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Irrigation schemes
Shaky financing and bad engineering killed an ambitious attempt to turn the Malad River toward the desert near Mountain Home.
The riddle of how to irrigate the Snake River Plain has puzzled the people of southern Idaho since the 1880s. Above all else, exploiting the region’s water resources and potentially irrigable land appealed to constituencies such as commerce-minded townspeople, prospective farmers, and outside schemers and investors who liked what they heard about the plan. Nationally, it was pictured after 1900 as a storehouse of natural resources awaiting Eastern capitalization on a grand scale.
Achieving such results across the Snake River Plain required better capitalization of irrigation so that water could sustain thousands of new farms. But caution, which restrained enterprisers from overextending themselves financially
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to provide such water, also predisposed some irrigation financiers against providing water in the way farmers preferred—by damming the Snake River and its tributaries so that agrarians could draw moisture from new reservoirs throughout the summer. Moreover, nationally prestigious prophets of magic-by-irrigation, among them the first director of the United States Geological Survey, John Wesley Powell, encouraged entrepreneurs not to build dams on western rivers but to accomplish their irrigation magic in other ways. Consequently, Idaho’s irrigation financers built no dams where it could be avoided. But little did they foresee the consequences of avoiding dam-building in the depths of the Snake River Canyon by contriving different ways of irrigating the state’s so-called King Hill projects.
The King Hill irrigation projects, situated mostly in Elmore County on sites contiguous to one another, were nestled in the depths of the Snake River Canyon where Three Island Crossing was once a well-known landmark along the Oregon Trail. In those early times, this land seemed inhospitable to irrigated farming. The uneven terrain consisted of a “series of basins and low benches” overlooking the Snake River, incised by “numerous gullies and gulches” where streams meandered across it before emptying into the Snake River.
Such terrain discouraged the onset of any irrigated farming until, in the 1880s, people staked the first claims under federal land laws to irrigable land. Prospective irrigators realized that diverting the Snake River water for gravity irrigation of their land was expensive. Consequently, during the 1890s the area’s merchant-landholder forces agreed on plans for tapping the more distant Malad River to irrigate their farmsteads and sustain new farms. Among the merits of the scheme, its supporters stressed, was that the plan required no spending to build a high dam behind which to impound Malad River water.
The plan also necessitated expensive irrigation works that although not essential if farmers relied on the Snake River for their irrigation water, were upheld as economically defensible and practicable from an engineering standpoint. According to the plan, water from the Malad River, a stream that emptied into the Snake River on its north shore, would move from its source by way of a siphon suspended above the Snake River and attached to hilly terrain on the Snake’s south bank. From there, the water would flow for nearly 20 miles to reach the first irrigable acres at Pasadena Valley. This 20-mile waterway would consist of stretches of canal embedded in hillsides in order to sustain water movement by gravity flow across uneven terrain. At places where water necessarily crossed gulches that pockmarked the area, it would pass through siphons or flumes perched astride trestles. Planners expected that, after Pasadena Valley irrigators had consumed their share of the canal-borne water, the remainder would flow onward through a canal linking Pasadena Valley and the riverside town of Glenns Ferry. Finally, in the last link of this system, another siphon located near Glenns Ferry.
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Shrub-steppe near King Hill Canyon, Idaho. |
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Glenns Ferry townspeople supported this irrigation plan, but local capital could not underwrite the building of so costly an irrigation system. Telluride Power Company entrepreneur Lucien Nunn, who had established a hydroelectric power empire in northern Utah and western Colorado, planned to expand his domain to the irrigation frontier that he expected would unfold on the Snake River Plain. Nunn especially coveted the Malad River for electricity-generating and staked legal claims to the water, all of which he continued to maintain except for 300 cfs of water that he later relinquished for irrigation purposes. Nunn launched a corporation, the Malad River Power Company, to exploit the river’s capacity to yield electricity.
An alternate plan
Aside from Nunn, another set of irrigation frontier promoters maneuvered for control of the Malad River, to the despair of Glenns Ferry forces that wanted it for irrigation of their area. This group organized the Mullins Canal and Reservoir Company in 1895 and, four years later, won approval from the State Board of Land commissioners, an elective body commonly called the Land Board, to expropriate enough Malad River water to irrigate 6,500 acres surrounding a new town site named Bliss.
