flowed from the patriarchal world where male heads of household worked with, controlled, and directed water, to 34 the familial world of the house and garden. In the main "trunk" canals which crossed the benches, pastures, and grain fields, water flowed between the separate villages, connecting them in ways no other shared resource could. The Logan River possessed natural characteristics that attracted Mormon settlers and structured the ways in which they used water. In comparison with other drainages, it was easily exploited. Any understanding of community water use must first take the river itself, and the landscape, into account. From its headwaters northeast of the town of Logan, the Logan River runs twenty-odd miles through the Bear River mountains, a spur of the Wasatch mountains, and down Logan Canyon to the floor of Cache Valley, where it joins the Bear River. The river drains 223 square miles of watershed, a topography that ranges from elevations of just over 4,000 feet above sea level to nearly 10,000 feet.l The Bear River mountains are predominantly limestone, with sandstone and dolomite in places. None of those rock formations readily absorb water. 2 Large glacial deposits at the center of the watershed do absorb water, and their storage capacity 1 Frank W. Haws, "A critical Analysis of Water Rights and Institutional Factors and their Effect on the Development of Logan River" (Master's thesis, utah state University, 1965), 4. 2 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 9. 35 supplies the river's continuous flow. 3 The geology of the region thus insures that most of the precipitation that falls on the watershed ends up in the river. The key climatological aspect of the valley's dependence on the Logan River watershed is the sharp discrepancy in precipitation between the valley floor and the nearby mountains. Annual precipitation in Cache Valley averages just over sixteen inches. The high peaks of the Bear River range just east of the valley, average over fifty inches in a year, most of it in the winter, in the form of snow. Because the Logan watershed is, in the words of water economist Frank Haws, a "tightly closed hydrologic system," it allows minimum loss or gain of water to or from invisible sources. The river thus efficiently conveys a sUbstantial volume of water out of the ' inaccessible mountains and canyon and onto the valley floor. There the annual surface runoff is quite easily harnessed by hand-dug irrigation systems. 4 The keys to that water management are the seasonal patterns of precipitation and river flow, which must be manipulated to provide water according to human, rather than natural, patterns. After emerging from the mountains at the mouth of 3 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11. 4 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11. 36 Logan Canyon, the river cuts through the benches on the eastern slopes of the valley, and across the flat valley floor, meeting the Bear River in the middle of lowlying wetlands at the valley's center. Like the Great Salt Lake Valley, Cache Valley is a legacy of Lake Bonneville, the great inland sea of which Salt Lake is a surviving remnant. About 18,000 years ago, the ancient lake reached its highest level at an elevation of just over 5,000 feet. Streams entering the lake formed deltas of sand and gravel which became high benches at the mouths of canyons; as the lake's level dropped, new deltas formed out of "sandy, porous chestnut soils, fertile and rich in lime."s This successive formation of deltas and fans at different levels left a series of flat, raised steps that climbed down the valley's walls. As it receded further, the lake left layers of alluvial deposits which now form the valley floor. 6 The nineteenth-century Mormon immigrants settled in the transition zone of the Wasatch mountain range, an area environmental historian Dan Flores characterizes as a "narrow, rich, alluvial piedmont of fans, deltas, and S Dan L. Flores, "Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review 7 (Winter 1983): 328. 6 A. J. Simmonds, "Lake Bonneville Sculpted Cache Valley Landscape," [Logan, UT] Herald Journal, 26 March 1989, Bridgerland section, 90-91. 37 terraces, through which meandered the sweet clear water of the mountains."7 Receiving between 13 and 18 inches of rain and snow in a year, this corridor of fertile soils was, in Cache Valley even more than along the Great Salt Lake, particularly suited to Mormon social, religious, and economic goals of agrarian communitarianism, selfsufficiency, and isolation. As settlers gravitated toward the confluence of water, timber, fertile soil, and grazing bottoms at the mouths of the canyons, they remade the transition zone into a Mormon settlement zone. The villages that the Utah pilgrims located on and near the Logan river, like others along the Wasatch Front, evidenced a perceptive environmental strategy, a consciousness of the value of the resources available in those particular places. That consciousness was reflected in the organization and form of the villages themselves, as well as in their location against the dramatic backdrop of the Wasatch foothills. The structure of Mormon communities, like the structure of the Logan River watershed, or of the soils of Cache Valley's alluvial benches, is crucial to an understanding of the flow of water between the two. The Mormon village, according to Leonard J. Arrington, held a venerable place, with the redemption of the earth and the 7 Flores, "Zion in Eden," 327. 38 stewardship of property, as an underlying economic ideal of the Saints' mission, one of the key foundation stones in the edifice of the Kingdom. 8 The village pattern was based on the Plat of the city of Zion, a plan first put forth by church founder Joseph smith in the early 1830s when he planned settlements for Jackson County, Missouri. smith's plan called for a mile square village with blocks of ten acres divided into twenty lots, each a half acre in size. streets ran east/west or north/south. House lots included room for a garden and lawn, or orchard. Farmland was located outside the residential areas of the town. 9 This Missouri-born plan continued to guide village planning once the Mormons left the Midwest for Utah. Though conceived long before the saints' plans to move to the arid west, the four-square, compact village surrounded by crop fields proved, as Leonard Arrington pointed out, "peculiarly adapted" to Mormon goals for life in the Great Basin. 10 The tightly concentrated housing pattern kept settlers close together, providing for a wealth of social and religious activities, easy regulation of community projects, and collective defense against displaced groups of Shoshone-Bannocks. In addition, Arrington noted, the 8 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24-25. 9 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 10. 10 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24. village as it developed on the Wasatch Front and throughout Utah, "permitted effective irrigation culture."n 39 The compact settlement pattern that characterized Mormon villages, though evolved from ideal images of early New England towns, contributed significantly to the success of Utah irrigation. with homes and gardens concentrated in a small area, a few main canals branching from the local river were split into networks of smaller ditches. These in turn brought water to each family, with the water itself traveling as little distance as possible. The same main canals could carry water to agricultural fields both before and after they passed through the residential areas of the village. Those same canals could continue beyond the boundaries of the village and its fields to serve the next village to the north or south along the base of the foothills. The Mormon village pattern thus encouraged efficiency of ditch-digging and of water use, though efficiency was not always the result. The importance of water and its flow within the village grid itself will be taken up in the next chapter. Water outside that grid, in canals and between villages, held different meanings. Samuel Fortier, a hydrographer and engineer who n Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25. 40 surveyed Cache Valley's water resources in the late 1890s, drew a detailed map of the region, showing the irrigation canals and ditches and the land they watered [Figures 2, 2AJ. Fortier's map demonstrates the marked contrast between the path of Logan River canals between the separate village grids of Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield, and their trajectories within the villages themselves. Outside the rigid geometry of the towns, the canals looked somewhat like tributaries to the rivers, curving with the topography of the valley's sloping floor. within the gridS, especially in Logan, the canals followed the straight lines and right angles the village streets, conforming to the order that the Mormons brought to their wilderness. The flow of water outside towns and between towns looked different, looked more river-like, more "natural." The canals' curving paths appeared somewhat analogous to that of the river itself. Folklorist Austin Fife noticed the contrasts between natural patterns of river flow and strict angles of the village grid. He wrote in 1979 that "the rectangular grids followed by the fenced property lines and roads did not synchronize with the terrain features that had to be followed in order to always keep the naturally flowing water where it could I Figure 2. Cache Valley Basin with Inset [see Figure 2A] Showing Logan River Canals, Including Logan and Richmond, and Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canals. From Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley (Logan, 1897). i! ~ ..... 