 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
||||
  |
||||
Boise project
In 1909, at Diversion Dam on the Boise River, the U.S. Reclamation Service rescued the dream of a desert remade through Arthur Foote's New York Canal.
The Boise Project broke more than one investor before delivering the precious water that would literally transform the valley.
 |
Around the turn of the 20th century, thousands of people migrated to Idaho to build the model of early 1900s technology—a network of dams, reservoirs and canals that would deliver a steady source of water to transform arid wastelands into productive full-scale farms, green lawns and growing industries. Today, their descendants enjoy a verdant valley along the Boise River, thanks to the vision of a government willing to pour $67 million over four decades into the idea that water would build success.
“If you look at the ground between here and Mountain Home, the rest of the valley would look like that without the (Boise) Project,” said Idaho Department of Agriculture Director Pat Takasugi. “A lot of sweat has gone into turning this valley into truly a Treasure Valley.”
The Boise River Project stores spring snowmelt in upstream reservoirs in readiness for the rush experienced as temperatures melt the abundant snow pack at Bogus Basin and east to the Sawtooth Mountains. Canals then distribute the water to farmers and other property owners throughout the spring, summer and early fall by way of waterways crisscrossing the valley.
Today, the project irrigates the a vast triangle of southwest Idaho from the desert near Mountain Home to Oregon's Malheur County. Arrowrock, Amderson Ranch, Cascade, Deadwood, Cascade, and Black Canyon are the biggest dams on the project. Multipurpose Lucky Peak Dam, completed in 1956, provide flood control for the City of Boise. Division Dam on the Boise taps water for the New York Canal. Below Arrowrock the project irrigates 276,000 acres with more than 8,000 farms.
Sherl Chapman of the Idaho Water Users Association said the decades of work transformed Boise from a desert community relying on trappers and overland trade to a valley considered No. 1 in the nation for production of sweet seed corn and other crops.
“We just have an excellent quality of life in the Boise Valley, and it all started with the Boise Project,” he said.
The series of reservoirs and dams provides boating, fishing, rafting, kayaking and tubing opportunities for thousands of people each year, including many coming from outside the state. It also gives protection from most seasonal flooding along the Boise River from Lucky Peak Dam to Parma. The New York Canal is in service early in the year, filling Lake Lowell with water being released from Arrowrock Dam in anticipation of the spring snowmelt.
But the system that works so well today didn’t come without heartache. The first farmers lured by the promise of abundant water often didn’t make it. The water was slow in coming. Farmers had to put in backbreaking days building homes, then clearing and leveling the land so irrigation water could reach it. They also had to dig irrigation ditches and put in crops. Often it all proved to be too much and they just gave up, earning the project the nickname “Heartbreak Row.”
Watering the desert
During the first decade of the 20th century, Idaho’s population jumped by 164,000—much of that in the Boise Valley as workers from across the country converged on the New York Canal, Arrowrock Dam, Diversion Dam and Deer Flat Dam projects. But the foundation for the change was laid well before the federal programs were conceived.
 |
||
 |
Building the New York Canal, Boise Project, about 1907. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. |
|
As more and more Americans fled the East to homestead the West, they had to forsake more than just their homes and families. They also left behind the abundant water provided by those regions’ streams, lakes, rivers and climates. Arriving in Idaho, they were faced with arid deserts and hostile bench lands—acres and acres of land higher than the river valley and inaccessible to running water.
But those lands were free to anyone could eke out a living for at least five years. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed for 160 acres per head of family. Later, the Desert Land Act of 1877 upped that to 640 acres. In neighboring Utah, Mormon pioneers developed highly successful irrigation techniques that made that area blossom. Missionaries brought the technique to Idaho in 1855; by 1864 all the river bottomland in the valley was being irrigated by hand-dug ditches. But the benches above the flood plain still were beyond the reach of cultivation.
Riches to be made
For Eastern speculators, the situation was a potential gold mine that would eventually turn sour. For transplanted Eastern engineer Arthur Foote, it was an all-consuming dream. In 1884, Foote envisioned a canal that would move water from the Boise Canyon to farms south of the river. His initial plan called for a canal 17.5 feet deep and 27 feet across at the bottom. A series of investors poured money into this and other canal projects, only to find that the costs, measured in the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars (no one knows the exact costs) outpaced their resources.
 |
||
Arthur Foote, engineer. Big plans and big losses. |
|
|
A few backers looked for ways to offset the cost, such as a scheme to use canal water during the off-season to flush gold from the played-out placers along the Snake River. But as many had already discovered, the gold wasn’t that easy to mine, and the scheme failed. One of the largest investors in the canal was from New York, giving the New York Canal the name it still bears today.
Foote, crushed by the failure of his dream, finally moved to California. But his vision lived on. His wife, writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, wrote about that dream in her memoirs, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: “The Reclamation Bureau … built the New York and Idaho Canal following the old line our poor men laid out and left behind them. We did not leave our bones on that battlefield, but we left pretty much everything else we had.”