When the Mullins Company’s irrigation ventures floundered after 1900, the Glenns Ferry merchant-landholder coalition redoubled its efforts. In the group’s first new step, member counterclaimed 1,000 cfs of Malad River water at the expense of Nunn’s claims to the entire stream. The Glenns Ferry group also reasoned that the federal Carey Act of August 18, 1894, authorized processes through which their irrigation project might be established. (The act allowed for the transfer of U.S.-owned desert lands on the condition that they were irrigated. Settlers could purchase up to 160 acres at 50 cents per acre plus the cost of water rights.) Naysayers discouraged such thinking because the first users of the Carey Act as a vehicle for arid-land reclamation in Idaho had encountered complications. But the merchant-landholder camp ignored those objections and looked ahead to an agricultural hinterland based on large-scale irrigation.
In 1902, the Glenn’s Ferry Land and Irrigation Company was established with Ernest Pearson as corporation president. Pearson migrated from Kansas to Idaho during the 1890s, acquiring land in need of irrigation to be of much value. He also maintained a “mercantile business” at Glenns Ferry until 1906. Pearson’s principal associates included one of the area’s most prominent pioneers, Joseph Roseyear, and a more recent arrival from Iowa, Glenns Ferry merchant Louis Adams. The remaining corporation founders were John McGuiness, a Cold Springs Creek farmer who years before had emigrated from Iowa to Idaho, and Wisconsin-born educator Albert Simpich, who resided at Glenns Ferry while waiting for his Clover Creek landholdings to yield acceptable returns. Simpich served intermittently as an elective justice of the peace and held the lone faculty appointment at the town’s high school.
Happily for Pearson’s camp, the Land Board looked favorably upon the group’s irrigation blueprints. The board authorized a 17,660-acre project for which the Glenns Ferry Company could assess a one-time charge of $25 per acre in return for Malad River water delivered to the users’ farms. Such a levy, the board and corporation leaders agreed, guaranteed profits for the company because it could spend as little as $600,000 on irrigation works. By the same calculations, irrigators were assured ample quantities of water. Good fortune also visited the company. The corporation staked claim to 1,000 cfs of Malad River water, a quantity that allowed it to comply with its contractual obligations to the state of Idaho under Carey Act provisions, and Telluride Power Company’s Nunn avoided a water fight with Pearson. Although Nunn claimed all of the Malad River for his own purposes, he presumably waited until he could learn whether the Glenns Ferry Company was, like the Mullins Company, one of irrigation’s paper tigers.
It was smooth sailing for Pearson until 1904, when the company’s projects floundered for the next two years. In order for the project to succeed, the Glenns Ferry Company would need to accumulate about $600,000 in exchange for pledging security and profits to its bondholders. In theory, bondholders risked little because the company could earmark enough of its proceeds from selling water to protect the bondholders’ investments and guarantee their profits. However, the company first needed to amass this capital and spend it for irrigation works in order for farmers to remit the company’s assessment against them; it could then reward its bondholders over the long haul. This plan, notwithstanding Glenns Ferry Company promises to reward its bondholders generously, elicited little interest at eastern banking and irrigation bond brokerages; in fact, those institutions often rebuffed proposals for capitalization of irrigation projects.
With few dollars to spend, the Glenns Ferry Company completed little of the project’s irrigation system and even wasted resources on building waterways that malfunctioned. Consequently, the company neither lured settlers nor realized any revenue from selling water before the corporation collapsed in 1906. With the company’s demise, its few bondholders lost their capital, and Pearson acknowledged that he depleted his own finances on this “experiment in wet farming.”
A new direction
Notwithstanding, Glenns Ferry visionaries continued to dream about irrigation of their hinterland. Furthermore, Nunn encouraged such expectations. Having bided his time until the Glenns Ferry Company collapse, he made preparations for producing electricity at the Malad River. He now counted on monopolizing the stream, inasmuch as the Glenns Ferry Company’s owners must either forfeit their claims to Malad River water or bargain away their rights to Nunn. Nunn also planned, on second thought, to utilize the river for irrigation according to Carey Act requirements. In order to better his chances of prevailing where Pearson’s forces had failed, and to take the promoter’s profits allowed by the Carey Act, Nunn involved Charles H. Hammett in his two-pronged scheme for producing irrigation and electricity.
