ENTRANCE INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1900-1920
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limbs or anything that could be stood on end and made a solid fence right around the whole Minersville. It took women, kids and everything.23 According to Jamison, the rabbits got so bad, they were trying to break into the barns and feed storage sheds. So "the people cut some holes through and dug a pit, and then the rabbits would try to go through that hole, and they'd fall down in the pit, and then they'd have to make a trip around that fence and kill the rabbits and get rid of them."24 Sometimes they would kill as many as 500 rabbits in a single night. At other times coyotes would plague Minersville farmers, roaming their fields and sometimes coming into town. Animal life, like the agriculture itself, was affected by drought cycles. Oldtimers remembered times when wild horses ran thick in the mountain valleys and then cycles when cougars or coyotes were thick and would eat the colts, a condition which Bill Woods described as making "a balance in nature." 25 Antelope and deer seemed to run in cycles as well.
Agriculture Farming changed during the 1900s, largely driven by continuing problems with water. The Beaver Arid Farm Company organized in February 1907 with a group of solid businessmen at its core—J.M. Murdock, C.E. Murdock, C D . White, D.A. McGregor, N.P. Ipson, G.B. Greenwood, J.T. Tanner, J.F. Jones, and H.A. White. The group secured 4,000 acres of land on Indian Creek and in Wild Cat from the state—arid land that they intended to make "blossom like a rose." To do so, the company purchased a thirty-two h.p. traction engine, a Reeves double-cylinder type capable of drawing eighteen plows and turning forty-five acres per day. The engine would also be used to transport fuel from Milford. Local farmers would build and maintain canals, first clearing them with plows pulled by horses and then lining them with stones or hard-packed earth. Eventually, they paved t h e m with cement. Regardless of the precautions they took in the preparation of canals, in Minersville sometimes floods would carry gravel and debris into town. The Farmer's Institute sponsored a series of speakers—professors
