Charles Eddy and the Irrigation Bet That Built a City
Near Carlsbad, New Mexico
Carlsbad sits on the west bank of the Pecos River in the Chihuahuan Desert of southeastern New Mexico, about thirty miles north of the Texas border. To look at it now, with its grid of streets and green irrigated fields, is to see the result of a bet made in the eighteen eighties by a cattle rancher named Charles Eddy who believed that the desert here could be made to bloom.
Eddy arrived in the Pecos valley as a partner in a livestock company called Eddy-Bissell, which ran cattle on the broad flat range along the river. What Eddy noticed was water. The Pecos ran consistently, and the land on either side of it was flat enough to irrigate. In eighteen eighty-eight, Eddy and his partners began cutting a diversion canal from the river, and the first irrigated fields went in that same year. On September fifteenth, eighteen eighty-eight, the town of Eddy was christened, taking the founder's name.
The irrigation works brought settlers who would not have come otherwise. Farmers planted alfalfa, grain, fruit trees, and vegetables on formerly dry land. The Eddy townsite grew into a real community, with stores, schools, a newspaper, and a church. When the Pecos Valley Railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-one, connecting the settlement to the wider world, its growth accelerated further.
In eighteen ninety-nine, the town voted to change its name. Charles Eddy had discovered that the local mineral springs had chemical properties similar to those of the famous European spa at Karlsbad, in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. The Bohemian spa was one of the most fashionable resort destinations in the world at that time, and Eddy believed that naming his town after it would attract health tourists and investors. The community agreed. Eddy became Carlsbad.
The gamble on irrigation, the gamble on mineral springs, the gamble on a European name for a desert town in New Mexico. Carlsbad is the product of a series of calculated bets, most of which paid off in ways that the people making them did not entirely anticipate.
