C??-IrrigationThe familiar rural landscape of the present Town of Tulare is the artificial creation of irrigation. The modern eye – accustomed to the regularity of shaded orchards and the linear, furrowed fields of row crops – finds it difficult to imagine the countryside before irrigation, much less the arid and barren prairies that existed until 1860. There is a tendency to see this landscape as eternal. But the current rural scene is not yet a century old. Although residents of Tulare Township had long recognized the need for irrigation, mass-scale irrigation came late to the district. The reasons for the delay – politics, geography, technology and economics – tell, in microcosm, the story of San Joaquín Valley irrigation. It didn't take long for California's small farmers to realize that dry farming, which depended on winter and spring rains, was unreliable. The first two decades of California's Wheat Era – the 1860s and 1870s – saw wide variations in crop yields as the state alternated between years of drought and years of “normal rainfall.” While large ranchers managed to survive the droughts of 1863–1865, 1870–1871, and 1873–1875, small ranchers often failed. The Diablo Range's "rain shadow" has worsened challenges for West Side grangers; even “below normal” rainfall elsewhere could seriously jeopardize the West Side crop. By 1870, the need for extensive irrigation in the San Joaquín Valley was clear, but how were Californians supposed to accomplish the task? Northern California's first large-scale irrigation attempts were entrepreneurial ventures. Investors established commercial irrigation companies that owned the canal system but not the irrigated lands. By the 1870s, land speculators regularly used this agreement to approve bond sales. Although some 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 over, and the rainy years brought good harvests to the West Side. . It was no longer urgent to spend money to avoid crop failures. Furthermore, some farmers believed that the district could not sell its bonds without state support. The Second Westside Authorization Act did not include such a provision after Bay Area interests objected. As subsequent experience would show, the lack of state support often posed a serious obstacle to the marketing of irrigation titles. By 1880, the West Side Irrigation District, authorized but never implemented, had collapsed. The town of Tulare would have to wait another thirty-five years for large-scale irrigation.