42 N 43 reach the cultivatable land."n Beyond village boundaries, irrigation canals were more like rivers. They were, in fact, new, human-made rivers, directed toward community ends, but eternally plagued by non-human nemeses such as mountain topography, muskrats, mudslides, moss, and floods. In a recent history of Chicago, western and environmental historian William Cronon uses the Hegelian and Marxist ideas of "first nature" and "second nature" to explore how 19th-century Chicagoans defined, and redefined, the "natural. "13 In Chicago, "first nature," the original, naturally created landscape, embodied a range of different possibilities open to Euro-American settlers and developers. out of "their vision of what it should be" early Chicagoans built on top of that first landscape, "[a] kind of 'second nature,' designed by people and 'improved' toward human ends. "14 In doing so, they imposed "their own order ••• on the world of first 12 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned, Horse Powered, Irrigated, Multiple Produce Farms of the Intermountain West," TS, 1979, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT, 13. 13 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), xvii. Nature's Metropolis explores the city's meteoric development through the transformation of its western hinterland, and in the commoditization of the goods--grain, wood, and meat--produced in that transformation. W Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 55-56. 44 nature ••.• ,,15 That human order remained "natural," though, because it conformed to human visions of what should happen in that particular place, the trajectory of the appropriate course of events. Furthermore, "second nature" so thoroughly obscured "first nature" that it took its place. That which was man-made was taken to be a gift of nature, so easily, so "naturally," had it arisen in nature's place. According to this idea of second nature, the railroads which passed through Chicago seemed natural. The flat landscape around the city and in it,s hinterland was "peculiarly suited" to railroads, much as the fringes of the Wasatch Front seemed so "naturally" adapted to compact Mormon villages and their irrigation systems. 16 That either of them--Chicago railroads or utah irrigation canals--sprang up and thrived, seemed entirely natural, as did their transformation of the surrounding landscape. In addition, Cronon points out, the bison and pine trees, which had once been part only of "first nature," became something entirely different when drawn into the humanconstructed world of "second nature. ,,17 They became commodities of the market, "things priced, bought, and 15 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 146. 16 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 72. n Cronan, Nature's Metropolis, 266. sold within a system of human exchange. ,,18 water in utah followed much the same path. 45 Cronon also proposes that the distance between first nature and second nature, is, in the history of Chicago and its hinterland, a measure of the movement from "local ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy. ,,19 In other words, the extent to which human construction of second nature obliterates first nature signals the degree of a place's integration into a larger economic system. It is that larger system, one of global markets, that redefines the "local" as something that is no longer local, that reshapes the first nature that made a city or a hinterland what it was to begin with, into something entirely different. Cronon's discussions of first and second nature, though focused on a topic far from Mormon irrigation canal systems, make a number of important points about any human manipulation of a natural landscape. First of all, the canals that Cache Valley Mormons built to carry water from the Logan River to their houses, yards, and fields constituted a form of second nature. They caused water to flow to places it had not flowed before, changing not only the n·ewly-watered land, but the river itself. To the 18 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 266. 19 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 267. 46 settlers who oversaw that process, the canals became, literally, second nature, an obvious, "natural" solution to their need to redistribute the river to meet human needs. The canals became elements of a landscape destined for a full-fledged flowering of the Mormon kingdom and for the fulfillment of the land's bounteous agricultural and "natural" potential. The water that flowed out of the Logan River and into irrigation canals was thus redefined, culturally, and economically. It was made part of a unique system of human exchange, given all of the spiritual, cultural, and historical meanings that Mormons bestowed upon water. The water of the Logan, as it flowed through Cache Valley villages, became part of a second nature. It was irrevocably separated from the water that continued on, uncaptured, across the valley to the Bear River, and into the Great Salt Lake. As irrigation water, it was measured, timed, commoditized, distributed, stored, and fought over in ways that changed its meaning and identity. While irrigation canals formed a vital and distinct second nature, imposed by human artifice, they did not subsume the Logan River itself. The Logan continued to flow, even if diminished, much as it .always had. First and second nature co-existed to a certain degree, both remaining visible, both struggling with the other to 47 assert its own order and dominance. According to Cronon's formulation, this "failure" of second nature to obliterate first nature was an indication of the enduring localism of this particular cultural and economic use of nature. In Cache Valley, second nature was built on top of first nature without causing first nature to be completely lost. Both "natures" were natural, but neither gained the upper hand, neither came to completely dominate the other. Mormon settlers lived and irrigated in Salt Lake Valley for a dozen years before Church President Brigham Young dispatched colonizers north to Cache Valley. Young's scouts had termed Cache "the most beautiful valley that they had seen," on an initial survey in August 1847 .20 Grazers took church cattle herds north to graze in Cache Valley in 1855, but harsh conditions--colder winters than the Salt Lake area--discouraged settlement until 1856, when Peter and Mary Ann Maughan and their family founded Wellsville. Skirmishes with Shoshone cattle rustlers and the threat from the federal army in the Utah War further delayed a proper foothold of villages W Thomas Bullock Pioneer Camp Journal No.2, 1847, quoted in Joel E. Ricks, Forms and Methods of Early Mormon Settlement in Utah and the Surrounding Region. 1847 to 1877 (Logan, UT, 1964), 43. until 1859. 21 Over 2,000 settlers, many of them northern European immigrants, flooded in over the next two years, establishing a string of towns at the base of the 48 mountains including Paradise, Millville, Logan, Hyde Park, Mendon, and Smithfield. This impressive rate of colonization continued through the early 1860s, with Logan reaching a population of 1,727 by 1870, and Smithfield of 676 by 1867.n That growth continued. Over 5,700 people lived in Logan by 1895, and over 1,400 in Smithfield. In only 35 years, 18,286 people settled in Cache Valley, rapidly transforming its landscape and the flow of water across that landscape. n When the newly arrived citizens of Logan first diverted the waters of the Logan River in mid-May of 1860, they baptized themselves and the river into a new set of hierarchies--beliefs, laws, and practices--concerning water use. The basic tenets of religious belief that 21 Ricks, FOrms and Methods of Early Mormon Settlement, 64-65; and Feramorz Young Fox, "The Mormon Land System: A Study of the Settlement and Utilization of Land Under the Direction of the Mormon Church" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932), 65. n Logan population figure from Haws, "Development of .Logan River," 42; Smithfield population figure from The History of Smithfield (Smithfield, UT, 1927), 8. n Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley, Utah Agricultural Experiment station Bulletin no. 50 (Logan, UT, 1897), 16. 49 influenced water use have been outlined, but the structure of actual irrigation practice that grew from those beliefs and from the settlers' goals for their community are of equal importance in unravelling the place of water in that community. The history of Utah irrigation institutions has been told numerous times since the late 19th century by skilled historians and engineers armed with massive documentary evidence of, and direct experience with, state-wide patterns of water administration.~ A firm consensus on the basic characteristics of the Mormon system runs through those histories. This consensus holds that Brigham Young formulated a water policy by combining the principle of divinely granted stewardship of the earth's resources with knowledge gained form Hispanic water systems. Drawing from those sources, he decreed that water was a public resource, owned in common by all ~ This work includes: Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in Utah (Baltimore, 1895); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York, 1900>'; George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York, 1920); Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigations Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment Stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1903); and John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the Evolution of Institutions Dealing with Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989). 