The Land of Enchantment: From Pike's Peak to the Pacific

by Lilian Whiting

The Platte River Power and Irrigation Company are about to establish two electrical power enterprises most important to Denver, one of which is to supply all the power that is necessary to turn every wheel now in motion in the city, and the second is to secure electric power from the water that is stored in the Cheesman dam and transmit it to Denver. Responsible men are working for the success of the enterprises, and it is anticipated that Denver will soon enjoy the advantage of power furnished at a minimum of cost.

The Denver inter-urban service for transportation will be carried on entirely by electricity within the near future. All the railroads that centre in this City Beautiful are preparing estimates and making ready to conduct experiments. The recent tests in the East of electrically driven locomotives indicate that Colorado, with Denver as a centre, will one day be a network of electric lines traversing productive regions and connecting all the prosperous towns of the state by this most ideal form of transit.

In Colorado it is one of the unwritten laws—a law from which there is no appeal—that nothing which is desirable is impossible. This is one of the spiritual laws, indeed, and he who holds it as an axiom shall perpetually realize its force and its eternal truth. The entire physical world is plastic to the world of spirit. In that realm alone realities exist. For "the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." The faith that stands—not "in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God"—is that which shall be justified by the most profound actuality. It is that hidden wisdom "which God ordained before the world unto our glory." Science has already discerned the connection between organic form and super-space; and speculations already begin to emerge from the dim and vague region of conjecture into hypothesis and theory out of which are developed new working laws of the universe which are as undeniable as is that of the law of gravitation.

In harmonious accordance, then, with that unwritten law of Colorado that nothing which is desirable is impossible, it was realized that the Gunnison River, a powerful stream thirty miles east of the Uncompahgre, afforded an abundance of water to reclaim these desert wastes to the traditional blossoming of the rose. The Gunnison River, however, flows through a box cañon three thousand feet deep. Were it at the bottom of a gorge three thousand miles deep, that fact would hardly daunt the Colorado spirit. Immediately some invention, incomprehensible to the present mind of man, would be made by which the desirable issue should be achieved. As has been remarked, failure is a word not included in the vocabulary of Colorado. That state has a "revised version" of its own for the resources of its language, laws, and literature. Its keynote is the invincible. Ways and means are mere matters of minor detail. If an achievement is desirable, it is to be accomplished, of course. It is not even a question for discussion. There is no margin of debatable land in the realization of every conceivable opportunity.

A stupendous work in development is that of this Gunnison Tunnel under the Vernal Mesa to Uncompahgre Valley,—a desert waste whose area comprises some one hundred thousand acres of sand, sagebrush, and stones. Yet even here irrigation worked its spell, and while the Uncompahgre River held out a water supply, the land reached proved fertile beyond expectation. But the Uncompahgre had its far too definite and restricted limits; no other water supply was available for this region, and there lay the land—a tract of potential wealth, but destined to remain, so far as could be seen, an unproductive and cumbersome desert region unless irrigation could be achieved.

To the constructing engineer of the reclamation service there came a telegram from the chief engineer in Washington asking if it were feasible to divert the waters of Gunnison River to Uncompahgre Valley by means of a tunnel under Vernal Mesa? This implied building a tunnel from a point totally unknown. No one had ever succeeded in passing through Gunnison Cañon. But the past tense does "not count," any more than Rip Van Winkle's last glass, in any estimate of the present in Colorado. Professor Fellows, an engineer of Denver, selected his assistant; they prepared their instruments, their provisions, and their inflated rubber mattress, and set forth on this expedition in which their lives were in constant peril; in which hardships beyond description were endured. The topographic map, for instance, was made by Mr. Fellows in the delightful position of being lowered with ropes into the deep cañon where, should the slightest accident occur, he would never return to the day and daylight world again. The establishment of precise levels for both ends of the tunnel, one of which must, of course, be lower than the other to induce a flow of water, was another matter requiring a delicacy of adjustment beyond description. Of their wonderful and even tragic experiences a local report says: "It all ended by Fellows and his companion saving two things,—their lives and their notebooks. Everything else went down with the flood. When the men emerged at the Devil's Slide, weary, bruised, and bleeding, friends who had been waiting to pick up their mangled bodies hailed them as if they had returned from the dead."

Of all this story there was no hint in the cheerfully laconic telegram despatched to Washington,—"Complete surveys for construction." The tunnel will be five or six miles in length, of which over two miles are already completed. The work proceeds night and day with the drills like mighty giants eating their way through the solid granite of the Vernal Mesa that lies between the two rivers. This desert region which will thus be reclaimed comprises portions of three counties,—Ouray, Montrose, and Delta,—the region being at an altitude of five thousand feet. It easily produces fruit, alfalfa, and grain, and it is also well adapted to the culture of potatoes, celery, and the sugar beet. The land when irrigated is estimated to be worth five hundred dollars per acre. The tunnel will have a capacity for conveying thirteen thousand cubic feet of water per second, and there will be connected with it an elaborate system of lesser canals and ditches that will carry the water all over this desert tract. It is estimated that this enterprise will add thousands of homes to the valley of the Uncompahgre, and that it will increase by at least ten millions the taxable property of Colorado. The cost of the Gunnison Tunnel will be some two and a half millions.

Uncompahgre Valley, lying between the Continental Divide on the east, and the Utah Desert on the west, comprises the greatest extent of irrigable land west of Pueblo in the entire state; but the need for irrigation and the possibilities of supplying that need were so widely apart that even Merlin the Enchanter recognized the difficulty, though by no means defining it as an impossibility. The Uncompahgre River was soon exhausted, and only this apparently impracticable scheme, now happily realized, offered any solution of the problem. Hon. Meade Hammond of the state legislature of Colorado secured the appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars to meet the expenses of surveying and preliminary work. Hon. John C. Bell, the representative for that district in Congress, gave untiring devotion to the project, and to his efforts was due the zeal with which the reclamation service took up this vast work; and when Professor Fellows was appointed as the government district engineer its success became the object of his supreme interest and unremitting energy, and its achievement adds another to the remarkable engineering works of Colorado.

In this Land of Enchantment almost anything is possible, even to yachting,—a pastime that would not at first present itself as one to be included among the entertainments of an arid state which has to set its own legislative machinery and that of Congress in motion in order to contrive a water supply for even its agricultural service; nevertheless, on a lake in the mountains, more than a mile and a half above sea level and some one hundred miles from Denver the Beautiful, a yacht club disports itself with all the airy grace and assurance of its ground—one means of its water—that distinguishes the delightful Yacht Club at old Marblehead on the Atlantic Coast. There was, however, no government appropriation made to create this lake, as might at first be supposed, nor any experts sent out commissioned to prepare the way. There are numerous forms of summer-day entertainments that are more or less in evidence in the inland states; but yachting has never been supposed to be among them, as preconceived ideas of this joy have invariably associated it with oceans and seas. Still, it must be remembered that Colorado is an exceptional region in the universe, and creates, not follows, precedents. It is the state, as has before been remarked, to which nothing conceivable is impossible.