Pueblo is always all sunshine and radiance, and has a beauty of location that makes it notable, with its encircling blue mountains and picturesque mesas, and the perpetual benediction of the Spanish Peaks silhouetted against the western sky. Its new library is the pride and delight of every citizen. It is one of the Carnegie chain,—a large, two-story and basement structure of white Colorado stone, the interior finished with the richly variegated Colorado marble which is used for mantels and fireplaces. The book stacks, the spacious and splendid reading-room, the children's room, and the smaller ones for reference and special study, are all planned on the latest and most perfect models.
The library is in the Royal Park, on the crest of one of the mesas, very near the home of Governor Adams. It is a library to delight the heart of the book-lover. Pueblo offers, indeed, great attractions to all who incline to this land of sunshine. The climate is even more mild than that of Denver, from which city it is a little over three hours distant by the fast trains, or four hours by slower ones. Colorado Springs lies between—two hours from Denver and a little over one hour from Pueblo. The location combines many attractions. With three railroads; its large industries in smelting and steel; its excellent schools, both public and private; its churches, its daily newspapers; its library; and its fine clubhouse, open to families,—women and children as well as men enjoying it freely,—Pueblo seems one of the most delightful of places. It has large wealth and a power of initiating many opportunities. It is on the most picturesque and delightful lines of travel to Cañon City, Salida, Leadville, Glenwood Springs, and through Salt Lake City to the Pacific Coast; or on the line to Arizona and the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and on to Los Angeles and San Francisco; or eastward to Chicago and the Atlantic Coast; or southward to Mexico, or St. Louis, or New Orleans. Pueblo is really in the heart of things, so to speak. The Chicago papers arrive the next day, the New York papers the third morning, and the telephonic communication is simply almost without limit. Governor Adams will step from his library into another book-lined room where the telephone is placed, and from there talk with people in five different states. Once he held a conversation with a man at the bottom of a mine a few hundred miles away,—a man whose subterranean sojourn had the alleviation of a telephone.
The greatest industrial organization west of the Mississippi River is that of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose largest plant is at Pueblo, and is held at a valuation of fifty-eight million dollars. On its pay-roll are fifteen thousand employés. There are twenty thousand tons of steel rail produced each month, and it is said that this number will soon be largely increased, and that the Goulds and the Rockefellers are arranging to utilize the product of these mills for their vast railroad interests. The company owns such large tracts of land in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; it owns coal mines, iron mines, lime quarries; it owns parts of two railroads, besides telegraph and telephone lines galore, so that by reason of these extensive holdings it is able to secure at a minimum of cost all the raw materials from which the finished products are turned out. Upward of three hundred thousand acres of the richest coal lands in the West, an empire containing one hundred square miles more than the coal area of Pennsylvania, constitute the holdings for coal mine purposes of the company. In addition there are iron, manganese mines, and limestone quarries containing the elements which give to the product of the furnaces and mills qualities that secure the markets of the Western world. Its plant at Pueblo has become the centre of a town called Minnequa, composed of its own employés and their families. The company has established a model hospital, with a surgeon's department fitted up with the most elaborate and finest scientific and nursing facilities; a fine library and large reading-rooms, and a recreation hall and gymnasium for the workmen. Nearly one million dollars has been expended on the tenant houses belonging to the company, which are rented to their employés on fair and advantageous terms. In many respects Minnequa, at Pueblo, is one of the most remarkable manufacturing centres in the world, presenting aspects that invite study, in its extensive resources, the vast and colossal character of its purposes, and its remarkable achievements. All employés are given the opportunity to acquire homes; and every late ideal in the way of providing opportunities for their care in health, in mental and moral development, and in recreations, is carried out to the fullest possible extent.
