Those intriguing fountains springing up beside the highway and the steady mist coming from center-pivots as they irrigate 160-acre or larger sections of the countryside are the hallmark of summer in Fremont County. Before their arrival, the land was identical to the barren sagebrush plains between Shoshoni and Casper.
The miracle of irrigation was well known across the globe, and the need for it was apparent after many small droughts, leading to the major droughts of the 1930s and 1950s in the Great Plains.
The Riverton area had irrigation water first, with the Riverton Ditch Company and the Leclair Ditch Company beginning operation during the failed, scandal-ridden period of the Wyoming Central Irrigation Company. Vast areas of farmland, 120,000 acres in all, waited for the right combination of engineering and public support to arrive and literally make the desert bloom.
Wyoming Republican Governor Bryant B Brooks was in the pocket of the Wyoming Central Irrigation Company and refused petitions from homesteaders who were cheated by the company and denied irrigation water. Senators Clarence Clark and Francis E. Warren didn’t get involved in water disputes, considering them state issues. Senator Warren was perhaps the most revered Wyomingite to ever serve in the “Big House” and was largely exempt from public outrage. Clark was not.
In 1916 he lost to Democrat John B. Kendrick.
The state was divided almost equally between Republicans and Democrats in the early days of the 20th century. In 1913, a riot erupted on the floor of the state house with representatives throwing punches in an old-style barroom brawl over the selection of the Speaker of the House.
Martin Pratt, a representative from Powell, switched from Republican to Democrat to break the tie. When he took the position, he switched back to Republican, creating another furor.
It’s an old story that while the politicians play, the people suffer, and that was the case with the promised water that held the key to the hopes of hundreds of homesteaders west of Riverton in the present-day locales of Pavillion, Morton, North Portal, Midvale and Kinnear.
Help came with the election of three consecutive Democratic governors beginning with Joseph Carey in 1911, followed by John Kendrick before he became a U.S. Senator and finally Frank Houx who served out the remainder of Kendrick’s term.
Kendrick was especially effective in keeping the project afloat. A farmer from Laramie County, he knew the value of water to the arid state and did his best to help his fellow farmers and ranchers.
These three Democrats sided with the farmers and were open to petitions to the United States Bureau of Reclamation for assistance in getting the water flowing into the fields of central Fremont County.
The Riverton Project, as it was known by the Bureau of Reclamation, began with a request for funding by Republican Representative Frank Mondell.
Mondell was able to get small appropriations in 1916 and 1917 for preliminary survey work on the project. The surveys were promising and, $3,650,000 was appropriated for the construction of the “Riverton Project,” with the beginning and ending dates for the construction set from July 1, 1918, to June 30, 1926.
Construction began in the summer of 1918.
The three major projects were a dam on the outflow of Bull Lake (for capture of spring runoff, and upstream storage for late summer water), canals to carry the water through the project, and most importantly, a diversion of the Wind River to create Pilot Butte Reservoir.
Bull Lake was a natural lake, with a narrow outflow perfect for a dam. The Bull Lake Dam raised the level of the lake 50 feet increasing storage capacity to 115,000-acre feet of water.
The first canal to be dug was also the most challenging. A 10-mile-long canal had to be dug below the Wind River as it turned to the south after a largely easterly run from Dubois. While one crew dug the canal through sandstone, shale, and gravel, then lined it with concrete, another crew excavated the depression that would become Pilot Butte Reservoir.
As crews excavated to the east, the imposing structure of Diversion Dam began to take shape on the Wind River.
The Wind River was a classic wild, western waterway, prone to heavy flooding one year, and just a trickle of water the next in Wyoming’s unpredictable climate. It was used to irrigate a few small fields to the south of the river, but no dams impeded its flow, so the irrigation was erratic at best.
It was also used by the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company to transport railroad ties from the Dunoir and Warm Springs area to the Riverton treatment plant each summer begging in 1914. Engineers had to account for the tie drives when they designed Diversion Dam.
Diversion Dam is just a huge weir, diverting water as any farmer knows by placing a dam in a ditch. This weir is a diversion 650 feet long with an additional 1,600-foot-long dike to the south. Construction began in August 1921 and was completed in May 1923. The project took 17,000 cubic yards of concrete to complete.
Further improvements came in 1924, when the Wyoming Highway Department built a bridge across the dam.
Water drops 90 feet from Diversion Dam to the influx of Pilot Butte Reservoir, the head pressure of that falling water, in a canal 65 feet wide and 10 feet deep delivers water at 2,200 cubic feet per second. That flow was harnessed with a hydroelectric powerplant at Pilot Butte that generated electricity from 1,100 horsepower turbines beginning in January 1925.
Electricity was sorely needed across Fremont County with the closing of Boysen Dam in 1923 after a disastrous flood breached the dam and flooded the Chicago Burlington and Quincy tracks through the Wind River Canyon.