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Italian canal workers near Twin Falls, about 1905. Idaho companies imported Greeks, Italians, and Slavs during the boom years of canal building, 1905 to 1915. |
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Hammett easily matched Nunn in audacity and willingness to incur risks. According to the writer of a biographical sketch, Hammett was a born promoter who “made and lost several fortunes” during his lifetime. Born at Huntsville, Missouri, as the son of the town’s founder, he subsequently sold and managed real estate at Kansas City and St. Louis, built railroads in Texas and Mississippi, mined lead and zinc in Missouri, and tried gold mining in Colorado and Nevada. But his better commercial moments happened in 1904 and 1906. First, his wildcatting for petroleum paid dividends when he struck oil at Alluwe, a site within Cherokee domain in Oklahoma Territory. He later earned large sums of money by leasing land beneath which was discovered Oklahoma’s Glenn Pool of oil. When Hammett became Nunn’s partner, his reputation as an oil millionaire followed him to Idaho. An Idaho journalist depicted Hammett as a “wealthy man” in possession of “sufficient money to make a go of it [Idaho’s Irrigation projects] from the start.”
With Hammett in tow, Nunn’s irrigation and electricity-producing schemes unfolded during 1907. Nunn launched the Malad Power Company, and Hammett incorporated the King Hill Irrigation and Power Company in Nevada—an institution that he named a “Kings Hill” corporation, but which was commonly know in Idaho as the “King Hill” company. Hammett next absorbed the moribund Glenns Ferry Company, paying the corporation’s owners and creditors in shares of King Hill Company stock, although the paper was of dubious worth. Following this transaction—the chief value of which was, in Hammett’s view, the Glenns Ferry Company’s old rights to the Malad River water—Hammett and Nunn accepted joint responsibility for electricity-making and irrigation, agreed to “promote both projects together,’ and placed their respective claims to Malad River water in a common pool.
Nunn and Hammett next divided the pool. According to contracts between them, they restructured their corporations in such a way that Hammett controlled the irrigation venture because he held two-thirds of King Hill Company stock, and Nunn voted the remainder; conversely, Nunn dominated electricity-making because the majority and minority stockholder positions in the Malad Company were reversed in the same proportions for Nunn and Hammett. In this dealing, the partners also apportioned their pool of Malad River to themselves. While Nunn retained the lion’s share of the stream, 300 cfs of water was allocated to the irrigation project. After this point, Nunn generally relied on Hammett’s judgments about irrigation affairs until they dissolved their partnership in 1911.
In his circuitous way, Nunn had gained enough Malad River water to generate electricity on a grand scale, and by design, Hammett benefited disproportionately when the pair reorganized their corporations. Nonetheless, they erred in projecting quick riches. By apportioning 300 cfs of Malad River water to irrigation, a quantity that contrasted sharply with the Glenns Ferry Company’s earlier resolve to use 1,000 cfs for irrigation, the partners foisted insecurity and water shortages on the project over the long term. They had, in short, miscalculated the water needs of their irrigation tract.
High expectations
Over the longer haul, Hammett misjudged the economic realities and underestimated the engineering obstacles, but the Land Board had also warmed to Hammett for what it perceived were the merits of his proposals from a public standpoint. The board admired his old-time handling of railroad, mining and petroleum ventures. This bias helped Hammett to convince the board to accept, in principle, his theory that charging high prices for water would enable him to capitalize the project without delay. Then, in 1908, the Land Board assigned to Hammett the 17,666-acre domain of his predecessor. The board reduced Hammett’s realm by 4,070 acres on Nov. 12, 1909, and took away another 127 acres on Sept. 18, 1913. Hammett agreed, in return, to conform to Carey Act mandates and adhere to other conditions on which the sides had settled by negotiations. The new project was known as the King Hill project in imitation of Hammett’s corporation.
