From the summit of Scotts Bluff the valley below looks like farm country anywhere, squares of corn, beets, beans and alfalfa running down to the river. It is not. Scottsbluff averages about fifteen and a half inches of rain a year, and the crops below the bluff are watered from reservoirs in Wyoming, through canals that run a hundred miles and more. In the summer of 2019 the valley learned how much rests on them.
The farmers' ditches
Irrigation here started small. In 1886 a settler near Gering ran a furrow a mile and a half from Winters Creek to a parched millet field. The next year local men formed the Farmers' Canal Company, dug about ten miles of ditch by October 1890, and failed for want of money. The Minatare Irrigation Company and other local cooperatives did better, and the Mitchell section of the Mitchell-Gering Canal was dug in 1890 and 1891 mostly by the farmers it would water. By 1889 Scotts Bluff County had seventy irrigators, more than any county in Nebraska. The long drought of the 1890s finished off the old promise that rain would follow the plow, and in 1895 the state let irrigation districts assess land to pay for canals.
Federal water
Big water took big money, and after 1902 it came from Washington. The new Reclamation Service surveyed the North Platte, the Interior Department approved a project in 1903, and in 1905 work began on Pathfinder Dam, about 47 miles southwest of Casper, and on a canal to carry its water east. Whalen Diversion Dam, below Guernsey, splits the river between two canals. The Interstate Canal, built from 1905 to 1915, runs about 95 miles along the north side to a chain of storage lakes, Lake Alice, Winters Creek Lake and Lake Minatare, that feed the north-bank canals. The south-side canal, built from 1915 to 1924, runs about 129 miles and passes through three tunnels.
The railroad towns and the farms followed the water. A Burlington subsidiary founded Scottsbluff in 1899. In 1910 Great Western Sugar bought the beet factory at Ames, near Fremont, moved it to Scottsbluff, and contracted 12,000 acres of beets in its first season. Scotts Bluff County went from 421 farms in 1900 to 1,391 in 1920, and by 1926 the valley was planting about 70,000 acres of beets.
July 2019
On July 17, 2019, a tunnel on that south-side canal, 2,200 feet long and dug in 1917, partly collapsed a mile and a half south of Fort Laramie, and the canal beside it washed out. It carried water for the Goshen district in Wyoming and the Gering-Fort Laramie Irrigation District in Nebraska. About 107,000 acres lost their supply in the middle of the growing season, some 55,000 of them in Nebraska, and both states declared emergencies. Water ran again on August 28, after about six weeks.
What a driver sees from the bluff is engineering more than a century old, with its working parts in another state. The valley's beet growers, planting 43,000 to 60,000 acres a year, still depend on it.