7 SEPTEMBER 19-25, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | The South Platte River rushes out of the Rocky Mountains through a canyon molded between grassy hills. Two miles below Waterton Canyon, 71 miles of trail stretch through the plains well into Aurora. The High Line Canal may never have become the liquid asset it was intended to become, but today it’s one of metro Denver’s greatest amenities. In 1880, James Duff saw the low valley in this part of the arid plains and envisioned build- ing the biggest irrigation canal in the Ameri- can West. Duff was a businessman, a Scottish immi- grant who’d organized a Confederate Texas cavalry during the Civil War, fl ed to Mexico when the Union won, then rebuilt his life in Denver. After opening the elegant Windsor Hotel downtown, he became vice president of the Colorado Mortgage and Investment Com- pany, the most prolifi c canal builder in the state, according to National Park Service archives. He began working alongside Englishman James Barclay, his fellow vice president at CM&I, engineer Edwin Nettleton, and engi- neer and entrepreneur (and future Colorado governor) Benjamin Harrison Eaton, who’d been trying to build a large canal project in Larimer County. The group had it in mind to build a grav- ity-fed canal based on the high-line principle, which suggested moving water from the highest elevation point possible to lower levels through a ditch. Duff believed the best place to start this High Line Canal was Waterton Canyon, the fi nal passage for the South Platte River from the Rocky Moun- tains to the yawning Great Plains. Eaton, an Ohio native who came out to Colorado to strike it rich during the state’s gold rush, liked the high-line principle be- cause it would allow him to carry water far- ther. He promised Duff that they could build the longest canal west of the Mississippi, 71 miles, and irrigate 120,000 acres of land. Construction crews working for Eaton began building the canal in the spring of 1880, with 160 teams of ditch diggers recruited through newspaper ads offering a dollar a day plus board. Using shovels and donkeys but no machinery, the diggers worked non- stop until November 30, 1883, completing the High Line at a cost of $650,000. It wasn’t as large as the Erie Canal, the giant 180-mile waterway that awed Eaton in his youth, but it was the largest irrigation canal built in the West, and the most expensive. To stay on the most elevated point, the canal meandered through the dry, arid grass- lands of Douglas, Arapahoe, Denver and Adams counties. It ran alongside farm lands and ranches built on land sold by members of Duff’s group, including railroad magnate Jay Gould, who spurred the project to attract settlers to land he owned east of Denver. But the South Platte River proved unpre- dictable, and the water rights that Duff had secured were weak and too junior. In the fi rst few years of the High Line’s operation, Duff managed only 1,200 cubit feet of water per second (or 651,000 gallons of water a day), which would only be enough to irrigate 60,000 acres of land, half as much as Duff had hoped. Worse yet, the canal had problems with seepage, water evaporation and carrying the water the full 71 miles. The diversion dam and sluice gates, which allowed additional water to pass, were sturdy, but the sand and gravel that traveled with the water blocked the gates and other parts of the headworks that surrounded the dam. Gophers also tended to burrow into the banks of the canal, weakening the walls. As a result, the High Line Canal was only going to be able to irrigate 50,000 acres at best — but the reality turned out much worse. In its fi rst few years of operation, it only managed to irrigate 20,000 acres EVAN ANDERMAN continued on page 8