50 members of the community.~ Water rights were grounded in the dual doctrines of beneficial" use and prior appropriation. The first to divert water from its natural course and put it to work in a manner useful to the community established rights to the amount diverted. Only a lapse of beneficial use abrogated those rights. Another key element of water use concerns the Mormon Church hierarchy, which controlled water rights until well into the twentieth century, and in informal ways does so today. As a result, "beneficial use" meant "beneficial" in the eyes of the church, beneficial to the progress of the community as they defined both "progress" and "community. ,,26 This meant that any use of water not sanctioned by the church could be relegated to secondary status. A. J. Simmonds, in his history of non-Mormon settlers in Cache Valley, described how this led, at least initially, to a segregation of agricultural pursuits. Mormons, with their community-constructed water canals, raised grain crops on irrigated farmland. Gentiles, ~ On the influence of Hispanic water law, Dan L. Flores, in "Zion in Eden," 330, noted that church leaders borrowed the idea of public ownership of water combined with priority rights to diversion from Hispanic communities of the Southwest. Richard Jackson notes that the Mormon battalion sent to fight the Mexican War studied irrigation systems in "Myth and Reality," 120. 26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 168. 51 locked out of those canal systems by religious separatism, settled less irrigable parts of the valley, and supported themselves by raising livestock.v These principles of public supervision, beneficial use, and ecclesiastical control distinguished Mormon water systems from those of other western regions. other qualities contributed to their distinctness as well: their cooperative nature; their diminutive scale in comparison to other projects across the West; the simple tools used in their construction; and the speed, simplicity, and frugality of that construction. In 1865, even with ever-mounting numbers of Utah settlers demanding new and larger canals, the 277 existing canals in the territory averaged a mere 3.7 miles in length. 28 The over 800 cooperatively owned ditches carrying water in Utah in 1920 had an average capacity of 24.5 second-feet, compared to the over 70 second-feet of water that ran in ditches in California, Idaho, and Colorado.~ Whatever magic made v See A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley: A Study of the Logan Apostasies of 1874 and the Establishment of Non-Mormon Churches in Cache Valley. 1873-1913 (Logan, UT, 1976). 28 Leonard J. Arrington and Dean May, "'A Different Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in NineteenthCentury Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975),8. 29 Fox, "The Mormon Land System," 5. the Mormon irrigation system successful, that magic had nothing to do with scale. The Mormon genius for distributing water lay in their consistent ability to manage small volumes of water. 52 The pioneers' rapid construction of the first canals has become legendary in utah, and is chronicled in innumerable community histories. Leonard Arrington recorded the Cache Valley tale of how 28 men and boys from the town of Hyrum, south of Logan, spent most of the month of May, 1860 digging a nine mile long, four-foot deep irrigation ditch, by hand, while the town shored them up with daily deliveries of food and milk.~ Just to the north, Logan settlers labored from late March to mid-May of 1860 scraping out enough of the Logan and Hyde Park canal to water 2000 acres that first summer. 31 Each farmer contributed labor in proportion to his land holdings, which were limited by family size, and doled out in twenty acre parcels by church leaders. Most of the ditch work was done with picks, shovels, and wooden plows pulled by ox-teams. Milk-pails and home-made plumb lines ~ Leonard J. Arrington, "Life and Labor Among the Pioneers," in The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956), 149- 50. 31 Joel E. Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, Twelfth Annual Faculty Research Lecture, Utah State Agricultural College (Logan, UT, 1953), 23. 53 served as surveying tools. There is no denying the cooperative nature of this work, the almost total lack of capital investment, or the speed with which water reached the croplands. The centrality of the first act of communal ditch-digging to pioneer narratives underscored the parallel between the birth of the community and the first watering of the land. 32 While this general picture of pioneer irrigation provides an accurate account of the cooperation demanded of Utah settlers in the face of isolation and starvation, it lacks depth. Most Utah historians, and water historians, invoke this basic outline without providing much detail to color in the picture. This lack of specificity is rooted in a point that Leonard Arrington and Dean May made in their 1975 discussion of irrigation as '" A Different Mode of Life.' ,,33 "The most striking aspect of the institutions devised for the control of 32 For other pioneer accounts, see Marlyn L. Fife, "Irrigation water Values in Cache County, Utah" (Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1967), 15i Ricks, ed., History of a Valley, 149, and Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, 32; Isaac Sorensen, "History of Mendon, 1857-1919," TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 1, Utah state University Library, 3; History of Smithfield, 47; and Richmond Bicentennial Committee, The History · of Richmond. UT (Richmond, UT, 1976), 17. 33 Arrington and May, '" A Different Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975). 54 water," May and Arrington wrote, "would seem to be that they were, for the most part, informal and unarticulated-barely institutions in the strictest sense.,,34 Given the milieu of religious beliefs that surrounded these water "institutions," it is not hard to understand that they were "unarticulated," and that historians find it difficult to pin them down, or to move beyond an invocation of their standard characteristics into a closer look at the place of water at various levels of community life. The celebrated process by which irrigation canals came into being, this cooperative labor in the interest of group survival, held within itself the tension that remained central to the later administration of the systems. An individual farmer's contribution of his own labor to the digging and maintenance of a canal, whether through labor or taxes, was the key means by which he secured a private right to have water turned onto his land. This labor established personal water rights, becoming, as historian John Harvey writes, lithe most crucial element in transforming a portion of the public 34 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life, '" 19. 55 domain into usable (semi-private) property. ,,35 An individual family, once in possession of land and a water right, and dependent on that land and water for survival, was forced to straddle an ill-defined line between their own best interests and that of the community which, through the ditch, had made their individual freehold possible, and which sustained them in numerous other material and spiritual ways. This system of securing one's place in the community, on the land, and along the ditch, made perfect sense to those attuned to Brigham Young's exhortations on manual labor as crucial to the progress of the community and the Kingdom.~ Just as individual Mormons devoted themselves to physical labor to gain membership in the post-resurrection world, so they labored on irrigation canals to gain their place in the agricultural approximation of that world in utah. Salvation and farming were individual pursuits, however, and therein lay the true challenge of community irrigation. The three major canals that ran water from the Logan river north through Logan toward Hyde Park and smithfield 35 John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the EVolution of Institutions Dealing with water Resource Use and Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989), 19. 36 Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 154. 