The Mystic Mid-Region Part 9

One of the most peculiar phases of journalism is found in the desert region of California. There are, in the two great deserts of the State, four weekly papers, two in each desert. In the Mojave Desert are the _Randsburg Miner_, published in the gold-mining town of Randsburg, in the northern part of the desert, and the _Needles' Eye_, issued from the town of Needles on the eastern confines of the sandy waste.

The Needles is the metropolis of the upper desert country, and the _Needles' Eye_ is the larger of the two papers published in this desert. The town has a peculiar history, inasmuch as in the first fifteen years of its existence it stood upon borrowed ground. In size the towns.h.i.+p is one and a half times as large as the State of Vermont.

The village of Needles is about eight miles west of the Colorado River on the line of the Santa Fe Railroad. The main part of the village is situated upon Section 29 of the towns.h.i.+p, which is one of the sections included in the railway grant to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

The town grew naturally about the station, which was established at the time of the building of the Santa Fe road, and little thought was given to t.i.tles at that time.

In time the town grew to the dignity of brick blocks, and still the t.i.tles remained with the railway company. Some ineffectual efforts were made on one or two occasions to secure t.i.tles to the lands from the railway people, but it was not until 1903 that a deal was made whereby the townsmen, in consideration of $43,000, secured deeds to the lands upon which stand their homes and business blocks.

Needles has a population of two thousand souls. It is a mine outfitting town, furnis.h.i.+ng supplies for a large and rich gold-mining district north of that locality. The _Needles' Eye_, which is an eight-page journal, is a wide-awake organ owned, printed, and edited by L. V.

Root, a native of Michigan, but a resident of the Southwest since 1892.

He formerly edited the _New Mexico Gleaner_ and is familiar with frontier journalism. His paper is devoted to the local interests of the town and to the mining districts of that region.

[Ill.u.s.tration: YEAR-OLD WILLOW TREES AT INTERNATIONAL LINE]

Randsburg is a typical mining town with desert accessories. It is the chief town of the gold-mining district known as the "American Rand,"

and has but one rival in the district, Johannesburg, which is close to it in size and importance, but which has not yet arrived at the dignity of a newspaper.

The _Miner_ is a four-page weekly devoted to the news of the mines and to local items. It has few features of interest outside the locality in which it is published.

In the Colorado Desert journalism attains an unusual degree of uniqueness. Both papers published in that region are printed below the level of the sea.

The _Submarine_ has the distinction of being the first paper in the world to be printed below the level of the sea. It is still unique in that it is the "lowest down" of any paper in the world. In order to hold this record the editor and proprietor, Randolph R. Freeman, was obliged to move to a new locality a few months after establis.h.i.+ng his paper in the desert.

In 1900, the first paper to be printed below sea-level was issued by Freeman at Indio, a station in the desert on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Indio has a depression of twenty-two feet below the level of the sea.

Later, the Imperial irrigation ca.n.a.l was started across the desert from the Colorado River, and the town of Imperial had its birth. Then the _Press_ sprang into existence and was printed in an office situated sixty-five feet below the ocean's level. The _Submarine_ thus lost double prestige, for it was no longer the only paper published below the level of the sea, neither was it the "most low down newspaper on earth," as the publisher announced in his prospectus.

The editor, in informing his readers of his move, did so in the following language:

"We have dropped from twenty-two feet below sea-level to seventy-six feet below sea-level. We hit Coach.e.l.la with a dull yet raucous thud. The low, rumbling noise you heard last Tuesday was caused by our printing-office taking the drop. It may be truly said that the _Submarine_ is the lowest down, or the lowdownest, or the most low down newspaper on earth. As nearly as we can compute the distance, Hades is about two hundred and twelve feet just below our new office. The paper will continue to advocate the interests of all the country below sea-level and we want you to fire in all the news you know."

The _Submarine_ is nothing if not consistent. It is an eight-page weekly, printed upon paper of a "submarine blue" tint. Its local paragraphs are run under the caption of "Along the Coral Strand." It has a humorous department conducted by "McGinty," the man who fell to the bottom of the sea. There is still another department ent.i.tled, "The Undertow." The editor owns a span of fine horses, the names of which are "Sub" and "Marine." In fact there is a flavor of the locality in everything connected with the establishment.

