Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by
those who fostered the irrigation and dryfarming booms which made
the last phase of exploitation of the old range. A vast amount of
disaster was worked by the failure of number less irrigation
companies, each of them offering lands to the settlers through
the medium of most alluring advertising. In almost every case the
engineers underestimated the cost of getting water on the land.
Very often the amount of water available was not sufficient to
irrigate the land which had been sold to settlers. In countless
cases the district irrigation bonds-which were offered broadcast
by Eastern banks to their small investors--were hardly worth the
paper on which they were written. One after another these wildcat
irrigation schemes, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples,
pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa,
pecans, eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to
the wall. Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the
collapse of these overblown enterprises. The recovery was slow,
though usually the result of that recovery was a far healthier
and more stable condition of society.
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