56 were the Logan and Hyde Park, begun in 1860, the Logan and Richmond (later Logan Northern), begun in 1864, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, begun in 1881. As was common in foothill settlements, irrigators dug the lowest canal first, the one furthest from the mouth of the canyon and closest to the center of the incipient town. There, the gentler slope and easier-managed river banks made the cutting of headgates fairly simple. Diversion from the river on a relatively flat plain was the first settlers' only viable option, as they lacked the time and equipment to begin ditch construction up in the rocky canyon itself. within Cache Valley's simple gravity flow irrigation systems, main canals branched into smaller ditches, and then into crop rows and village gardens. Water could be diverted only onto land that lay downhill from the canal, and thus irrigators referred to their land as being "under" the canal. The first Logan canal, the Logan and Richmond, watered land below it, leaving large tracts of irrigable land above the canal waterless until irrigators dug the higher, or "high-line" canals. Irrigators started the later ditches as soon as the rapidly growing population laid claim to enough land and demanded water. Since the three main Logan River canals ran down, or west, from the their diversion points and then swung north toward Hyde Park and Smithfield, each brought the new swath of land below it, but above the lower canal, into cultivation. As folklorist Austin Fife pointed out, the lines of the canals marked patterns of land use. Land above the canal, without water, was used for grazing or dry-farming, and had a distinct, unwatered appearance. "Below" the canal, the greener orchards, gardens, and fields evidenced an entirely different regime. TI In 57 bringing land under a canal, Mormon villagers transformed it from desert to garden. They brought it into their kingdom, a realm of order and civilization. Each canal, in bringing another level of the valley's fertile borders into that realm, constituted an enormous gain, both materially and spiritually. Samuel Roskelley of Smithfield reported such a gain in his journal for 1885, the year in which the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal was completed as far as Smithfield. "On Tuesday 16 June," he declared in larger-than-usual handwriting, indicating his excitement, "the water first reached my land east of my farm through the Upper Logan Canal [ ,'] which is a source of great rejoicing to me, to know that the water will run through from Logan. ,,38 37 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned Farms," 13. 38 Samuel Roskelley Diary, 20 June 1885, MS, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT. 58 with this pattern of parallel ditches built at increasing elevations came a hierarchy of water diversion. The higher canals, built later than the original, lower-elevation canals, took water from the Logan River at points further upstream from the headgates of the earlier canals. The high-line ditches had the power to take water first, to affect the water supply of all downstream diverters. In the late 1890s the Logan, Hyde Park and Smithfield Canals, the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and Thatcher Canal ranked first, second, and fourth in order of elevation, but in opposite order for priority of diversion. 39 This ascendancy of elevation over community-sanctioned priorities of water right required water users under the higher canals to heed the social restrictions on their favored geographical position. The members of each canal company had social and economic relationships with those of the other companies, much like the relationships among farmers with land along the same ditch.~ Ideally, those relationships worked to nullify the natural advantages held by higherelevation diverters who could take water before it reached . 39 Samuel Fortier lists all Logan diverters in order of elevation in The water Supply of Cache Valley, 19. ~ Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ... and the Desert Shall Rejoice; Conflict. Growth. and Justice in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 2. the headgates of lower canals. The tension between the social imperatives of the Mormon irrigation system and those geographic advantages played an important role in community water use. The two lower Logan River canals, Logan and Hyde Park, and Logan and Richmond, came into being under the 59 auspices of the local county court, the first formal legal institution charged with the allocation of water resources, and the first administrative structure to give some shape to the "informal and unarticulated" world of water use. 41 Peter Maughan, founder of Wellsville--Cache Valley's first town--and a bishop, or ward leader appointed by the Church, took his position as probate judge of Cache County at its creation in 1856, well before permanent settlement. In doing so he became both civil and religious leader of the community.~ As county judge, Maughan had direct control over the allocation of natural resources. He was directed in that function by an 1852 territorial law which read: The country courts shall ••• have control of all timber, water privileges, or any watercourse or creek, to grant mill sites, and exercise such powers as in their judgment shall best preserve the timber 41 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life,'" 19. 42 Craig Woods Fuller, "Development of Irrigation in Wasatch County" (Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1973), 28. 60 and subserve the interests of the settlements in the distribution of water for irrigation or other purposes. 43 This law embodied Mormon ideals of stewardship and community development, and contained according to early analyst Elwood Mead, "some of the best features of the highest development of irrigation law."44 In lauding Mormon policy, Mead may have had in mind the inherent localism of administration, as well as the underlying principle of public ownership of water and timber. Despite the centralized power inherent in church-directed Mormon colonization, the probate judge's powers over water resources represented anything but dictatorship to Cache Valley settlers. It was more a system of accepted custom, by which the water flowing through the community canal could not be taken, or rights to it challenged by anyone outside the community. Town leaders, holding the powers granted by both church and court, decided what was good for the collective. They assured everyone who worked within the local system the benefits of that system. Because community benefit involved the pursuit of an equal distribution of natural resources, the ~ Quoted in Elwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions: A Discussion of the Economic and Legal Questions Created by the Growth of Irrigated Agriculture in the West (New York, 1903), 221. 44 Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 221. county court had to weigh petitions for water and timber according to that ideal. It rarely adjudicated direct conflicts over a particular amount of water or stand of timber, however. Those fights were settled outside the legal structure by the parties involved, by watermasters of irrigation companies, or by local bishops, who, admittedly, often served as probate judges and town councilmen. The imperatives of community and of shared 61 wealth dictated that Mormons turn to church institutions, and to their well-enforced sense of mission and community, to settle disputes.~ From 1852 until 1880, the county court heard petitions for rights to irrigation water and mill sites, and timber and grazing lands. Hyde Park founder William Hyde applied to the court in December 1862 for "a grant of one fourth of the water running in the north fork of Logan River enlarging the present water ditch by which the farms at Hyde Park are irrigated."~ In June of 1863 the court granted a mill right to Thomas Smart and Samuel Parkinson for use of the waters of the Cub River west of Franklin.~ 45 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production," 174. ~ Cache County Court, "'A'County Book of the County of Cache, Organized April 4, 1857," 'TS, Utah state University Library, 18. ~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 37. 62 The entire town of Smithfield acquired rights in March 1874 to "the big bend on Bear River" for grazing purposes. 48 Probate judges also granted individuals or groupS franchises on certain community projects, including timber harvesting, the running of saw and grist mills, and road construction. The county court defined borders of new towns, and appointed town watermasters and road supervisors, and other guardians of the infrastructure. until the Irrigation District Law of 1865 took effect in Cache Valley, the county court also controlled the appointment of boards of directors, and the organization of community irrigation districts and companies, among them the Logan and Richmond Canal Company, founded in 1864. The Logan and Richmond Canal got its start in the usual Mormon way. In 1864, new lands were surveyed above the towns on the east side of the valley, and Ezra Taft Benson, church leader for all of Cache Valley, called a meeting to point out "the benefits that naturally would arise" from a second, higher Logan River canal. 49 Soon thereafter, another important segment of the valley's ~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 221. 49 Lydia T. Nyman and Venetta K. Gilgen, "Miscellaneous Papers on the History of North Logan, UT," TS, 1959-60, utah state University Library, Logan, UT, 3. 63 "second nature" came into being. Benson appointed five men--one each from Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, Richmond, and Franklin, Idaho--to oversee the project and coordinate laborers. A professional surveyor ran a line for the canal from the mouth of the canyon, along the steep slope of the Logan bench, or "sidehill," and then north out of Logan toward Hyde Park. 5o Given the rocky conditions at the canyon mouth, and the gradient of the sidehill, this second canal posed greater challenges than had the Logan and Hyde Park in 1860. In an extension of the each-farmer-digs-inproportion- to-his-Iand-holdings labor formula, each town was assigned a section of the difficult sidehill in proportion to the acreage that it, as a town, expected to water from the new canal. 