Dubois had power from a hydroelectric plant on Warm Springs, Lander from a similar plant on the Middle Popo Agie at the Sinks, and Riverton and Hudson operated diesel and coal-powered electric plants, but none reached the potential of Pilot Butte.
Pavillion was the site beginning in 1919 for construction camps. In September 1919, two large draglines began excavating the main canals for the project. The first canal from Pilot Butte to Pavillion was 16.5 miles long and required excavating 2,100,000 cubic yards of dirt.
Laterals had to be cut from the main canal, and the first, serving 20,000 acres, required 200,000 cubic yards to be removed by government excavators. The remaining 80,000+ acres were fed by laterals dug by private contractors totaling 400,000 cubic yards of material.
The laterals were completed by September 1926.
Water reached Pavillion in July 1925.
The original survey of the area was carefully mapped on a scale of one inch to 400 feet. These detailed contour maps allowed engineers to use gravity flow to distribute water where it was seemingly impossible to flow.
The altitude of the land in the Riverton Project varied from 5560 to 4700 feet. The annual rainfall of the area is less than eight inches, including snow melt, and farming would not be possible without the irrigation system.
Much of the area was homesteads established in 1906 when the ceded portion of the Shoshone Reservation was opened via the McLaughlin Agreement. Farmers with homesteads owned their land outright after five years if they met the specifications of the Homestead Act.
Before the arrival of water, these 160-acre parcels were valued at less than $10 per acre. Once water flowed into the ditches, the land value jumped to over $40 per acre.
The first oat harvest came in 1925 on 90 acres of land irrigated near Morton, adjacent to Pilot Butte. By the 1926 harvest, agriculture was booming on the virgin soil wherever the water reached.
Within three years of the project’s completion, farmers were harvesting record numbers of potatoes, onions, turnips, beans, oats, and barley. Sugar beets came soon after, with pinto and Great Northern beans as well.
Alfalfa was established, and corn began being rotated with alfalfa to use and restore nitrogen in the soil. Chickens and turkeys were once widespread across the irrigation area, and with the arrival of electricity, dairy farming boomed. Riverton had two creameries to handle all the milk, along with creameries in Hudson and Lander.
Fremont County alfalfa is considered the best in the United States, and its production grew as hay was shipped via the Chicago North Western from depots in Riverton, Shoshoni, Arapaho, Hudson, and Lander to dairy farms and race tracks back east.
Pavillion called for an extension of the rail line from Shoshoni, but the Chicago North Western wasn’t interested. Highways were improved and the Yellowstone Highway was rebuilt, making the route to Dubois and on to Yellowstone much easier with sections of asphalt and well-maintained gravel.
Beekeepers took note of all the purple alfalfa blossoms, and Fremont County became the state’s major honey producer.
The project continued to grow with an expansion east of Pavillion near Midvale, serviced by a tunnel through a rise in the land that allowed water to flow into the adjoining valley. Tunnel Hill Road off the Missouri Valley Highway parallels this construction.
The Midvale Irrigation District now manages the entire “Riverton Project” with a closely monitored, well-organized system of water delivery.
The Midvale Irrigation District was created in January 1921, during a time of great expectations but few results.
The first units open for irrigation came on March 3, 1926, when 20 farms of between 35 and 108 acres received water.
It was estimated that 60 percent of the land awaiting water had been homesteaded 20 years before, and the bulk of the remaining land was unoccupied and had no homestead claim.
Homesteading was allowed to World War I veterans before July 1, 1926, but no one else could place a claim.
After that, homesteading opened again with provisions. The prospective homesteader had to have $2000 in cash, and at least two years’ experience in farming. If a homesteader could prove $2000 in value in livestock and equipment, that worked as well.
The original fee for water was a dollar per acre-foot for the first two acre-feet used; after that, it was 50 cents per acre-foot.
Very few people filed a homestead claim.
In October, the Republican administration of President Calvin Coolidge rejected reclamation projects across the west, ending funding and attempting to shut down already established projects like Riverton and another near Deaver in Big Horn County. But the projects thrived after construction was completed and later, in the 1950s, wiser political leaders saw the benefits that irrigation created in the arid west.
Despite the lack of interest, agriculture gradually grew as established farmers had their children or relatives file claims on vacant, irrigable land adjacent to their operations.
Some news outlets held hope for the future despite the actions of the Coolidge administration.
A hopeful story from the Fremont County Independent published in 1928 showed this dream.
“If time lasts, the day is not so far distant when the Pavillion Valley will be raising feed for vast flocks of turkeys and other poultry with the golden stream of butterfat flowing from a herd of dairy cows kept on every unit.”
Others didn’t support reclamation efforts at all.
The turkeys didn’t last, and the once-thriving dairy industry in Fremont County is just a memory, but beets, alfalfa, beans, corn, oats, and barely continue to thrive.
In recent years, they’ve added pressurized water to areas north and east of Midvale that significantly lowers the costs of pumping water to run center pivot and wheel row irrigation systems.
Midvale remains a prime example of government, both state and federal working with individuals for the betterment of all.