Irrigation - The San Juan Pioneers Greatest Challenge

Irrigation - The San Juan Pioneers Greatest Challenge. . The success of the pioneers' settlements along the San Juan River was contingent upon irrigating the parched land. Irrigating with water from the San Juan River, which was prone to frequent fluctuations ranging from nearly no water flow to raging torrents that destroyed irrigation canals, water wheels, and even towns, earned the river the nickname of the "Devil's Ditch.", The Bluff Ditch , Moving water from the San Juan River to the higher elevation of the farm fields of Bluff required the construction of a canal between Bluff and a location on the San Juan River far upstream from Bluff. This canal, which was simply called the Bluff "ditch," was a major engineering and labor intensive feat. The Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers commonly said that irrigating with water from the San Juan River became their greatest challenge, even exceeding the hardships of their journey to Bluff., The day following their arrival in Bluff, every able bodied man immediately went to work on the ditch. When completed, the ditch's banks would frequently break. Dredging sediment from the ditch was a never ending task, and river currents constantly washed the head of the ditch away., At the end of their first summer, the ditch was considered a complete failure. "...Bluff ditch little better than no ditch at all." Albert R. Lyman, San Juan History, 1879-1917., Determined to not give up, all of the men in Bluff labored throughout the fall and winter of 1881-1882 on a longer, more substantial ditch., Their final ditch was five miles long, six to ten feet wide, with banks up to six feet high., Moving water into the head of the ditch without the river currents destroying it proved to be particularly difficult. A variety of approaches was tried to strengthen the head of the ditch and divert river water into it. On their second ditch, this was accomplished by building 100 connecting log cabin-like structures that extended far into the river. The log structures were filled with rocks. This structure was referred to as cribbing. Albert Lyman recorded that this cribbing required thousands of cottonwood logs, possibly more than were ever used for log cabins in Bluff., Year after year, every available man-hour went into the ditch, and year after year, river currents would negate most of their efforts., Water Wheels , At other San Juan pioneer settlements, water wheels were constructed to lift the river water into smaller scale ditches for individual farms. A water wheel for the Bluff ditch was not possible due to the volume of water required to fill a canal five miles long and meet the water needs of all of the farmers in Bluff. The use of smaller scale irrigation ditches with water wheels for individual farms at Bluff was not possible because there was no sandstone base along the river to anchor water wheels., The water wheels that were utilized at the other settlements along the San Juan River were patterned after the Noria water wheel design which dates back to 300 B.C. Its design utilizes water power to lift water to a higher elevation. The Noria water wheel consists of buckets secured to a wheel which fill with water on the undershot rotation of the wheel. Water current against the water wheel paddles rotates the wheel. When the buckets reach the top arc of the wheel, the buckets empty into a flume which carries the water to an irrigation ditch., The largest water wheel on the San Juan River was located at Montezuma Fort, 18 miles east of Bluff. Built by William Hyde, the wheel was 16 feet in diameter and 12 feet wide. It could lift 28,000 gallons into its flume per hour. There were a total of ten known water wheels that were put into operation., Devastating Floods , In 1884, four years after the pioneers arrival in the area, major river flooding destroyed every water wheel on the San Juan River and washed away major portions of the Bluff ditch. This ended the use of water wheels, but once again the Bluff ditch was rebuilt. However, the pioneers determined that irrigating with the San Juan River was impractical for a major settlement, and a search for land with better irrigation options eventually resulted in the towns of Blanding and Monticello. The Bluff ditch continued to be used well into the 1940s by the few farmers who remained at Bluff., Captions , (Photo #1) Remnant of the Bluff Ditch east of Bluff courtesy of Kay Shumway , (Photo #2) Water wheel on the Green River John Jarvie Historic Site