Pre-irrigation was hard life
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Editor,
We are the inheritors of both a rich cultural heritage and some pretty amazing feats performed by our ancestors, here in the Flathead, Mission and Bitterroot valleys. Has anyone really looked at the pictures that adorn the walls of the Missoula airport and noticed the lack of vegetation prior to the irrigation projects of the early 1900’s? This part of the world was a desert - simply a seed buried under the snows of winter and hard, dry summers waiting for the right conditions to grow and reproduce.
Seems to me we’ve forgotten how much work and foresight it took to create these lush valleys. The words, “we scratched out a living from the land,” were commonplace back then — pre-irrigation. If you didn’t grow it next to a somewhat seasonal river or creek, you didn’t grow it.
My favorite picture is the one of an Indian woman, holding the reins of the photographer’s horse, standing in a field of mud next to a teepee with mud and dirt one-third of the way up its side. The mud was not the result of heavy traffic use; there was no traffic, there were no crops, there was no lush agriculture; there was dirt and rocks and brush and some wild roots and berries. There was famine, disease and malnourishment. There was life, hard life.
That all changed, for better or worse. There’s no going back to those “wonderful” times of hardship and pain. We inherited electrical power, irrigation projects that created reservoir systems that support flowing rivers, irrigable land for agriculture and the abundance we see around us.
Do you honestly believe that it will remain this good after those who wish to control it are done? This place is the headwaters; everyone else is “downstream.”
Michael Gale
Ronan
