C??-IrrigationThe familiar rural landscape of present-day Tulare Township is the artificial creation of irrigation. The modern eye, accustomed to the regularity of shaded orchards and linear, crisscrossed fields of row crops, finds it difficult to imagine the countryside before irrigation, much less the arid and barren meadows that existed until the 1860s. We tend to consider this landscape as eternal. But the current rural scene is not yet a century old. Although the people of Tulare Township have long recognized the need for irrigation, large-scale irrigation came late to the district. The reasons for this delay – political, geographic, technological and economic – tell, in microcosm, the story of irrigation in the San Joaquín Valley. It didn't take long for California's small farmers to realize that dry farming, which depended on winter and spring rains, could not be trusted. The first two decades of California's Wheat Bonanza era—the 1860s and 1870s—saw wide variations in crop yields as the state alternated between years of drought and years of "normal precipitation." While large ranchers were able to survive the droughts of 1863-1865, 1870-1871, and 1873-1875, small ranchers often failed. The Diablo Range's "rain shadow" has compounded challenges for West Side Grangers; even “below normal” rainfall elsewhere could seriously jeopardize West Side crops. By 1870, the need for extensive irrigation in the San Joaquín Valley was obvious, but how should Californians carry out this task? Northern California's first attempts at large-scale irrigation were entrepreneurial. Investors created commercial irrigation companies that owned the canal system but not the irrigated land. In the 1870s, land speculators regularly used this arrangement to purchase paper......to approve the sale of bonds. Although some have accused Crittenden of defecting to cattle interests, his reluctance may have reflected West Side farmers' general loss of enthusiasm for irrigation in the late 1870s. The drought of the 1870s was ended and the wet years brought good harvests to the West Side. . It no longer seemed urgent to spend money to avoid crop failures. Additionally, some farmers believed the district could not sell its bonds without state support. Westside's second authorizing bill did not include such a provision after Bay Area interests opposed it. As experience would later prove, the lack of state support often constituted a serious handicap for the marketing of irrigation titles. By 1880, the West Side Irrigation District, authorized but never implemented, had collapsed. Tulare Township would wait another thirty-five years for large-scale irrigation.