64 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



falls, and where little else can flourish. "What is the cause of 

 this desert ? We find at once that it is over-drainage. There 

 is probably some land that needs to be drained ; but the great 

 mass of it has been over-drained. Salt Lake Valley is a good 

 example of this sort of land. You see on the way through 

 this desert the marks of an immense number of old lakes, prob- 

 ably most of them of fresh water, although the great lake of 

 Utah Valley is now salt, as I shall explain. From the central 

 position of our country, we find rivers rolling to the east and 

 west and carrying off the surplus water ; and those rivers, roll- 

 ing on for thousands of years, have worn deep channels through 

 the rocks, in some instances a thousand feet. Lieut. Powell 

 told me that, going down the Colorado, he could count a' most 

 the whole of the geological series where that river had made 

 its way down through the solid strata. These rivers, running 

 east and west for thousands of years, cutting their channels 

 deeper and deeper, have cut through the edges of many of 

 those lakes and have drained them. And they are the vast 

 drains, taking out from the centre of our continent the waters 

 too rapidly, and carrying them to the Atlantic Ocean on the one 

 side, and the Pacific Ocean on the other. And therefore we 

 have this vast region, the American Desert, so called, which is 

 over-drained ; so that trees and plants that require water can 

 only grow around the mountains, and in certain places in the 

 valleys where the waters from the mountains accumulate. The 

 great mass of the land is a barren waste, covered with the sage- 

 brush that marks the desert. 



In Salt Lake Valley, and all around that region, we have a 

 country which is not drained at all into the ocean. How does 

 it happen, then, that this becomes such a barren waste? It 

 happens just in this way: — that -the water, being drained off 

 towards the Atlantic on the one side and towards the Pacific 

 on the other, we have here a basin that can receive water only 

 as it comes from the mountains on either side ; and those moun- 

 tains upon either side condense the water from the clouds before 

 it comes over that great valley ; it is deposited in the form of 

 snow upon their summits, and as it melts and rolls down into 

 the valley, we should expect, of course, that the valley would 

 in time become filled with water. That is not the result, how- 

 ever ; because the wind that comes from the south in the sum- 