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Hammett, Idaho, in windswept Elmore County. The town takes its name from the Missouri land promoter who promised more water than was ever delivered to the desert near King Hill. Mike Edminster. |
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The Land Board’s critics sometimes accused it of giving away the store to Hammett, and such criticism only exaggerated the extent of the board’s concessions to him. In 1908, Hammett contracted with the board to provide water for 17,666 acres and to sell water to irrigators under conditions that supposedly guaranteed them a square deal. Purchasing such water rights from Hammett’s King Hill Company entitled irrigators in theory to about three acre-feet of water annually per acre, a generous allocation when contrasted to the two acre-feet on which Idaho irrigators traditionally insisted. However, irrigator access to this water depended on the King Hill Company delivering such amounts; and worse from the standpoint of irrigators, there were doubts about the sufficiency of Hammett and Nunn’s apportionment of 300 cfs of Malad River water for the project.
Problematic as were the extent and security of their water rights, irrigators paid dearly for water because the Land Board capitulated to Hammett’s demands on water pricing. At first, the highest cost estimates for building the irrigation system justified a water levy in excess of $66 per acre; Hammett predictably argued for such a maximum, but the land board allowed him only $50 per acre. Hammett appealed the board’s decision even though it was twice what irrigators paid for water at the Twin Falls South Side tract, a tract the board deemed a model for other irrigation projects to emulate. Hammett subsequently persuaded the board to review the issue and dragged out the negotiation until the board readjusted the levy to $65 per acre. The board defended the new pricing on grounds that Hammett had finally sustained his projections of high spending for irrigation works. Furthermore, the board judged King Hill project farmers capable of paying at least $65 because of the value of their land. According to the board, a “high grade of soil” at the project suited it to “fruit [growing] and high class farming.”
Hammett often repeated the Land Board’s characterization of the area in describing his project to prospective farmers and King Hill Company bondholders. In 1908, he even invented a phantom “fruit and canning” company as a means of emphasizing his claims about peach and grape growing at his project.
Brokering deals
Authorizing high-priced water for the King Hill tract produced the results that Hammett had promised—quick capitalization of the project at about $600,000. Irrigation bond dealers at Chicago competed for the chance to broker deals between Hammett and investors in bonds issued by his King Hill Company, and the Farwell Trust Company brokerage eventually acquired a portfolio of King Hill Company paper with a face value of $780,000. This interest in Hammett’s project persisted even when he underestimated the cost of installing the first of two siphons that eventually spanned the Snake River, and without which his irrigation system would be non-functional. The condition required Hammett, in his words, only to “strain to raise more money,” and he secured $358,400 in new funding in a sale of King Hill Company securities handled by the American Trust and Savings Bank of Illinois. The bank advanced the money to Hammett in exchange for collateral consisting of a mortgage on his irrigation project and King Hill Company gold bonds with a face value of $500,000.
Given Hammett’s success in attracting financial backers, his stock increased in the eyes of the Land Board, and the board’s trust rose another notch when his builders finished the first major segment of the irrigation system during 1908. According to an observer, the builders achieved “one of the most spectacular engineering feats in the West.” That feat was a siphon linking the intake to Hammett’s Malad River water source to the canal outlet on the opposite side of the Snake River Canyon.
Judging from this achievement, the Land Board trusted Hammett to insist on technological perfection at King Hill, and because it also expected completion of the irrigation system within a short time, the board advanced its timetable for admitting the first new settlers to the project. In 1908, it opened 11,500 acres to the public. Hammett’s forces then advertised the project as widely as possible and benefited from new interest nationally in Idaho’s Carey Act projects. Hammett also received a helping hand from C.C. Hutchinson. Hutchinson, a resident of Portland, Oregon, and earlier a town founder at Hutchinson, Kansas, praised the project and his endorsement helped stimulate interest in the tract; however, at the project’s opening day on Oct. 12, 1908, fewer home-seekers participated in the land drawing than anticipated. Hammett’s customers distressed him by being tight-fisted and picky, judging the land primarily for “levelness and freedom from boulders” instead of by its purported worth for fruit-growing. Finally, newcomers selected only 8,000 of the 11,500 acres available; Hammett’s treasury was accordingly shortchanged when he could sell water rights for no more than the smaller acreage.