The Imperial _Press_, owned, edited, and published by Edgar F. Howe, is conducted strictly on journalistic principles. The paper is somewhat larger than the _Submarine_. It is an eight-page weekly devoted to the interests of irrigation and of reclamation of the desert lands, and to general and local news.

Howe has been connected with various California newspapers, and has a wide reputation as a commercial editor and an oil expert. He confesses that the Imperial publis.h.i.+ng business has introduced him to decidedly new experiences. One of the chief difficulties in printing a paper in so torrid a region is that it frequently occurs that the ink-rollers melt and the paper is delayed from issuing till other rollers can be obtained from Los Angeles, nearly three hundred miles away. Summer temperature in Imperial ranges from 100 to 120 degrees in the shade and from 20 to 30 degrees higher in the sun. A double set of rollers is kept on hand when possible, but it frequently happens that rollers collapse about as fast as they can be adjusted, and the paper is hung up till a new lot gets in, or till the weather cools off a bit.

Howe has a device of his own invention for the keeping of the rollers when not in actual use. It is a cupboard with a ventilator in the top and a box of sawdust in the bottom. The rollers are set in a rack midway. The sawdust is kept wet, and the rapid evaporation keeps the cupboard moderately cool.

In one feature the _Press_ and _Submarine_ are peculiar. Each of the papers has a circulation three or four times larger than the entire population of the towns in which the papers are published. Another feature not common with rural publications is that all subscriptions are paid in advance and in cash. There are no delinquent subscribers, for the paper is stopped when the subscription expires. Neither are subscriptions payable in cordwood, for that is a commodity unknown to desert towns.

Twelve miles north of Imperial, and near the end of the Imperial ca.n.a.l, there was completed, January 1, 1903, a single board building twelve by sixteen feet. When the writer visited the place in the following June he found thirty-six buildings completed and others in the course of construction. This was the town of Brawley, one hundred and twenty-five feet below sea-level. One of the first objects to greet his eye was a printing outfit, the presses, cases, and accoutrements being stacked upon the sands beside a street of the town and near a tent in which resided the owner of the outfit. This was the nucleus of a new newspaper, to be started as soon as a building could be erected for its occupancy. This paper is destined to be the "lowdownest," unless one of the other papers moves still deeper into the great sink. It is among the possibilities of the future to have a paper published three hundred feet below sea-level, for this depression may be reached in the center of the basin known as the "Salton Sink."

CHAPTER XVII

THE END OF THE DESERT

There must be, we are told, an end to everything, and the beginning of the end of the desert is at hand. Already two hundred thousand acres of the great Colorado Desert has been taken from it and placed with the productive acreage of the State.

This is but a fraction, to be sure, of the vast amount of arid land in the State and but about one five-hundredth part of the arid area in the United States, but it is a beginning, and when it is considered that it is the work of only two years it will be conceded that it is a marvelous beginning.

Irrigation, to be sure, is not new to the Western country, but reclamation on a gigantic scale is new. Farming was carried on by irrigation in the West before the first white man visited this continent. In Arizona and New Mexico are to be traced to-day vast irrigation ca.n.a.ls and reservoirs used by a race that had been forgotten when the first white man visited the region. Some of these ancient ca.n.a.ls are now being used by both Indians and white men in those Territories.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IRRIGATING DESERT LAND]

The national irrigation idea had its birth in Los Angeles in 1890, when the business men of that city met and opened a campaign for securing a Government system. Nearly six thousand letters were written and mailed to representative men of the country with the result that the idea took root and national irrigation became an accomplished fact.

Before the Government pa.s.sed laws whereby irrigation became a national charge, private enterprise had taken hold of the matter, and the Imperial ca.n.a.l had been started out into the Colorado Desert. This ca.n.a.l has had marvelous development, and two years from the time work was begun upon it more lands had been reclaimed than by any other single irrigation system in the world.