The company has recently engaged in an irrigation enterprise in the purchase of water-right priorities of the Arkansas River for seventy cubic feet of water per second, at an expense of one million dollars. These rights, which date back to 1860-62, are among the oldest existing, and they insure to the company the uninterrupted and certain possession of the river flow. A court decree enabled them to change the point of division, and they have constructed a new head-gate at Adobe, six miles east of Florence. A canal fifty-eight miles in length is being constructed from Florence to the mills owned by the company. The cost of this canal will be some three quarters of a million. These mills produce over seventy-five thousand tons of iron and steel each month. The manufacturing plant at Minnequa includes blast furnaces, converting works, blooming mills, a merchant iron mill, a hoop and cotton tie mill, a spike factory, a bolt factory, a castings and pipe foundry, with open hearth furnaces, a reversing mill, and many other appliances.
"It must not be supposed, because we find it necessary to practise irrigation in Colorado, that we therefore never have any rains," observed a Coloradoan; "on the contrary, the rains of spring are usually of such abundance as to make the ground in fine condition for ploughing and putting in crops, and we seldom find it necessary to apply water to germinate any kind of seed; only once, in thirteen years' experience at Greeley, were we compelled to resort to irrigation before crops of all kinds were well up and considerably advanced in growth. About the last of May, however, as regularly as the natural periods of summer, autumn, winter, and spring occur in the other states, never varying more than a week in time, these copious rains suddenly cease and give place to light and entirely inadequate local thunder-showers. Now is the accepted time, and all over cultivated Colorado, within a period of not more than two days, every flood-gate is opened and the life-giving current started to flowing on the rapidly parching grain. Corn will endure until later in the season, but all sowed crops must get one thorough application of water within two weeks or become severely injured for the want of it. Day and night the silent current flows on and on, among the fields of grain; not a drop of water nor a moment of time must run to waste until the first irrigation is completed."
In so exceptional a summer of drought and heat as was that of 1901 the advantages of irrigation stand out. Journeying through Kansas, the long day's ride across the state revealed continued devastation from the lack of rain. Corn fields looked almost as if a fire had passed over them, so shrivelled and stunted they were; but in Colorado on every hand there were greenness and luxuriance of vegetation and of crops. The result is simply that, with irrigation, man controls his climate and all the conditions of prosperity. Without it, he is at the mercy of the elements.
The Union Colony of Greeley was the first to introduce upland irrigation in Colorado. Of the method employed, the "Greeley Tribune" gave this description:
"Almost the first question asked by many persons on their first arrival in Colorado, when they see the irrigating ditches running along the sides of the bluffs high above the river, and back from it five, ten, or twenty miles, is, 'How do you get the water out of the river, and so high above it? It looks as if you made the water run uphill.' The answer is very simple. All the rivers of Colorado are mountain streams, and consequently have a fall of from ten to thirty feet to the mile, after they reach the plains. In the mountains, of course, the fall is often much greater. The plains also have a gradual slope eastward from the foothills, where the altitude is generally between six and seven thousand feet above sea level, while at the eastern boundary of the state it is only about three thousand feet. Take, for example, the canal generally known as Number Two, which waters the lands of the Greeley Colony. This canal is taken out of the Cache la Poudre River, about seventeen miles west of Greeley, and where the bed of the river is probably a hundred and sixty feet higher than it is at Greeley. The bed of the canal only has a fall of from three to three and a half feet to the mile; therefore it is easily seen that when that grade is continued for a number of miles, the line of the canal will run in a direction further and further from the river, and on much higher ground, so that the lands lying between the canal and the river are all 'covered by,' or on a lower level than, the water in the canal. In the process of irrigation this same plan must be followed, of bringing the water in on the higher side of the land to be irrigated, then the water will easily flow all over the ground."
In Weld County, of which Greeley is the county seat, irrigation was extended during 1905 to cover from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand acres of arid land never before under cultivation, and storage reservoirs increased in capacity. It is proposed to cut a tunnel through the Medicine Bow mountain range and to bring a large quantity of water through from the Western slope to irrigate an additional fifty thousand acres of prairie.
Within the past year there have been two potato starch factories started in successful operation in Greeley which are estimated to pay out annually one hundred thousand dollars for potatoes that have heretofore been practically a total loss to the farmers.