Because sales of water had lagged, Hammett’s treasury was diminished below his expectations by about one-third, and he afterward failed to increase the pace of his sales. Even worse for Hammett, other setbacks followed, and this accumulation of troubles threatened to scuttle his venture. As 1909 approached, it became apparent that his spending on irrigation works would exceed $600,000 by a wide margin. Establishing a new waterway for Malad River water through nearly 20 miles of hilly terrain to reach Pasadena Valley farmsteads consumed his reserve of dollars at a fast pace, only to have his canal system require more amenities before it could carry water onward from Pasadena Valley to a point near the town of Glenns Ferry. There the system required a siphon to boost water to farms at the opposite side of the Snake River. Because the Snake River, a wide and treacherous stream at this point, cut Hammett’s project into north and south segments, he also had to erect a bridge spanning the river when public authorities refused to do so.
Overextending
Forced to hustle for more capital, Hammett could have placed another issue of King Hill Company bonds on commercial bond markets, but investors in irrigation securities might not bite a second time in light of Hammett’s troubles. Therefore, he set in motion a scheme for extracting money from the same groups in another way. Hammett first created a new corporation, the Kings Hill Extension Irrigation Company, an institution that, in Idaho, was commonly known as the King Hill Extension Company. Hammett’s plan for enlarging his irrigation venture was to extend it westward from Glenns Ferry to Medbury Valley at a price of about $650,000. He then planned to sell water rights at $65 per acre to Medbury Valley’s old-timers and to the incoming farmers of several thousand acres. In this way, Hammett positioned himself publicly to secure underwriting of the King Hill Extension Project in the same way he capitalized his first project. But unbeknownst to the bond buyers, Hammett intended to transfer part of their subscription money to cover shortfalls in his capitalization of the first King Hill project.
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Idaho canal diggers with a horse-drawn Fresno scraper, 1906. Steam tractors began to replace the horses in about 1910. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. |
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While such subterfuges unfolded, Hammett negotiated deals with an underwriter at Chicago’s Farwell Trust Company. Farwell’s underwriters scrutinized the extension project for financial viability and closed their purses until Hammett convinced them that he could sell sufficient water to settlers to secure the new investments. Hammett augmented this underwriting of the project in 1910. He persuaded Farwell Trust Company officers to advance additional dollars in exchange for certain King Hill Extension Company “second mortgage notes,” backed by the company’s assets (mainly water contracts with settlers).
For Hammett to proceed, he also needed the Land Board’s approval of his extension project scheme, and the public body cooperated. Wincing not at all as Hammett wove his tangled webs, the board asked few questions about his affairs before approving his irrigation plan for the new project. This plan first entailed bringing 100 cfs of Malad River water to the extension project by extending Hammett’s canal system to Medbury Valley at a cost of $288,746. This water, which would be carried for about 50 miles from its Malad River intake to the most distant point, could irrigate the better part of the extension project. However, this water must pass through what was, for Hammett’s engineers, nightmarish stretches of rough and hilly terrain in order to reach its terminal point. Still, Hammett promised that water would arrive at the valley in 1910. As for the remainder of the extension project, a so-called “reservoir” sector, Hammett’s plan called for the land to receive irrigation water from small reservoirs behind which were impounded spring runoff from Cold Springs, Bennett and four other creeks.
Furthermore, the Land Board later defended this irrigation plan despite Hammett undermining it at the outset by diverting extension company capital to his first project. Such sidetracking of money left no underwriting for the “reservoir” feature of his new project. The Land Board likewise protected the extension project when U.S. Department of Interior authorities questioned its worth on technical grounds, threatened to block the development of the tract on Carey Act terms, and could have cause Hammett to lose his promoter’s profits if the department forced him to proceed under different conditions. The Land Board enlisted Idaho’s federal congressmen and senators on its side, and the group blunted the Interior Department’s resistance to the project.
The Land Board then acted before the Interior Department could resume a block. Wielding its Carey Act authority, the board authorized a 9,454-acre project and granted Hammett nearly all else that he asked. Hammett could sell water to extension project farmers under the same conditions that he offered irrigators at his first project. The board also helped Hammett pressure Medbury Valley’s old dwellers to purchase water for their land. According to the board’s rules, Hammett could deny water to old-timers if they delayed signing water contracts past the Nov. 16, 1909, deadline.
