Water and the Valley: Federal Reclamation in the Panhandle
Near Scottsbluff, Nebraska
The green fields visible throughout this valley exist because of water imported from Wyoming. The North Platte River runs low or nearly dry in summer without the snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains far to the west. When the first settlers arrived in the eighteen eighties, they quickly understood that rainfall alone would not sustain farming here.
Small ditches dug in the valley in the eighteen eighties were the beginning. Private irrigation schemes followed but frequently failed without reliable storage. After Congress passed the federal Reclamation Act in nineteen-oh-two, the new Reclamation Service studied the North Platte Valley and authorized the North Platte Project in nineteen-oh-three.
Reservoirs, canals, and diversion structures built over the next decades created an irrigated agriculture system that turned a semi-arid grassland into productive farmland, the foundation of everything the Panhandle economy became.
