Carlsbad Irrigation District

In retrospect, the history of the Pecos Valley's various private irrigation companies is both tenuous and disappointing, a story of huge sums of money largely wasted on false expectations and inadequate technologies. During the fifteen years that corporate reclamation was attempted on the lower Pecos, an investment of well over two million dollars failed to produce an adequate, functional irrigation network. Instead, Company engineers produced an inefficient, haphazard system, as unable to provide a consistent water supply as it was to withstand the eccentricities of the Pecos River. Much of the blame for the private reclamation system's failure can be traced to the lack of proven irrigation technologies available to Irrigation Company engineers. Francis Tracy's analysis of the Irrigation Company as "real pioneering" was both accurate and perceptive — the Pecos Valley's promoters were undertaking reclamation work at a scale and level of complexity hitherto nearly unknown in the American west. While this was undeniably discouraging and frustrating to the system's nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, it makes the various Pecos irrigation companies highly significant as a case study of early, large scale western reclamation. Contemporary professional observers considered both Avalon and McMillan Dams to "most boldly exemplify" the rockfill dam technology as practiced during the late nineteenth century. Such dams, however, had to be constructed properly and later events indicated that Avalon was not. This provided the potential for a sudden, powerful flood to impregnate Avalon's earthfill with water, causing the earthfill to settle and exposing the dam's loose rock to the force of the water. This could, in turn, lead to the dam's failure. Unfortunately for the Pecos Valley's residents, the unpredictable Pecos River demonstrated just such a scenario in both 1893 and 1904. Other aspects of the system's construction also reflected incorrect design based on uninformed judgements or inadequate technology, including the roughly-built canal network and the vulnerable, ephemeral wooden Pecos River Flume. These facilities, in common with the dams themselves, reflected the philosophies of current reclamation design, but contained inadequacies that required correction before the system could fill even a portion of its intended potential. Finally, the grandiose plans of Eddy, Hagerman, and the others were also unfulfilled due to a basic misunderstanding of the land itself. Large-scale irrigation was introduced to the Pecos Valley without a clear understanding of what the land was capable of growing, how local crops could best be managed, and the amount of return these crops could generate. Unrealistic expectations of the Valley's agricultural productivity not only left many farmers disappointed, but diminished the revenue of the irrigation companies. As with the reclamation system's engineering, the farmers' eventual success was dependent on refining and rationalizing local agricultural methods and technologies. As a whole, then, while corporate irrigation in the Pecos Valley was ultimately unsuccessful, the experiences of the Valley's entrepreneurs served as a proving ground for the embryonic field of reclamation engineering. As the twentieth century began, this field was poised to initiate a rapid period of expansion and development, and the technologies employed in the Pecos Valley would continue to evolve. Now, however, the genesis for technological advancement was to come from the federal government rather than the private developer. Even so, the Pecos Valley was once again destined to be a showplace for these changes, as the first Reclamation Service staffers arrived in Carlsbad in 1904. The slow, painful evolution of the Carlsbad Project under Bureau of Reclamation tutelage mirrors, in many ways, the advancing maturation of American reclamation technology and philosophy. Reclamation Service efforts to reconstruct Avalon in 1906 and 1907, combined with its later improvements to the dam, are today highly representative of the increasing sophistication of early twentieth-century reclamation engineering. Avalon and McMillan Dams remain especially significant for their rockfill, "composite" design, and Avalon's use of an impervious corewall is also noteworthy. Avalon and McMillan were among the largest such turn-of-the century dams in terms of length and height, and were among the first important rockfill dams with an earthfill facing in the United States. Less-prominent features of the Carlsbad Project's physical plant also represent the early technological evolution of the Bureau of Reclamation. The most noteworthy of these are Avalon Dam's 1911 cylinder gates, an early implementation of a design form which saw later use in the intake towers of Hoover Dam. The Avalon project apparently marked the earliest use of the cylinder gate design in a major dam spillway. In addition to the Carlsbad Project's physical landmarks, its operational history also typifies the evolution of public-sponsored reclamation in the American West. The Project's long-standing attempt to maintain fiscal responsibility without unduly burdening Project farmers replicates the primary concern of most Reclamation Service projects, and Carlsbad's relative success in achieving such a financial balance made the Project a source of federal pride. Carlsbad is also nationally representative in its long-discussed, but slowly implemented, transition from federal to local control. Still, a number of factors make the Carlsbad Project historically unique. While the Reclamation Service imposed many of its contemporary designs on the project, these features were added to an irrigation system of private origin and largely of nineteenth-century construction. This resulted in a physical plant displaying true dichotomies of design and philosophy, exhibiting both private and public design philosophies, as well as both nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineering techniques. While the Pecos Valley was not alone in possessing a privately constructed irrigation system that was later acquired by the federal government, the relatively massive size of the private system was unusual among such projects. Although the federal government's construction and rehabilitation investments at Carlsbad were substantial, during the Reclamation Service's first years the Project largely remained a private, nineteenth-century system imbued with the trappings of federal funding and control. Although this characterization gradually faded with each government improvement project, the dichotomy remains sharply visible today.