Magic-by-irrigation
In 1910, Hammett’s agents arranged for marketing the projects’ nearly non-existent crop of cantaloupes through contracts between their hastily contrived King Hill Land Association and a Chicago commission house. Hammett also claimed that he could capitalize the irrigation “reservoir” sector of the extension project. Besides someday unlocking such land for exploitation, he added, his projects offered ample space and welcomed prosperity-seekers because he had already financed most of his two projects. In short, Hammett dangled before prospective settlers the certainty of enrichment when water reached farmsteads at his oldest project in 1909, and to extension project farms in 1910. Moreover, Hammett’s assurances looked credible. In 1910, his financial angels at Farwell Trust Company granted him additional underwriting under conditions that economically intertwined the irrigation tracts.
Like many others, an attorney at Cleveland, Ohio, who trusted Hammett’s magic-by-irrigation arguments, expected to take possession of bountifully irrigated land at the extension project, present his “proofs of irrigation” to the government to ensure his entitlement to the land, and cash out his profits in 1910. But Hammett promised too much. He missed his deadlines for delivering water to settlers during 1909 and 1910, and worse, he built an irrigation system so defective that farmers suffered long-term shortages of water. At Medbury Valley, this same Cleveland lawyer recounted, settlers shared a “general complaint” about “water not being sufficient” for their crops and that the water supply amounted to about one-third of what was expected.
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Waiting for government water in the desert of South Central Idaho. Library of Congress. |
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Such complaints were commonplace on Idaho’s irrigation frontier, but Hammett’s irrigation system engendered settler frustration and saddled farmers with economic hardship for two decades. Where his main canal nestled in hillsides beneath which lay strata of sand, lower canal embankments collapsed as soon as water percolated from the canal into the underground. Wooden flumes and wood stave siphons, another staple in the irrigation system, leaked after a few seasons of use, and such wasting of moisture added to the loss of water from excessive seepage elsewhere in the system. Certain flumes and siphons, which were essential links in the projects’ common waterway, washed away in the absence of cement barriers around the intakes and outlets of the structures. In even worse conditions at the Pasadena Valley siphon, a full head of canal water could not pass through the pipe. Because of this bottleneck, farmers were denied the better part of the water on which they relied for irrigation. It also appeared that Hammett’s system, which at best provided 300 cfs of water, could not satisfy all of the farmers’ needs after he extended the system to the extension project. Water shortages ensued, Hammett’s agents tried to divide the water at hand among too many irrigators, and farmers with first crack at the water “took matters into their own hands” by adjusting their head gates to “get what water they needed” at the expense of the others.
In building the irrigation system, Hammett had squeezed pennies, leading to imperfections in the irrigation works. He had also, in fashioning the irrigation system, ignored the topography and geological characteristics of the area despite plenty of forewarning from the experiences of his Glenns Ferry Company predecessors. Consequently, project settlers lost patience with Hammett. They remitted no more money despite their contractual obligations. Many settlers lapsed into “don’t care” and “drifting with the tide” postures, and some even abandoned their farms, at the peril of losing their claims to the land under Carey Act rules, “while waiting to see what the outcome of conditions” would be.
Other irrigator forces fought back against Hammett in their own ways. Glenns Ferry attorney Allen Miller, whose own investment in the projects amounted to at least $2,500, helped organize this fight. He described it as a battle for “radical” measures that could force Hammett to “give way to [the best interests] of the many.” In 1910, the insurgents organized the King Hill Water Users’ Association and next employed a “consulting engineer” to scientifically document the shortfalls of the irrigation system. This consultant, Osmar Lysander Waller, was a self-taught “irrigation engineer” and a mathematician and civil engineering professor at Washington Agricultural College at Pullman. He also described himself as an “expert on irrigation for Idaho” as a result of his consulting work at the Twin Falls South Side project, and he supplied the King Hill fighters with plenty of facts with which to embarrass Hammett. Waller also urged Idaho state authorities to compel Hammett to rebuild large portions of the irrigation system and, in that way, “stamp the State of Idaho” nationally for upholding the rights of irrigation tract settlers.