After 16 years of frustration and heartache, a scaled down shadow of the original version of the New York Canal finally was opened, but it delivered a mere trickle of water to the valley. Diversion Dam, which now raises water to the level of the expanded final canal, was still years away.
Irrigation gains momentum
In 1902, Congress passed the National Irrigation Law, better known as the Reclamation Act, to help construct dams and canals too expensive for state and private coffers. “Reclamation’s mission was to irrigate the West,” said Steven Jarsky, manager of operations and maintenance for the Snake River Area of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “We wouldn’t be the way we are without the Boise Project.” Idaho, with its half-finished canals and farmers desperate for water, was ripe for aid.
Under the auspices of the Bureau of Reclamation’s vast Boise Project, the expanded 40-mile New York Canal finally realized its potential. At the official reopening in 1909 Foote, hailed as the Father of the New York Canal, was paid the following tribute in The Idaho Statesman: "A quarter of a century ago, Mr. Foote saw these possibilities which we now so fully realize; he saw where water could be diverted; he saw where it could be stored, and, in the reach of his precise imagination, he could see these lands peopled with thousands of prosperous families."
While the canal was being finished, grander components of the Boise Project also were under way, including dams to create a storage facility at the end of the canal in Nampa and some way to store water at the head of the canals for the hot summer months.
“Arrowrock Dam was always a hinge pin in the master plan,” Jarsky said. The dam generated huge excitement both inside and outside of Idaho. With its 351-foot walls making it the highest dam in the world at the time, people flocked from all over the country to snag jobs as laborers, engineers, bakers and carpenters. A town soon sprang up near the construction site, 23 miles from Boise. Estimated at between 1,500 and 3,000 people, the Arrowrock camp boasted a movie theater, an orchestra, a baseball field, a tennis court, a hospital, a library and a dance hall. In addition, a rail line ran east from the Boise Bureau of Reclamation office on Broadway Avenue up the canyon to the camp.
To cut costs on the project, Diversion Dam, which supplied the New York and Penitentiary canals, generated all the site’s electricity. In addition, the project ran its own lumber camp and quarried its own sand for 350,000 cubic yards of concrete. The savings on the concrete alone topped $250,000.
Arrowrock Dam opens
After three years of work, the dam was completed in 1915, at a cost of nearly $5 million. The dam also provided experience that would later prove vital in building the Hoover, Grand Coulee and Shasta dams. Today, water users access the canals through a control board such as the Boise Project’s, which consists of five irrigation districts. It was established in 1926 as an operating entity for the Bureau of Reclamation and the irrigation districts.
 |
||
|
Arrowrock, the world's tallest dam, from a 1920s postcard. |
|
Royse VanCuren, a former Boise Project manager, grew up in the project as the son of the water master at Lake Lowell. He began working for the project in the 1930s and said it was the farmers who carried the risk of the venture from the start. “The government did the studies, formulated and constructed, but had no risk,” he said. “Those poor old sodbusters out here had to bond to protect the government.” (editor’s note: VanCuren died in Feb. 2000)
But without the government, such a mammoth undertaking never would have been possible and thousands of valley residents would never have made the trek west. Now that they’re here, the project faces different concerns than those of a century ago. Instead of worrying so much about quantity, water managers focus on the quality of the water and the varying needs of the users.
“In the 1920s, there were hardly any people here,” Boise Project assistant manager Paul Deveau said. With increased population have come concerns about encroachments, endangered species and pressure for public recreation. But the heart of the project will always be the farmers. “The canals really changed Boise,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the New York Canal, there would be no valley.”
 |
Water to the valley
1877—Ridenbaugh Canal begun
1880—256 farms, encompassing 81,000 acres, produce crops in the Boise Valley
1883—Phyllis Canal begun
1894—Carey Act offers Idaho one million acres for reclamation
1900—76 canals, totaling 568 miles of main and lateral ditches, cover a quarter of the Boise Valley
1902—Hubbard Dam and Reservoir built; purchased by Reclamation in 1912
1908—Boise River Diversion Dam completed
1909—New York Canal opens
1910—Arrowrock Dam authorized
1908 to 1911—Deer Flat stores water from the
New York canal.
1912—Diversion Dam hydro for Arrowrock construction
1915—Arrowrock Dam completed
1924—Black Canyon Dam completed
1931—Deadwood Dam completed
1948—Cascade Dam completed
1950—Anderson Ranch Dam completed
1956—Lucky Peak Dam completed
1988—Lucky Peak power plant opens
2000—Boise Project supplies 423 billion gallons annually
Adapted in part from an essay by Craven in The Idaho Statesman, March 14, 1999.
Features: Out of Bounds • Irrigation Schemes • Boise Project • Energizing Idaho
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |