OUR INLAND WATERWAYS 295 



fact of his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt was as a Moses leading the 

 people from an " oppressed and degraded state of commerce " in which 

 they found themselves beleaguered, as did their forebears a century and 

 a quarter before. Nearly all the water craft of the river system were 

 assembled; railways abandoned schedules and stopped freight traffic to 

 accommodate specials ; entire towns were evacuated that the inhabitants 

 might gather on the river front. On the average each river town — 

 Keokuk, Quincy, Hannibal, Louisiana, St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, Ste. 

 Genevieve, Cairo, Memphis, and the rest — showed more spectators 

 standing out to salute the presidential party than its entire population ; 

 while day and night the air was rent with acclamations of voice, steam 

 whistle, shrieking siren, salvo of guns, and roar and rattle of fire- 

 works. 



Individual members of the commission, singly or in groups, studied 

 the Ohio, the upper Missouri and its tributaries, the vast Columbia 

 Valley and Puget Sound, the California rivers, Eio Colorado, the 

 streams of the Gulf slope, and the waters and projects of the Atlantic 

 slope. And the interest of citizens grew in every state, until the au- 

 tumn of 1907 produced such a crop of conventions and such a volume of 

 support for waterway improvement as no other peaceful issue ever 

 evoked. The Irrigation Congress in Sacramento in September; the 

 Lakes-to-Gulf meeting at Memphis, the Upper Mississippi Improve- 

 ment convention at Moline, the Interstate Waterway convention at 

 Victoria (Texas), and the celebration of the opening of Hennepin 

 Canal at Sterling, in October; the Trans-Mississippi Congress at 

 Muskogee, the Atlantic Deeper Waterway conference at Philadelphia, 

 the Drainage Congress at Baltimore, the Gulf State Waterway con- 

 vention at Birmingham, and the Ohio Improvement Association meet- 

 ing at Wheeling, in November; the National Rivers and Harbors Con- 

 gress at Washington in December — these were among the national or 

 interstate conventions devoted either primarily or secondarily to water- 

 way improvement and attended by hundreds or thousands of delegates 

 from every state and territory and representing every industrial and 

 public interest of the country during the closing months of 1907. 

 And state executives have commenced to combine not only with their 

 constituents but with each other; at Sacramento there were five gov- 

 ernors, at Memphis eighteen, at Muskogee and Washington half a 

 dozen each and at several others from one to three. 



Nor is this the end : Under their broad instructions the commission 

 found it needful to consider not merely the improvement of our rivers 

 but the use and conservation of related resources; and deeming the 

 proper administration of these a duty devolving jointly on the nation 

 and the states, they asked the president to follow Washington's example 

 by invoking the advice of our several co-sovereignties in a conference on 



