30 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



IRRIGATION IN KANSAS. 



BY F. G. ADAMS. 



The subject of irrigation is not a new one. Nor is it essentially a scientific 

 subject. The oldest nations of history practiced irrigation; and, in the 

 earliest periods, by methods involving no scientific knowledge. A simple 

 ditch made to turn the water of a brook, and carry it to a level above the 

 adjacent land, whereby it can be spread over, to moisten the cultivated soil 

 of the fields, in the season of crop growing, involves all that is essential to 

 irrigation. Yet where irrigation is done on a larger scale, and broad and 

 deep channels are made, hundreds of miles in length, requiring the con- 

 struction of aqueducts and bridges and tunnels and reservoirs, at vast ex- 

 pense, and after that a just apportionment of whole rivers of water thus to be 

 brought into use, in its application to thousands of acres of land, and among 

 many thousands of people — in all this, much of science must needs be em- 

 ployed. So in the sinking of wells to great depths, to obtain water for irri- 

 gation, scientific investigation is requisite to determine the position of strata, 

 and the reasonable sources of the water supply which is sought. The 

 climatic eflfects which may accompany the change of the soil, in a district 

 where rainfall is slight, from a state of sterility to one of great productive- 

 ness, may be a subject of no little scientific interest. 



Is irrigation practicable in Kansas? This is a question which it would 

 seem the facts of science might have long ago helped to solve. If the ques- 

 tion has already been solved without such aid, doubtless science may be made 

 to help in carrying forward the work which has been begun without its inter- 

 vention. 



Mr. Gaunett's tables of elevations, together with the tables of distances on 

 the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, show the fall in the waters of 

 the Arkansas river, between Hutchinson and the Kansas State line, to be 

 about eight feet to the mile. 



The application of the engineer's level through fifteen miles in Sequoyah 

 county, the third county from the western line of the State, on the Arkansas 

 river, shows the fall in the river there to be about seven and a half feet to 

 the mile. At low stages the river banks are about four feet above the water in 

 the channel ; and the bottom lands spread out for miles back from the river, 

 at a little more than the same elevation. As the water falls, in the course of 

 the river eastward, so does the adjacent bottom land, seven or eight feet to 

 the mile, thr.ough several counties here, perhaps the entire distance from 

 Hutchinson to the west line of the State, and beyond ; the uplands, too, have 

 about the same general declivity to the eastward. 



In the Arkansas river, four miles above Garden City, in Sequoyah county, 

 and about seventy-five miles from the western line of the State of Kansas, is 



