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 canal, 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 canals and reservoirs used by a race that had been forgotten when the first white man visited the region. Some of these ancient canals are now being used by both Indians and white men in those Territories.