Politics of water
Aside from the Water Users’ Association assailing Hammett’s handling of irrigation, his projects became an issue in the statewide election campaigns of 1910. Critics accused an Idaho assistant attorney general of joining Hammett in “water juggling.” James Hawley, the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor, referred to incumbent Governor James Brady and members of the Brady administration as “figureheads and incompetents” whose King Hill wrongdoings stemmed from their “direct connections” to the “land promoters.” Moreover, such accusations interested the muckrakers of national journalism. Edward Bohm, for instance, noted Idaho’s irrigation difficulties in his series, “Irrigation Finance—Evils and Remedy,” in the New York-based The Financial World.
Hawley prevailed in the election of 1910, and the King Hill Water Users’ Association reminded him that he had publicly deplored the taint surrounding Hammett’s projects. They insisted that the new administration force Hammett to better the irrigation system according to Waller’s prescriptions. Also, settlers who had received no water during 1909 and 1910 demanded rebates on their first water payments to Hammett’s King Hill companies, and many similarly deluged the companies with demands for compensation for crop losses due to insufficient water. The companies rejected such claims for reimbursement, and when Hammett’s Farwell Trust Company backers disallowed the same claims except for a “few small accounts where the reputation of the project was at stake,” settlers countered with lawsuits to collect the damages.
Rebels next struck at another of Hammett’s flanks. They refused to pay for any of the water reaching their head gates unless the stream amounted to their full entitlement. So united was the rebels’ resistance that Hammett could only counterclaim that his companies held ironclad contracts requiring settlers to remit $65 per acre in 10 annual installments. Finally, such withholding irreparably damaged Hammett, the Farwell Trust Company and the other bondholders of King Hill companies. At Hammett’s oldest project, non-payments soared by slightly more than $224,000 between 1909 and 1911. Settlers also extracted their pound of flesh from Hammett and his allies in a federal district court proceeding, Continental and Commercial Trust and Savings Bank v. McCarty. The court disallowed the King Hill companies any interest on delinquent payments unless the corporations stayed in “substantial compliance” with water delivery rules that were spelled out in water contracts between the companies and the settlers.
Hammett could secure no underwriting for even small betterment of the projects during 1911 and 1912. The Farwell Trust Company, which had pledged limited underwriting for repairing the irrigation system at the start of 1911, reneged, and by the end of the year announced that it could advance “no more money” to Hammett. At this point, the trust company was overextended from investing about $1 million at the King Hill projects and had incurred other losses from underwriting irrigation in several other states. The company abandoned its western irrigation business in 1911. No angels then rescued Hammett. Instead, disgruntlement spread nationwide among buyers of western irrigation company stocks and bonds during 1911 and 1912, and when Hammett offered his King Hill companies’ paper to those skeptics in exchange for their investment dollars, none would buy it. The difficulties of the Farwell Trust Company reminded them of how easily irrigation company securities became virtually worthless when settlers refused to pay for water.
A desperate scheme
With doomsday approaching, Hammett wrote, “I can see only one way out, and this is to have the people [residents of the King Hill projects] vote an irrigation district and place every available acre under bond.” Hammett reasoned that if settlers created an irrigation district, which was a governmental jurisdiction with powers to tax, the new district could refinance the projects and, with this new money, refurbish the irrigation system to service about 20,000 acres. Furthermore, a district could reasonably expect to borrow dollars from investors; although they no longer dared risk their funds on western irrigation company bonds, state law would protect this new venture. The laws empowered irrigation districts to borrow money, offer the districts’ bonds as collateral, and tax district residents to pay such indebtedness. The alternative to his plan, Hammett then added, was a disaster for everybody. Settlers, he warned, could either vote such a district or have no water for their crops. Without settler acceptance of his plan, Hammett could lose his personal investments in the projects and sacrifice the promoter’s profits that the Carey Act allowed him if the projects succeeded. Furthermore, without an irrigation district, the Farwell Trust Company and the projects’ other bondholders might never recover their investments. The bondholders predictably supported Hammett’s plan for making prosperous farmers out of hapless settlers.
