Tulare Township

C??-Irrigation

The familiar rural landscape of today’s Tulare Township is the artificial creation of irrigation. The modern eye—accustomed to the regularity of shaded orchards and the linear furrowed fields of row crops—finds it difficult to imagine the countryside before irrigation, much less the arid, barren grassland that existed until the 1860s. One has a tendency to see this landscape as eternal. But the current rural scene is not yet a century old.

Although Tulare Township residents had long recognized the need for irrigation, irrigation on a mass scale came late to the district. The reasons for the delay—politics, geography, technology, and economics—tell, in microcosm, the San Joaquín Valley irrigation story.

It did not take long for California’s small farmers to realize that dry farming, which depended on winter and spring rains, was not trustworthy. The first two decades of California’s Wheat Bonanza era—the 1860s and 1870s—saw wide variation in crop yields as the state alternated between drought and “normal rainfall” years. While the large bonanza ranchers could survive the droughts of 1863–1865, 1870–1871, and 1873–1875, the small ranchers often failed. The Diablo Range’s “rain shadow” worsened the challenges for West Side grangers; even “below normal” rainfall elsewhere could seriously jeopardize the West Side harvest.

By 1870, the need for extensive irrigation in the San Joaquín Valley was clear, but how should Californians carry out the task?

The earliest Northern California tries at large-scale irrigation were entrepreneurial ventures. Investors fashioned commercial irrigation companies that owned the canal system but not the irrigated lands. In the 1870s, land speculators regularly used this arrangement to st...

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... to approve the bond sale. Although some accused Crittenden of defecting to the cattle interests, his reluctance may have reflected the general loss of enthusiasm by West Side farmers for irrigation in the late-1870s.

The drought of the 1870s had ended, and the wet years brought good West Side harvests. It no longer felt urgent to spend money to avert crop failures. Besides, some farmers believed the district could not sell its bonds without state backing. The second Westside authorization act had not included such a provision after Bay Area interests had objected. As later experience would prove, the lack of state backing often placed a serious handicap on marketing irrigation securities.

By 1880, the West Side Irrigation District, authorized but never implemented, had collapsed. Tulare Township would wait another thirty-five years for large-scale irrigation.