51 Digging began that fall and continued off and on through the winter. Newly-arrived immigrants taking up the newly-surveyed lands joined the previous settlers in digging the canal, and thus earned their right to irrigate from its flow. By the end of 1865 they had 2000 acres under the new canal. 52 As always, farmers and gardeners under the new canal established rights to the "new" water by putting that 50 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3. 51 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3. 52 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 45. 64 water to community-defined beneficial uses. Those uses were, as usual, defined by the small group of men holding positions of church and community leadership. The impetus to begin the second canal had come from a powerful, prominent church leader whose vision for the community was perceived as having divine sanction. The group charged with the canal's direction included Samuel Roskelley and Marriner Merrill, both town bishops--prominent church and community leaders. Though this small group of men controlled the construction and administration of the Logan and Richmond, they turned to the county court for official recognition of their activities. The legal structure governing their efforts shifted slightly however, with passage of the Irrigation District Law in 1865. The 1865 law empowered the residents of any geographical area, a valley, village, or neighborhood, to, with the approval of the county court, organize and tax themselves for the construction and management of canals. 53 Under this measure, the court assured that only those citizens who wanted water, and wanted to contribute to the construction and upkeep of a canal, would bear its costs. This spared older groups, already drawing water from previous canals, the burdens of 53 Arrington and May, II 'A Different Mode of Life, III 10. 65 new projects. 54 As new canals benefitted certain segments of growing communities more than others, the 1865 law sanctioned the creation of residential and farm districts, or sub-communities, based on canals. The irrigation districts had great powers of exclusion or inclusion. Their claims to water had the effect of reserving a certain water supply for the use of a very specific group of people in a specific geographic area. In 1875 the Cache County Court approved an irrigation district set up by a group of citizens from the towns of Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, and Richmond. The district included [a]ll the tract of land lying between the base of the mountains and the Logan and Hyde Park Canal in Logan Precinct ••• and ••• in Hyde Park Precinct with all that tract of land known as the New North and South fields in smithfield Precinct as well as the New South field in Richmond Precinct •••• 55 The county court had to approve district boundaries and 54 George Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early Utah Conditions (New York, 1920), 52. 55 Cache County 'A' Book, 26 April 1875, 262. The same year, the court approved the Providence and Millville Irrigation District, south of Logan, granting it "power to construct dams and to have controll [sic] of all springs, streams, and rivers for irrigating purposes located in said district, and to make canal for the distribution of said waters, and a further grant of 4/5 of the water running in the Blacksmiths fork River." Cache County 'A' Book, 1875, 253. the boards of directors in order to assure community benefit. The 1865 law, by splitting villages into districts, encouraged greater decentralization of water development. It also demanded greater democracy within the irrigation community, as members had to vote to approve the district's taxes, policies, and actions. 56 Given the power that the districts were granted over the 66 water within their boundaries, however, irrigators living outside district boundaries had reduced chances of gaining full access to water. The next territory-wide attempt to regulate water use and development came in 1880, when a new water law removed the powers of water grants and district supervision from the county court. In place of the probate judge the county selectmen became water commissioners, charged with adjudicating all water claims, and recording those claims in official county document,s.57 The 1880 law recognized that much of the water in small community streams had long ago been claimed and put to use, but that little of it had been measured, recorded, or in any way legally quantified. The governmental burden shifted from one of granting water to one of trying to formalize previous grants and 56 Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in utah (Baltimore, 1895), 36. 57 Wells A. Hutchins and Dallin W. Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights (Salt Lake City, 1965), 12. 67 adjudicate contests over water long-ago committed to someone's ditch or someone else's mill. This divested the county court of its authority to grant water according to the criteria of beneficial use, and left Utahns without a way to appropriate "new" water. 58 The 1880 water law held sway over Utah irrigators only until 1897 when statehood brought about yet another reformulation of policy. In the seventeen years between 1880 and 1897, however, the 1880 measure effected a revolution in conceptions of water ownership and use, if not in the actual irrigation practice. The revolution exhibited a certain schizophrenia. It moved away from, yet also affirmed, Mormon religious and community ideals. Water was public property in pioneer Utah, its use inseparable from the land it watered. Water rights could not be bought and sold as private property separate from that land. In 1880 the territorial legislature reversed those provisions. Thereafter a water right was an individual's private property, to be bought or sold as such, without reference to land. 59 The text of the 1880 law read that such [water] rights may be appurtenant to the land 58 Hutchins and Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights, 14. 59 George Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 144. 68 upon which it is used or it may be personal property, at the option of the rightful owner of such rights and a change in the place of use of water shall in no manner affect the validity of any person's right to use water ..•. 60 This provision did not radically change Utahns use of water; irrigation practices remained much the same. 61 What changed was the structure of authority into which the water "owner" entered when disputing a substance that had now become his private property. Rather than community groups presenting proposals for water use to probate judges, individuals now turned to county selectmen, who settled disputes over individual rights, rather than group claims. 62 The changes brought on by the 1880 irrigation law had their roots in the growing conflict between Utah Territory and the U. S. federal government. Among other attempted subversions of Mormon regional dominance, the United states was busy curbing the powers of Utah's county officials. The growing numbers of non-Mormons in Utah also challenged Mormon control of water resources. It seems plausible that the 1880 law was an attempt to assure 60 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 54. 61 Maass and Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall Rejoice, 343. 62 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 54. Mormons continuing control of the water by making water into private property.63 The law switched the foundation of water rights from a community basis to an individual basis, but in doing so it worked toward maintaining the status quo of community control over water. 69 The second revolution of Utah's 1880 water law, which confirmed its schizophrenic nature, harked back to pioneer ideals and water rights whil~ at the same time adjusting the legal structure to the necessity of continued growth. The 1880 law confirmed the doctrine of prior appropriation, the rule of "first in time, first in right." within the structure of priority rights, though, the legislature designated two classes of rights--primary and secondary rights--based on the volume of the river flow. Those holding primary rights could draw water from a stream no matter what its level of flow. Holders of secondary rights drew water only when the river rose above its lowest average level. M Secondary appropriators were allowed no water once the river dropped below a certain level. This provision opened opportunities to post-1880 settlers in areas where earlier diverters had sealed up the use of available water, but those opportunities lasted only as long as the excess seasonal flow. The law also 63 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 82. M Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 228. 70 allowed holders of secondary rights to divert water during the off-season, when primary rights were not claimed for summer irrigation. 65 It reduced the ability of on~ group of water users to block appropriation of excess resources by others, and thus appeared to serve the growth and equality of the community within the tradition of Mormon ideals. M As Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson commented, the idea of an absolute priority, such as that applied in Colorado, was "incompatible" with the Mormon's "cooperative community approach." In Utah, "the idea of proportioning limited flows was a natural outgrowth of the common community interest. The church could not allow some settlers to have a full supply of water while others were denied access to it. ,,67 This principle would be solidly reiterated in the early twentieth century with the first full legal adjudication of the waters of the Logan River, which called into question the place of primary and secondary water rights in the Mormons "cooperative community approach" to water use. The territorial water laws of 1865 and 1880 may have had little actual effect on the means by which the 65 Hutchins and Jensen, Utah Law of water Rights, 36. M FOX, "Mormon Land System," 140. 