Early settlers in the Uncompahgre Valley struggled to bring enough water to fertile but arid land, relying on ditches from the Uncompahgre River until its limited seasonal flow was stretched to capacity by 1900, while the more abundant Gunnison River ran through the Black Canyon six miles away and bypassed thousands of fertile acres. Valley residents had considered a tunnel as early as 1894, and in 1900 John Pelton led a five-man expedition down the Gunnison through the Black Canyon, but after one of their two boats was destroyed, the party fought rapids, crossed immense boulders, traveled only 15 miles in four weeks, and escaped the canyon under the leadership of William Torrence. Abraham Lincoln Fellows, Colorado's State Hydrographer, urged congressional support for dams, tunnels, and ditches and then led a second expedition for the United States Geographical Survey with Torrence as his assistant; using an inflatable rubber air mattress instead of boats, they crossed the river 76 times and emerged nine days later with surveys showing that a tunnel was feasible. Begun in 1901 as a Colorado state project, the 5.8-mile diversion tunnel stalled when funds ran out, but after the Newlands Act of 1902 provided federal support, work resumed in 1905, and when the low bidder failed to complete it, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation finished the job in 1909. Construction from the east and west portals was hazardous, with water-laden clays, combustible gases, a pressurized stream that sent water forty feet into the cavern, and a collapse that trapped thirty men and killed six; about 500 men worked on the project, though constant turnover reflected the exhausting and dangerous conditions. On July 6, 1909, crews drilling from opposite directions met, completing the 5.8-mile Gunnison Diversion Tunnel, then the longest in the United States, and after nearly 10 years of effort it brought abundant water to more than 100,000 acres of farmland in the valley as the second project completed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. On September 23, 1909, President William Howard Taft came to Montrose, where nearly 10,000 people attended a daylong celebration and he dedicated the tunnel at Lujane near the west portal, while a large Welcome Arch over Main Street marked the tunnel's opening and the region's agricultural promise.