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A canal provides flood irrigation in Laura Gipson's Cornfield, 1984. |
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At the oldest of Hammett’s project, his new scheme generally fell on deaf ears because the plan would increase water costs, and many also resisted because they no longer trusted Hammett to translate his theories into reality. Conversely, a majority of extension project settlers supported Hammett’s plan, although they realized that it would force them to pay more for the same amount of water. They agreed to dig deeper into their purses because their west-end lands, which were situated the farthest from the projects’ water source, remained more vulnerable to water shortages without renovation of the irrigation system. In the end, the King Hill Water Users’ Association rallied the opponents of Hammett’s plan, and when the Land Board held hearings at which the irrigation district plan was “thoroughly ventilated,” few minds were changed. This opposition scuttled the plan.
In 1913, creditors forced the oldest of Hammett’s corporations, the King Hill Irrigation and Power Company, into bankruptcy, and his King Hill Extension Irrigation Company teetered on the edge of insolvency until it collapsed in 1914. Furthermore, no private enterpriser would subscribe even $30,000, a court-mandated minimum, for the defunct King Hill Irrigation and Power Company at a receiver’s sale on March 10, 1914. Idaho state authorities intervened at the last moment of the sale. By paying $30,000, those public officials prevented King Hill settlers from losing their land for non-compliance with the Carey Act, but the state’s officers wondered what next to do with the state’s white elephant.
Hammett, once heralded as a giant among the builders of Idaho’s irrigation frontier, scarcely exemplified the best in free-enterprise methods of putting land under irrigation ditches. Instead, he disillusioned King Hill settlers, and they predictably worried lest Idaho state authorities select another enterpriser to fulfill Hammett’s Carey Act obligations to provide water. But many settlers stayed the course at the project, and visualized themselves as takers of enough Malad River water to sustain fruit farming in the depths of the Snake River Canyon. Such ends were attainable, they believed, if they relied on approaches other than free enterprise to reclaim arid land. Consensus finally developed among them to trusting the federal government to provide a suitable irrigation system.
As for Hammett, who closed his business offices in Idaho during 1913, shutting the office doors symbolized the end of a dream and the beginning of much for him to ponder. As A. Miller Hammett, an attorney at Tulsa, Oklahoma, earlier warned his father—a man who had built and lost fortunes—Hammett should “attend to the irrigation [projects] before all else because this is our all.” But Hammett, whose enrichment in recent times from the Glenn Pool of Oklahoma petroleum had conditioned him to expect more than his share of good luck, garnered little for himself at the King Hill projects. Irrigation in Idaho might even be his last fling at amassing wealth and proved, in any event, as chancy as his wildcatting for oil.
Features: Out of Bounds • Irrigation Schemes • Boise Project • Energizing Idaho
For Further Reading
Note on the sources: This study has been excerpted and adapted from Hugh Lovin’s “Weaving Tangled Webs at the King Hill Irrigation Projects” (typewritten), 2006. Extensively documented, the manuscript is available upon request from the Center for Idaho History and Politics, MS 1925, Boise State University, Boise 83725. Key sources include:
Archibald, George.“General Report: Kings Hill Project and Kings Hill Extension Project in Idaho and Glenn’s [sic] Ferry Land and Irrigation Company, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 1947, Record Group 115, Microcopy 96, Roll 61, National Archives.
Carey Act Lands, Opening & Drawing, October 12, 1908 at Kings Hill, Idaho. Boise and King Hill: Kings Hill Irrigation Company, 1908.
Cochrane, Frederic J. Hydro Era: The Story of Idaho Power Company. Boise: Idaho Power Company, 1973.
Glenns Ferry Gazette, 1909-1919.
Groefsema, Olive. Elmore County: Its Historical Gleanings. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1949.
Howard, Randall R. “Irrigation Frauds in Ten States.” Technical World Magazine, 17 (July 1912).
Ninth Biennial Report of the State Engineer to the Governor of Idaho, 1911-1912. N.P: n.p., 1912.
Stacy, Susan. Legacy of Light: A History of Idaho Power Company. Boise: Idaho Power, 1991.
Story Told and Illustrated: How the Desert was Conquered and Idaho’s Richest Fruit Section Developed and about the Opportunities Offered the Homeseeker and Inventory in the Wonderful Valley of the Snake. (N.P.: n.p., 1911.
Williams, Mikel H. The History of the Current Status of the Carey Act in Idaho. Boise: Idaho Department of Reclamation, 1970.
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