67 Maass and Anderson, ••• and the Desert Shall Rejoice, 347. 71 individual Cache Valley farmer diverted water through his lateral ditches to his crops, but they provided the overarching structure to the smaller patterns and negotiations that surrounded those diversions. As state power grew, the Mormon church withdrew from formal involvement in community water use, but its ideals remained central to that use. Most importantly, the patterns of community thinking and behavior that it developed in its members proved, at least in smaller villages, crucial to the ways in which they dealt with, and thought about, water. The structure of water use began as a religious ideal of cooperation. In becoming a more secular process and in adjusting itself to state laws such as those of 1865 and 1880, it maintained much of its original cast. The laws, even when trying to break away from church-created principles, continued to reflect community values. When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, the larger governmental structure continued, with legislation and new bureaucratic institutions, to assert pressure on local control over water. In the small towns of Cache Valley, however, at least through 1920, the attempt to separate legal order and community order appeared to have little effect. Local irrigation companies, aided by a continued abundance of water, simply adapted legal structures to their own needs. Even when incorporating themselves into 72 new legal entities outside the church, and in using nonchurch means to resolve their disputes, water users remained inherently tied to church-created structures of thought and action. Those structures included a fundamental unwillingness to turn to powers outside the immediate group for financial support, legal advice, or legal adjudication of conflict. They included as well an unswerving commitment to the idea that the individual should contribute to the collective system in proportion to his benefit from that system. And it included the conflicts and tension inherent in a system where religious ideals demanded both individual and community success, and where each irrigator had to balance his contributions to the collective with his pursuit of individual advancement. Water in Mormon Utah flowed flow from the first nature of the river to the second nature of the canal systems and the village, the infrastructure that both defined the community and provided the tapestry against which Mormons wrestled with their goals and ideals, both individual and collective. The community did not produce these CUltural, water-based ideals on its own, however. Nature played a role. This second nature of canals and towns, like all such human-constructed second natures, was rarely free from the vagaries of first nature, from the unexpected complexities of its own workings, or from the 73 cultural imperatives that brought it into being. In July of 1890, at the height of the irrigation season, a mud slide careened down the slope of the raised alluvial bench at the mouth of the canyon, filled in the Logan and Richmond canal, and tore a 200 foot break in the canal's bank. with over 200 city lots and about 2,600 acres of farmland thirsting for their due, the landholders of the Logan and Richmond irrigation district spent a dry three weeks repairing the damage and building a wooden flume so that water could again reach their yards and crops. They then spent a year wrangling with officials of Utah state Agricultural College, a two-year-old institution whose application of irrigation water to farmland on top of the bench, just above the canal, softened the soil along the sidehill, and caused the mud slides. In early July of 1891, a year later, it happened again. At an emergency meeting on July 11th, district stockholders debated their next move. James Adams, who owned 14 acres of farmland and one city lot in the Logan precinct of the irrigation district, declared to the assembled group that "the reason we are here is that the canal is broke and we want to know if all are willing to go to work and fix it, alIso [sic] what are we going to do with the College for destroying our Canal.,,68 The struggle between the Logan and Richmond district and the Agricultural College, which continued, as did the mud slides, into the twentieth century. It provides a microcosm of the first set of connections important to 74 water use in Mormon communities: the flow of water out of its natural water courses and into community-managed canals, and the conflicts over management of and responsibility for those canals. Here, first nature--the rich, porous soils of that land formation--impinged on the second nature of the canal system and the farms it served, as, for example, when two sets of irrigators attempted simultaneous July waterings of land on top of the bench and below the canal. This particular conflict also emphasized some important features of the canal systems: their generally unplanned nature, at least in relation to each other; their technological simplicity; their low level of capitalization. The stories of the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the two major irrigation thoroughfares that I will examine here, illustrate the flow of water through Mormon 68 Minutes, 11 July 1891, Logan 'and Richmond Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 1, Bound MS 28, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan and Richmond I], 414. 75 communities, beginning with the initial flow from a "natural" structure into a community structure, from first to second nature. 76 CHAPTER IV GETTING WATER: COMMUNITY SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE The struggle within and among Mormon communities to harness water for shared and individual purposes took place not on the level of territorial water law (though these laws certainly played a role), but on the level of day-to-day and season-to-season water use. The tensions rooted in the struggle to put water to God's purpose grew out of the mundane, and often muddled proces's of appropriating, measuring, distributing, paying for, and controlling water. Through these processes, irrigators measured their share of the community resource, and defined their individual contributions to the upkeep of the ditches. At its core, irrigation was a system of exchange between the individual and the community. Canal companies, representing the water community, based the rate of exchange on a direct proportion. Everyone gave to the system in proportion to the amount of water they needed. The simplicity of that system was confounded, though, by the patriarchal nature of the society which gave small groups of leaders greater power over communityregulated resources, and by every individual's struggle to better his family's condition within the community. The 77 ideal of the system was complicated as well by the illdefined, always-changing exchanges themselves, and by nature itself. water flowed downhill, from one geographic point to another, and thus different water users, upstream, and downstream, no matter how democratic their intentions, bore unequal relationships to one another, and to the canal. The conflicts that arose out of these exchanges between individual and community prove that Mormons did fight over water. Less obvious, however, and more subtly apparent in' the inner workings of Logan River canal collectives, were the ways and the reasons that they fought over water, and the routes they took in surmounting the barriers raised by those conflicts. The need to manage water kept the problems of community purpose and individual salvation at the center of daily life. Water, for this reason and others, took on powers and meanings well beyond its salutary effects on agricultural production. The resolution of water conflicts continued, into the twentieth century, to reflect the insularity and ~ solidarity of early Mormon villages. Although the 1880 water law made it possible to redefine a water right as a piece of private property rather than as a community-granted, church-granted, or Godgranted usufruct, Cache Valley irrigators in the last two 78 decades of the 19th century defined and dealt with water in very practical, non-legislative ways. The community used water in myriad ways, to power mills, water stock, cook, clean, and, eventually, generate electricity. The pre-eminent use of canal water, however, was irrigation of ~ food crops. The process by which water was channeled to crops, rather than legal definitions of water right, dominated collective understanding of how water should be measured and distributed. The result of this agricultural mindset was a fluidity of exchange in which irrigators traded labor, grain, and cash for water according to mutually agreed-upon rates of exchange. The leadership of the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, for instance, spent much of its time administering these various arrangements, recording the amount of labor and cash that each member contributed to the collective, and attempting to regulate the amount of water taken in return. The landowners under the canal met annually to vote on standards of eXChange, to set wage rates, yearly tax assessments, and haggle over the worth of everyone's work and water. Not everyone in the community was required to contribute labor, cash, or crops, however. widows and men in "poor circumstances" were provided with water tax-free by the community, a practice which underscored the extent to which the irrigation district was a ' community, rather 79 than commercial institution. 