Sidon Canal

The panel says the canal was finished in less than two years; water reached its end on April 23, 1904, four years after Woodruff held the plow for the first furrow on May 28, 1900. What carried the colony through those years was a railroad. The Burlington's chief engineer let the colonists grade more than twenty miles of its line toward Cody, a contract one account puts at $80,000, and half of each railroad man's pay went to the colony for canal stock, which in turn paid the canal crews half in cash.

What the plaque says

Sidon Canal Following Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley beginning in 1847, church leaders envisioned colonization of the entire inter-mountain region. In following decades, Mormons emigrated from Utah into Idaho, Arizona and Wyoming. Seeking to improve their economic status and following Mormon pioneering tradition, several hundred people in 1900 emigrated from Utah and Idaho to Wyoming's Big Horn Basin where they built a canal and a community. Under the Carey Act of 1894 states were encouraged to sell arable public land cheaply following reclamation. But private reclamation projects required capital, and some were aborted as investors lost faith. Unlike other privately-financed projects, the Sidon Canal was built without a large amount of capital. Emigrants were organized into the Big Horn Colonization Company, an irrigation cooperative which offered company shares in return for labor. Upon arriving in the Basin workers plunged into canal construction, excavating with horse-drawn plows and slip scrapers. Near this point work was blocked by a sandstone boulder known as "Prayer Rock." According to legend, prayer and divine intervention caused the rock to split, allowing construction to continue and strengthening the emigrant faith in the canal project. The 37-mile long canal was completed in less than two years. It still transports water from a headgate on the Shoshone River near the Big Horn-Park County line to a land segregation of approximately 20,000 acres. Its successful completion serves as an outstanding example of the cooperative effort and spirit of determination exhibited by Mormon pioneers in the American West.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart Mountain Interpretive Center — 19 mi
  The incarcerated cleared and watered the land; when the camp closed it went to veterans to homestead, and the barracks sold for a dollar each.

More markers nearby

• The Mormon Colonists — 8.0 mi
• Sheep Mountain — 18 mi
• Shortcut to the Goldfields — 22 mi
• McCullough Peaks Wild Horses — 22 mi