| Show the old settler albert R lyman my dear san Jua ners if san juan county had now as many people as it had years ago it would be in point of numbers eligible for statehood in area the county is more than half as great as new jersey and four times as extensive as the grand duchy of luxemburg of the benelux union people who have never been interested to consider the empire of ancient san juan may pass this statehood notion over as just a gust of hot air they see the little area in which we live and look away at the wide open spaces without guessing how far they reach and what they have been let them start at the junction of the two big rivers and explore to the northeast north east more than a hundred miles laboring through canyons across mesas over timbered mountains and in sight of endless ruins in the cliffs and on the prairie and if they are not too much occupied i in n whimpering about the weariness entailed by their journey they will be deeply impressed by the evidences of an ancient A U S government bulletin quotes the statement without question san juan county is the best dry farming county in the state these people who lived here years ago were dry farmers they had no irrigation system and they had only their peculiar primitive wooden implements m clements ts to be operated by force of arm yet they could and did for a long time produce from this soil enough for their big population when we began as settlers here in blanding in 1905 the annual rainfall rain fall was from nineteen to twenty one inches and it was easily possible to raise both grain and garden vegetables melons squash tomatoes peas pieplant and other things grew successfully without a ditch ever being made to them the I 1 decrease in rainfall in the next live five years made a discouraging difference in the yield the ancient farmers of san juan had no plows no tractors not even any horses nor any power other than their brawney arms with which to work the soil yet it was from this soil right here that they had to dig their food or starve and they bent to the task with wa all faith and diligence for there was no system of transportation to bring it in from the outside the ambition of every farmer and that meant almost every man was Z to retain on hist gisland his land every drop of water that fell on it to this end they made dams across the draws and terraces along the hillsides hill sides the earth was their nursing mother to which they th ey clung for dear life and left their beloved country only when in 1260 the long drouth drove them off to the southeast south east it is not to be assumed that they lived only where we find them ruins of their stone dwellings although stone dwellings are to be found by the thou sands even in remote corners of what is now lonely wilderness it was quite beyond their strength to carry stone or to find stone for their dwells far from gulches or ledges most of their prairie homes were built of logs doubled up with mud and have disappeared all but the few stones which were often stood on edge around the found foundation atio n in their last crises many of these houses were burned converting the dry mud into a kind of brick consistency which is often plowed up now on the level prairie with the imprint of the logs around which it was plastered the fact that this primitive people subsisted here for such a long time with their crude hand implements proves that men of the present day d ay with their splendid devices can live here in comfort and in much greater numbers even though we have no ambition to carry the honor and carry the responsibility of a separate state |