1 In March 1879 Robert and James Meikle of Smithfield, who were not at the time landholders in the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, but would by 1884 own 28 acres between them, petitioned the district trustees for use of water from the canal based on labor they had done on the canal in 1865, 1866, and 1867, over ten years earlier. The trustees figured out that the Meikles labor had been worth $133, which entitled them to enough water for six and a half acres of land. 2 Thus labor on a canal, even if accomplished long ago, remained the key means of access to water, the immediate fruit of that labor. Robert and James Meikle may not have needed water from the Logan and Richmond Canal in 1865, but when they did need it later, their labor guaranteed them that right. Although different methods of measuring irrigation water sprang up everywhere as more and more claimants and regulators sought to divide river flows, here the volume of water remained, for the time being, measurable only by 1 Log~n and Richmond I, 5 March 1881, 87. 2 Logan and Richmond I, 8 March 1879. water taxes and acreages cited, and calculations of average payments and number of acres owned, are derived from Logan and Richmond accounts for the years 1879 and 1884, found in the first volume of records, pp. 4-24, 188-215, and the years 1891 and 1896, found in the second volume of Logan and Richmond records, pp. 2-20, 172- 93. the area of the fields it could irrigate. The "water of six and a half acres," was clearly measured in terms of agricultural land. 80 In 1879, then, the Logan and Richmond landholders thought of water in terms of their fields, and in terms of the crops those fields produced. In October of that year the annual stockholders meeting bogged down in a debate over the price to be accorded a bushel of grain in the paying of annual water assessments. The water taxes were set at 10 cents per acre of agricultural land, and 20 cents per city lot. After "considerable discussion" the group agreed on a price of 75 cents for a bushel of wheat, in the paying of water assessments. 3 A landholder with one city lot and 20 acres of land, owing $2.20 to the district for the year, could pay in cash, in labor, or in grain--just under three bushels. Water users paid water assessments based not on the actual volume of water they used, but on the amount of land and the kind of land they watered. Water was not really taxable apart from its use for irrigation; it was part and parcel of the way in which it was put to use. When irrigators looked at and thought of water they saw water, certainly, but they also saw their own labor, their investment in the land and the community, and they saw grain. with assessments paid in 3 Logan and Richmond I, 13 October 1879, 33. 81 grain, the exchange came full circle. The product of the water itself--the crops--could pay for the water. Any system of exchange, however, that attempted to balance water on one hand, and land, labor, and grain on the other, all of which had different values in different seasons and years, generated its share of confusion. Questions of how to measure and distribute water came up again and again in the 1880s and 1890s. For Robert and James Meikle, the Logan and Richmond district trustees measured water according to acres of land. How much water that actually involved was never specified, but rather regulated by the farmers and watermasters, according to commonly held conceptions of hoW much water was needed for each acre of crops. The standard unit of distribution was the "irrigating stream," a somewhat vague volume considered to be the largest free flowing stream of water that a single irrigator (with a shovel) could distribute over his crops.4 In June of 1882, Smithfield's watermaster complained that Hyde Park, whose irrigators got water before it got to Smithfield, were cutting through the canal banks and taking more than their share. The trustees discussed the issue and, in an attempt to even out the distribution of water, "ordered that the 4 Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under Irrigation, 109. 82 water be divided so as to give each one hundred acres a stream all through the district. tls Presumably, this water would be distributed on a set schedule, everyone or two weeks. This attempt to match specific volumes of water with specific acreages indicated that such co-ordination required special effort, and that the irrigators' conception of equal distribution was based in the idea that a given amount of water was best measured by the amount of land it irrigated. The Logan and Richmond district account books kept records of water use according to the number of acres and number of city lots each subscriber watered, and assessed water taxes accordingly. Actual volumes of water rarely entered into the proceedings. This agriculturally-based system of measurement would change, however. In October of 1879., Thomas X. Smith, the Logan city Watermaster, and a local ward bishop, approached the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District on behalf of Logan City with a request for a grant of year-round water rights to one square foot of the canal's water, a specific volume equivalent to 100 acres of water right. The agreement that followed signaled a slight shift in the inseparability of water and land. In its contract with Logan City, the irrigation district required the city to S Logan and Richmond I, 24 June 1882, 118-19. 83 pay taxes on 100 acres of water right, even though Logan city was not watering 100 acres of land but rather supplying its residents with water for various other purposes. This deal also signaled a geographic division between water users that changed community relationships. The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District was taking form as an entity separate from the town of Logan itself. The Logan and Richmond canal flowed only through part of Logan, and then out of Logan, to serve other communities. The community of Logan residents and the community of irrigators along the Logan and Richmond Canal emerged as distinct factions with distinct interests and distinct ways of using the same water source. Growing demands for water thus complicated the accepted systems of exchange for water, and increased the chances for conflict. The intricate details of neighborly water-sharing realm, whether between individuals or villages, required a constant hammering out, as irrigators sought fair solutions to the dilemmas posed by clashes between the river itself and the uses to which they put it. In December of 1896 members of the Smithfield Precinct challenged a district by-law that directed Hyde Park water users to pay an additional ten percent on their annual taxes, and smithfield water users an additional twenty percent. Proponents of the extra tax held that the canal 84 had longer to travel to supply water to the towns farther north, and thus those towns should contribute a greater proportion to the canal's upkeep. This challenged the cherished system of directly proportionate water exchange. By May of 1899 James Cantwell, long-time representative of smithfield water users, reported that his village planned a lawsuit to challenge the 20% "local expenses" tax. 6 The suit materialized the following December, with Smithfield claiming that the by-laws, along with the extra local taxes, had been drafted by the wrong party. The towns came to an out-of-court agreement however, and the trustees agreed to draft a new set of by-laws, eliminating the offensive taxes. 7 Despite the seeming prevalence of inter-town water disputes, the majority of conflicts described in irrigation district account books, and in the literature of local water history, demonstrate that much of the tension involved in district administration arose from struggles over the individual water users responsibilities to the collective infrastructure, and the various canal companies' . contributions and responsibilities to its 6 Minutes, 16 May 1899, Logan and Richmond Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 2, Bound MS 29, Utah state University Library, Logan Utah [hereafter Logan and Richmond II], 277; Logan and Richmond II, 25 February 1899, 272-73. 7 Logan and Richmond II, 4 December 1899, 286. 85 individual members. In 1887 a legal conflict arose concerning the Logan Irrigation District, the district surrounding the Logan and Benson Canal, built in 1860. Farmers in the tiny outlying village of Benson had dug an extension to the original canal to serve their fields. The trustees of the Logan Irrigation District took no responsibility for the canal extension or the distribution of water from it. By 1887 the Benson irrigators found themselves deeply frustrated by internal battles over individual water rights. In 1898 they sued to force the Logan Irrigation District to acknowledge the Benson extension as part of their canal and take over its administration. 