Sugar Beets and Irrigation: Turning the Desert Green

Congress authorized the Huntley Irrigation Project on April eighteenth, nineteen oh five, making it only the fifth project approved under the Reclamation Act of nineteen oh two. The goal was straightforward: divert water from the Yellowstone River through a system of canals to dry farmland downstream, turning arid benchlands into productive agricultural ground and drawing settlers to claim it.

The engineering was substantial. The completed system included a diversion dam, thirty-two miles of main canal, twenty-two miles of carriage canals, and more than two hundred miles of laterals and drains. President Theodore Roosevelt opened the project for homesteading in May of nineteen oh seven. More than five thousand people filed for land in the first month.

The land that the Huntley Project opened had until recently been part of the Crow Reservation. A cession negotiated in nineteen oh four transferred this particular strip to the federal government, creating the legal basis for the irrigation project and the homesteading that followed.

Sugar beets became the dominant crop of the Yellowstone Valley, and they required a refinery to be commercially viable. The sugar factory that eventually operated in Billings, acquired by Great Western Sugar in nineteen oh six, had a capacity of two thousand tons per day by nineteen nineteen and more than four thousand tons by the nineteen seventies. The towns of Huntley, Worden, Ballantine, and the community near Pompeys Pillar all grew up around this irrigation economy.

The valley that looks so green from the highway through here is not naturally that way. It is the result of a century of water management, political negotiation, and considerable physical labor, most of it performed by people who had moved here for exactly this opportunity.