One after another these wildcat irrigation schemes, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples, pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa, pecans, eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to the wall.
Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the collapse of these overblown enterprises.

The recovery was slow, though usually the result of that recovery was a far healthier and more stable condition of society.
This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness.

It was much like the spawning rush of the salmon from the sea.

Many perish.

A few survive.
Certainly there never was more cruel injustice done than that to the sober-minded Eastern farmers, some of them young men in search of cheaper homes, who sold out all they had in the East and went out to the dry country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more hazardous occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and always risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with irrigating waters.
Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these successive and startling innovations.