Between 1884 and 1887, local men, boys, and animals labored to build the Eureka Irrigation Canal, an early effort to irrigate semi-arid lands with water from the Arkansas River. Financed by speculator Asa T. Soule, the canal stretched more than 90 miles from Ingalls to near Spearville and supplied farmers along its route. The project was soon regarded as a failure as breaks in the canal wall, seepage, flash floods that destroyed a dam, low river levels caused by upstream irrigation, and drought undermined it. People came to call it Soule's Folly and Soule's Elephant. Efforts to revive the canal with pumps also failed because too much water was lost to seepage and evaporation, and it was finally abandoned in 1921.