September 2024, Issue #65
Catching Up
Did summer get away from you? Fall can be a good time to get caught up, between the vacation and holiday seasons.
Over the summer in the Water Resources Archive, we were busy with outreach, reference questions, and digitization projects. Read about some of these outcomes below. We also announce our newest Water Scholar and highlight some unexpected items found in our collections.
We feature literary history in our water puzzler, and we encourage readers to become supporters.
Read on to get caught up on some Colorado water history…
– Patty Rettig, Archivist, Water Resources Archive
Water Scholar 2024
This year’s Water Scholar is Ben Stanley, an assistant professor of environmental humanities in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. They will be travelling to Fort Collins this fall to use six collections in the Water Resources Archive for their project comparing citizen’s drought documentation in the American West and South Africa’s Western Cape. Professor Stanley intends for the research to result in a scholarly article examining the cultural narratives of drought.
The Water Resources Archive annually offers the Water Scholar Award, funded through the support of generous donors. Review the current Water Scholar Award criteria, and watch for the 2025 update in the coming months. The annual application deadline is January 31.
Watch Out for Scams!
The Water Resources Archive has the standard types of historical documents—meeting minutes, engineering reports, ditch maps. But many unexpected items grab our attention, especially as we work on digitization projects. Several documents reveal questionable business offerings of the past. You decide if they were scams:
- 1870 phrenological chart of Martha Bennett, who would eventually become the mother of Delph Carpenter, water attorney. Such studies examined bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.
- “List of Colorado Irrigated Lands along the Arkansas Valley,” being a promotional pamphlet from about 1911 issued by the Payne Investment Company of Omaha. The “colonization agents” used enthusiastic language to sell land “with a permanent water supply.”
- A brochure from about 1926, from a company based in Liverpool, promoting the Mansfield Patent Automatic Water Finder. It promised that the apparatus “has solved the problem” of locating “subterraneous streams.”
Explore our ever-expanding digital offerings on your own by searching or browsing our online database.
Water Puzzler
Fifty years ago this fall, a best-selling novel focused on Colorado swept the nation. This 900-page tome with a single, stately word as the title covered the area’s development, starting in the time of the dinosaurs. Its author, originally from Pennsylvania, had come to the Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado, which named their library for him and which holds his archives) in 1936, staying just a few years. Yet the idea of writing a western novel stayed with him even as he won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific.
Pursuing it in the early 1970s, the writer researched his Colorado novel, which features the South Platte River as a geographical and thematic throughline, with local water experts, including E. V. Richardson, a CSU engineering professor, and Harvey Johnson, the former mayor of Fort Collins. Both men’s collections are in the Water Resources Archive and contain information about assisting the author (pictured above, at right, listening to Johnson explain the Grand Ditch onsite in July 1973).
Who was this author and what was the title of his Colorado novel?
Listen Up
Have you heard? The Water Resources Archive has been included in a podcast and a radio story in recent months. Give them a listen (or at least check out the photos—the one above being from the podcast interview):
- Colorado State University’s The Audit podcast, “The Story of Water” (17 minutes)
- KUNC, “These three words from 1922 are at the heart of the latest Colorado River clash” (4 minutes)
Become a Supporter
Thank you for appreciating Colorado water history and the efforts of the Water Resources Archive! Please consider becoming a supporter. You can do so in several ways:
- Forward this e-newsletter to a colleague and encourage them to sign up.
- Consider whether you, a colleague, or a relative have documents that are historically important to Colorado’s water story and contact us about discussing them as a potential addition.
- Make a monetary contribution to one of our existing funds (select Water Resources Archive from the dropdown menu), or contact Libraries Associate Director of Development Thea Rounsaville about other ways to give.
We sincerely thank all of our supporters!
Puzzler answer:
James Michener, Centennial
See Richardson’s Michener photos online.
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This newsletter is created by Patty Rettig.
Designed by Demi Connelley