8 In doing so, they turned to a higher, but wholly community based, collective power to mediate individual conflicts, a common pattern in Mormon village life. The local court denied this request, asserting that the Benson farmers "constructed the Benson extension to the canal without any suggestion or aid from the Logan farmers, while the Logan section was constructed by all in common. ,,9 This followed 8 George L. Swendsen, "Appropriation of water from Logan River," in Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigation Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 312. 9 Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan River," 312. 86 the Mormon community rationale that the labor involved in canal construction or maintenance was the only true tie to that canal, and the only tie that carried rights to and obligations toward use of that canal. The state supreme court, however, overturned the local decision, stating that the trustees of an irrigation district cannot arbitrarily set limits on its services within the geographic boundaries of the district. tO within the area designated as a water community, the community was obligated to meet the needs of all of its members, at least to a certain point. These issues of individual and community obligations arose at different times in different forms. Since members of each precinct had shared certain interests, petitions to the trustees often took the form of collective demands. At the annual landowners meeting of December 1894, William Hyde of Hyde Park suggested that the votes to elect the board be cast by precinct. James Adams of Logan countered with a move to give each landowner one vote. Rasmus Nielsen pointed out that according to law, they were bound to vote according to acreage watered under the canal, and the group agreed to to Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan River," 312. 87 do SO.l1 This debate concerning how each individual was to represent himself within the group, how he measured his power in collective decision making, demonstrated, to some degree, the basic hierarchy at work. The individual water user was not to be considered merely a member of his irrigation precinct, nor as a voter equal to all other voters in the district. The village, or community, was not considered capable of representing each individual's interest, nor was each individual's interest considered equal. The established practice of voting by acreage gave each water user power over group decisions according to his degree of interest, the amount of land he had to water with the resources controlled by the group. This affirmed the tradition of the individual/community exchange governed by direct proportion. The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District's traditional system of exchange for water was complicated in the 1890s by the possibility of re-constituting the canal as a corporate stock company. The struggle to come to a communal decision to incorporate the irrigation district began in 1882, and waxed and waned for many years. It came to a head at several points, including the winter of 1894-95. At that time, out of concern to place the organization on firm legal ground, and follow the 11 Logan and Richmond II, 3 December 1894, 123. 88 letter of the law, the landowners voted to incorporate. This decision was followed however, by a long debate over the method by which to distribute stock in the new corporation, whether by "Dollars and cents expended on the Canal" or "according to waterright pre Acreage as shown on the Books of the Company. ,,12 Though the argument that followed ended as the majority of attenders wandered out of the meeting, it demonstrated that the question of what gave the individual water user rights to interest in the company--his individual contributions in labor and cash, or the amount of land he needed watered--remained an issue. A year later, in January of 1895, the landowners abandoned the idea of a stock company and unanimously voted to maintain their current status, to legally organize themselves as an irrigation district. 13 In the final decision they rejected the sUbstitution of an exchange system based on financial stock in favor of their traditional system of taxes and communal labor. The recasting of water rights as shares in a corporation would have constituted a further abstraction of a natural entity--water--into a financial entity. That the Logan and Richmond District turned away from that abstraction 12 Logan and Richmond II, 4 January 1895, 125. 13 Logan and Richmond II, 11 January 1895, 126. 89 pointed to their favoring of the more concrete, hands-on, local administration provided by the irrigation district. It underlined as well the cultural importance of these exchanges based on labor and land. similar debates and conflicts over water use plagued the water users under the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the third and highest of the Logan canals running north from the canyon. The Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield began as a private, for-profit enterprise. The challenges of diverting water from the river in the canyon itself and running it through a canal carved in a ledge in the canyon wall proved too much for the initial investors. In the early 1880s a community organization took over, completed construction, and began operations as an incorporated cooperative irrigation company by the end of the decade. The articles of incorporation of the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield declared a capital stock of $20,000, consisting of 4000 shares sold at $5 each. The initial subscribers were required to pay for only 10% of their stock in order to have the corporation acknowledged by the county court, which retained authority over canal incorporation. Cash played a larger role as the arbiter of water use, but initially it remained secondary to the standard currencies of canal finance--Iabor, crops, and 90 water. In the first year of operation, the canal directors granted credits in corporate stock to irrigators who had worked to complete the construction. Thus stockholders gained further shares through their labor and non-stockholders earned water rights in the traditional Mormon way, by helping to finish and repair the ditch. Laborers were often paid half of their wages in cash and half in stock. w Despite the new language of shares and stock, the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield remained a small, local operation. The trustees, or board of directors, reported the net worth of the company in February 1891 as consisting of 40 acres of land, .a cooking stove, four and a half barrels of cement, a tent, some tools, and a dump cart. The total cash value of these items amounted to just over $500.15 The inflow of tax money and .outflow of cash for materials and labor left the corporation with little in the way of liquid capital. Though the canal itself was worth about $14,000, wealth in and of itself 14 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal Company Minutes and Account Book, Bound MS 26, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield], 10 February 1890, 1 March 1890, 15 March 1890, 39-45. 15 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 21 February 1891, 73. was neither a corporate goal, nor a reality.~ stockholders voted their shares in company business, and paid for their water at a lower rate than nonshareholders. In 1890 shareholders paid 12 1/2 cents an 91 acre to water farm land, and $1.00 for city lots, compared to the 40 cents per acre and $1.50 per city lot paid by non-shareholders. Shareholders, of course, held first rights to available water. Though the owning of stock distinguished members from non-members, and thus served as a criteria for full participation in this particular water community, all irrigators paid water taxes according to acres and lots watered. The old standards of exchange remained very much in evidence. The need for and use of water was based on land and crops, as usual, and not on corporate status. The advent of corporate stock, a measure of water-community membership and, indeed of water, however, was new to irrigators, and required some adjustment. Shares in the corporation could be earned, bought, and sold with no reference to the land or the water they represented. For the first few years, shareholders wavered over what in fact distinguished them from other water users-those with more stock, those with less, and those with 16 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 23 February 1891, 75. 92 none. Board President Hyrum Maughan raised this issue to the presiding group in March 1892. -He "suggested the propriety of having some relation established between the shares held and the water used by stockholders ..•. ,,17 Maughan felt that they should review the records and find the total amount expended on "cleaning, repairing, and enlarging the canal from the beginning of the present ownership .... ,,18 After figuring as well the amount that water users had paid in taxes, they could ascertain who was using less or more than their share. A similar question arose the next week, when a shareholder asked that some standard be set for "how much waterrright was required to water an acre of land or rather how much stock it was necessary to hold to water one acre."~ Irrigator Marrinus Anderson added that "I think that if we knew how much water right was required for 5 or 10 acres use [we] could govern ourselves accordingly."w The measure of, and relationships among, land, water, time, and corporate stock remained mysterious and confused. Anderson added 17 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 8 March 1892, |
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