The work of reclaiming the Colorado Desert was begun in 1900. Not far from the Mexican line, at Hanlon's Crossing, the river left a convenient place for the headworks of the great ca.n.a.l. Here is where the river was tapped. About a mile from the headworks the river, which in the bygone ages laid down the sixty-mile barrier between the gulf and the desert, also left a channel whereby to aid in reclaiming the desert. The first ten miles of this natural channel required some deepening, and then for some sixty miles across the Mexican border and back to the international line the ca.n.a.l was ready-made.

From the point where the ca.n.a.l leaves the Colorado to where it returns to the international line, after circling through Mexican territory, there is a fall of one hundred and fifteen feet, less than two feet to the mile. This, however, is sufficient for the purposes of irrigation.

One of the first questions to be settled, when the project for leading the river out into the desert was considered, was the character of the water. Not all water found in the arid regions is good for irrigation.

Much of it is so impregnated with alkali as to be injurious rather than helpful to the soil.

The University of Arizona made daily a.n.a.lysis of the waters of the river for a period of seventeen months. This a.n.a.lysis showed that the waters contained no injurious substances, but, on the contrary, much that is nutritive to the soil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DESERT SORGHUM]

The waters of the Colorado carry in suspension one-fourth of one per cent. of solid matter. The color of the water is about like that of lemonade. The a.n.a.lysis shows that this matter in suspension is composed of clay, lime, phosphoric acid, available potash, and nitrogen. The fertilizing value of these substances is about 25 cents per acre-inch of water. As from twenty-four inches to thirty-six inches of water are used in the course of the year for each acre irrigated, it will be seen that the fertilizing value of the water is from $6 to $9 per acre per year. This means that the land will never wear out but will produce abundant crops so long as worked and irrigated.

Another question which came up for settlement was the permanence of the water-supply. The answer to this was equally satisfactory. The mean flow of the river is found to be forty thousand cubic feet per second, an amount of water ample to irrigate territory eight times as large as the Colorado Desert.

The volume of water in the lower Colorado River is greater in the summer, or dry season, than in the winter, or rainy season. This is because the river has its source in the great mountainous region in the north, where the melting snows on the mountain-tops during the summer season furnish large quant.i.ties of water to the streams which make up the river. This brings the greatest amount of water at the season of the year when the farmers use the most, a condition most satisfactory to the projectors of the irrigation system.

The main ca.n.a.l, which was begun in 1900, at the beginning of 1903 had grown to be one hundred miles long. This ca.n.a.l is seventy feet wide and eight feet deep, and supplies more than three hundred miles of lateral ca.n.a.ls with water. The first season that water was turned into the ca.n.a.l, six thousand five hundred acres of crops were raised where for ages had been nothing but barren desert lands. The second season forty thousand acres were raised, and at the end of the season one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of land had been broken ready for seeding.

The great sandy wastes have given way to green fields of waving grain, verdant seas of billowy maize and millet, broad meadows of rich green alfalfa, and wide pastures where thousands of cattle dot the plain. In addition to this, new cities are springing up where desolation so recently reigned, and a railroad has crept down toward the Mexican line, and is destined to go on to the line and over, even to the great gulf which ages ago retreated from the land now being turned into a paradise.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MILO MAIZE ON RECLAIMED DESERT LAND NEAR HEBER]

One of the first towns a man hears of now, when he enters the desert region, is Calexico, the most remote of the settlements in the desert north of the Mexican line. It is noted for two things, both of which have to do with the hotel, one of the half-dozen buildings which compose the town. When the visitor steps from the train at Old Beach, in the very heart of the desert, he is apt to be greeted with this question:

"Going down to Calexico?

"Waal, ye'll git the best meal there of any place in the desert, an'

they've got a shower-bath at the hotel there, too," is the information vouchsafed when the visitor announces Calexico as his destination.

These are the things which have given Calexico fame. It was nine o'clock in the evening when the writer and his party arrived at Calexico in June, 1903, after a two-days drive across the dusty, burning plain.

"This way," said the landlord who answered our hail, showing us into a side room in the adobe structure. "Drop your luggage here. You can wash over there. And right in here," said he, proudly pointing the way, "is a shower-bath. Help yourselves."

A shower-bath in the very heart of the desert! It is no wonder the landlord is proud of it, for there is not another within two hundred miles.