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PREFACE This study in historical geography grew out of research initially conducted for the Kelowna Museum and British Columbia Heritage Trust in 1983. The work then was largely archival - collecting maps of early irrigation works, organizing a photographic collection of irrigation "hardware", compiling a bibliography on the subject. The following year the bibliography was published and the work seemed complete. Yet there it was obvious that the subject had much more potential. Changing the course of water, after all, whether to irrigate the Okanagan or drain the Fens, is one of the most potent means people have possessed to change the landscape, and in the dry Okanagan Valley irrigation schemes and the expansion of settlement went hand in hand.Irrigating the Okanagan is a regional study. The first chapter describes the physical character of the Okanagan Valley and provides an environmental context for the remaining chapters. The region is semi-arid, but the soils are good and the open parkland vegetation, was well suited to early pioneer cattle ranching. Numerous upland lakes provide ideal sites for the construction of storage reservoirs for gravity irrigation. Yet when orcharding began around 1900 there was little environmental data, and it took many years of trial and error to harmonize the region's physical and climatic circumstances with available varieties of fruit trees and the routines of irrigated horticulture. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the major enabling factors that underlay the advent and development of irrigated horticulture. In Chapter 2 provincial water law is shown to refine the principles of beneficial use and prior appropriation and to eliminate the stumbling block of riparian rights. For the Okanagan orchardist who perceived water as a public resource, water law provided the means to remove it from the control of private irrigation companies. Enforcement of these laws became a management problem, and management is the focus of Chapter 3. It traces the redefinition of water as a common good rather than a private resource; the emergence of regional perspectives in water management; the shift to large scale developments reliant on large volumes of water; and the increasing reliance on scientific climatological and hydrological data for making effective water management decisions. Chapter 4 explores the changing technological solutions to the problems of irrigating Okanagan land. The impact of the move to orcharding and of the need for large, well-designed and well-built systems becomes clear. Against this background, the final chapter combines the use of maps and tables to reveal the extraodinary speed with which irrigation remade the regional economy and landscape. In less than a generation tens of thousands of acres of the valley's benchlands were opened to irrigated orcharding. The completion of a thesis is never a solitary task, and so it is with "Irrigating the Okanagan". In the Geography Department my greatest thanks must go to Dr. R. Cole Harris, whose comments and encouragement kept me on track. At the Kelowna Museum the Director/Curator, Ursula Surtees, offered me the widest opportunity to pursue my subject. Others who contributed helpful comments were Jon Alcock, Richard Mackie, and Frank Pells. My wife, Connie, and my children, Rosalyn and Mark, deserve my warmest and most lasting thanks - your mere presence inspired me and kept me moving forward. IRRIGATING THE OKANAGAN |
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