Excerpt from Irrigation Works: Constructed by the United States Government Agriculture by irrigation is one of the oldest occupations of civilized man. Various parts of the world show evidences that irrigation was practised long before any historical record was kept. The remains of prehistoric irrigation works have been identified and extensively traced in southern Arizona along the Salt River and in parts of New Mexico and California. American Irrigation was left entirely to private and corporate. enterprise until the passage, in 1902, of the National Reclamation Act, which has been amended and modified from time to time by subsequent acts. The original reclamation act provided for the segregation of the receipts from the sales of public lands in the sixteen Western States and Territories into a special fund to be known as the Reclamation Fund and to be available for the survey, construction, and operation of reclamation projects in those States. It provided that the cost of those projects should be returned to the Reclamation Fund by the owners of private land or entry-men on public land in ten annual installments, no requirement of interest being made. A subsequent act in 1914 extended this time to twenty years. The original act required the expenditure of the major portion of the funds in the States in which it had been received. Under this act about one hundred million dollars have been expended in construction, and twenty-five projects are now in operation and prepared to deliver water to about one million five hundred thousand acres of land, about two-thirds of which was actually irrigated in 1916. The projects undertaken, unlike the early simple diversions upon valleys adjacent to the head works, involved, on the contrary, expensive storage works, high diversion dams, difficult tunnels, or long, expensive canal work upon side hills, where large investment was necessary before any water was brought to the land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.