Why is that canal in Boise named New York? Here’s how Idaho’s irrigation began

In East Boise, on the outskirts of the ever-sprawling city, a waterway splits from the Boise River and travels southwest, beside busy streets, neighborhoods and shopping centers.

The New York Canal — as it’s been called since the 19th century — moseys through bustling urbanity, past a Home Depot here and an Applebees there, until it juts south across agricultural land near Kuna and Nampa and dumps into Lake Lowell. It travels 41 miles in all.

Boiseans, native and new, might not give the canal a second thought. But why is this concrete river in the middle of a city? And why is it named after such a far-off place?

In its simplest terms, the canal diverts water from the river to help farmers grow our food. It’s also a small part of Idaho’s rich relationship with irrigation, a farming technique that’s helped the arid regions of the state grow in size and wealth while raising fraught political conflicts over water rights.

“It’s an amazing thing in the desert,” said Mark Fiege, the Wallace Stegner chair in Western American studies at Montana State University, who has studied Idaho irrigation.

‘Science of farming’ comes to Boise

C. H. Tompkins, president of the New York-based Idaho Mining and Irrigation Co., and his engineer, A. D. Foote, first surveyed the Boise Valley for a canal in 1883, according to the Idaho State Historical Society.

Fiege wrote about the development of Idaho irrigation in his 2000 book, “Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West.” Hailed as the “science of farming,” irrigation promised precision in farming and control over the elements on desert land that could easily be claimed.

Irrigation promoters — like the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Co. — lured eastern growers to Idaho in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“That was a new thing for a lot of people,” Fiege told the Idaho Statesman by phone.

But irrigation wasn’t exactly novel, Fiege noted. Hispanic and Native American communities had used similar techniques in the West. In Idaho, missionaries and other settlers dug ditches to cultivate crops as early as the 1830s, according to the Historical Society.

Much of the irrigation in the Snake River Valley, in East Idaho and the Magic Valley, was managed by settlers who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Fiege said.

In the Boise area, on the other hand, private enterprise drove irrigation. Local entrepreneurs W.H. Ridenbaugh and W.B. Morris in 1878 built the Ridenbaugh Canal to irrigate Morris’ ranch on the Boise Bench.

At the time, some considered it a “worthless” enterprise to divert water through “gigantic sage brush, deep with dust in the summer and mud in the winter,” the Evening Capital News, a daily paper that ran in the early 1900s, reported decades later. But by 1913, thanks to new agricultural production, the Bench had become “one of the richest, finest improved and most thickly settled sections of the Boise Valley.”

The Ridenbaugh Canal cost the local investors $250,000, but the New York Canal project was much larger, with original estimates at $1 million to $1.5 million, according to the Historical Society.

Boise historian Arthur Hart in 2017 wrote that the New York Canal is the “grandest project yet conceived” to divert water in the 350,000-acre Boise River Basin.

The cost would prove difficult for the New York investors to manage.

Oddly Idaho explores curious quirks and nostalgic moments in the Gem State.
Oddly Idaho explores curious quirks and nostalgic moments in the Gem State.

Federal aid completes project

Bringing a canal down from a canyon cost “enormous amounts of money,” historian Frank Ross Peterson wrote in his 1976 book, “Idaho: A Bicentennial History.”

For years, the New York Canal project was plagued by a lack of funding and engineering problems, and control of the project changed hands a few times.

Then Congress passed the Reclamation Act of 1902, creating the U.S. Reclamation Service, now called the Bureau of Reclamation. The new agency was tasked with funding irrigation projects in the West. Among its early endeavors was completing the New York Canal, nearly three decades after the project began.

Later, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would build the Arrowrock, Lucky Peak, Anderson Ranch and Diversion dams along the Boise River, altogether known as the Boise Project, which manages irrigation and floods and produces power.

Today, the New York Canal is the centerpiece of a 1,500-mile network of human-made waterways in the Treasure Valley. The canals and ditches irrigate farms, ranches, parks and golf courses and deliver water to subdivisions and municipalities in the region, according to the Treasure Valley Water Association.

While the Big Apple moneymen didn’t see the project to its conclusion, the canal still carries their namesake.

Irrigation a thorny political issue

The New York Canal is one of countless manufactured waterways that irrigate 3.3 million acres of farmland across the state. Like the system of dams and canals within the Boise Project, the Minidoka Project uses five reservoirs to irrigate farmland along 300 miles of the Snake River in East and Southern Idaho.

Under the Reclamation Act and the earlier Carey Act (1894), which incentivized private companies to build irrigation systems, Idaho became a “national showcase” for irrigated farmland, historian Carlos Schwantes wrote in his 1991 book, “In Mountain Shadows: A History of Idaho.”

While historians point to the federal actions as key to farming and ranching becoming Idaho’s most valuable industry, the history of irrigation in Idaho is complicated, and remains a divisive political issue.

“Canals and their life-giving water fostered the growth of special kinds of oasis communities that combined the complexity and dependency of urban life with a rural agricultural environment,” Schwantes wrote. “Promoters often described such communities as perfect gardens of Eden, but they were also highly vulnerable.”

The well-being of such communities depends on federal money, bureaucracy, technological expertise and the whims of nature, Schwantes wrote.

For example, Fiege’s book details the complications of prior appropriation, a legal doctrine rooted in Idaho since statehood, that grants the right to use water based on seniority. Conflict over water allocation is difficult to solve with the law, in part because irrigation didn’t fully deliver on its original promise of precision and control.

The river is a “real, live thing,” Fiege said, and drought, soil type, geological conditions and other factors complicate the irrigation process.

“It’s not like it’s a pipeline, and they precisely open little valves, and it all comes out and every drop is accounted for,” Fiege told the Statesman. “The water is in the environment, and it’s open to all of the hydrological processes that affect water movement across and under the land.”