690 



CONSERVATION 



is well to note that irrigation has been 

 practised in Egypt, India, Mexico, and 

 many other lands for long periods of 

 time. It is a proud heritage for any 

 race that wherever their flag has gone, 

 there, constructive and scientific work 

 has arisen for the benefit of the peo- 

 ples who had, from time immemorial, 

 been subject to flood, drought, famine, 

 plague. When was there ever so pro- 

 pitious a day for Egypt and the Sou- 

 dan as when the British flag was planted 

 there, with British engineering skill and 

 British millions of pounds sterling? 

 The dams and canals, channels and bar- 

 rages already finished, with the new 

 ones planned^ have brought a prosperity 

 and a peace to the ' North of Africa 

 which never has been seen, and never 

 has been possible in all the weary mil- 

 lenniums which have dragged over its 

 thirsty wastes. Though there has been 

 irrigation in India from time immemo- 

 rial, it has been on a small scale. No 

 vast projects were ever undertaken un- 

 til the British occupation, such, for ex- 

 ample, as the Chenab Canal, which ir- 

 rigates 2,000,000 acres, or two-fifths as 

 large an area as all of cultivable Egvpt — 

 a canal with six times the discharge of 

 the Thames at Teddington. Thirteen 

 millions of acres of the 44,000,000 acres 

 under irrigation in India are watered 

 from wells, but the vast government 

 undertakings have become the main 

 insurance against the recurrence of 

 famine, that dread visitant in this over- 

 crowded land. 



The first Presidential message to 

 Congress recommending Government 

 aid to agriculture was that of George 

 Washington, in 1796, himself a member 

 of the first agricultural society ever or- 

 ganized in the United States. He rec- 

 ommended "a. national board to en- 

 courage and assist agriculture * * * 

 by stimulating private enterprise and 

 experiment." 



The first Presidential message rec- 

 ommending aid to irrigation and the 

 national control of water-supply was 

 the first message to Congress of Presi- 

 dent Roosevelt, December 3, 1901. 



Legislation waited on Washington's 

 recommendation forty-five years later. 



when Congress appropriated £200 for 

 the purpose, which the Government 

 took three years to spend ! Within 

 seven months after the recommendation 

 of President Roosevelt, Congress en- 

 acted the most beneficent piece of 

 public-land legislation which has be- 

 come a law since Abraham Lincoln 

 signed his Homestead Act in 1862. 

 Eleven days after the measure became a 

 law, recommendations were made for 

 the withdrawal from entry of areas in 

 six localities to prevent speculative fil- 

 ings on them, pending an act. 



On the third anniversary of the 

 passage of the Reclamation Act, on 

 June 17, 1905, and within three years 

 and seven months of the first presenta- 

 tion to Congress by a Presidential mes- 

 sage of any plan for the national policy 

 of the reclamation of arid lands by irri- 

 gation, water was turned on to 50,000 

 of the thirsty acres of Nevada, the first 

 section of this national project to be 

 completed. This is known as the 

 "Carson" project. A very interesting 

 incident in connection with the digging 

 of the ditches of this project illustrates 

 the value of the Hydrologic Survey. 

 This irregular tract comprises a flat 

 desert, which lay in the line of the im- 

 migrants' trail to California about the 

 time of the gold discovery. There were 

 here forty miles of country where never 

 a drop of water was to be found. It was 

 several, and sometimes many days' jour- 

 ney, with horses or mules or oxen, and 

 every drop of water used had to be car- 

 ried with them. Not all the immigrants 

 knew this, and the consequence was that 

 hundreds perished, with thousands of 

 animals, and very often the only monu- 

 ment left to mark the spot where some 

 father, mother, son, or daughter had 

 perished and was left six feet deep in 

 this desert soil was an old gun-barrel 

 or steel ramrod to mark the place. 

 Three wagon-loads of such pathetic 

 mementoes were recovered from the 

 digging of the main ditch. But the 

 Hydrologic Survey has ascertained the 

 fact by this time that this entire re- 

 gion, in fact almost the whole of Ne- 

 vada, contains vast quantities of under- 

 ground water, and had any one out of 



