THE MAKING OF NORTHERN MINNESOTA, 323 



it now without regard to the forest reserve with all that lace- 

 work of beautiful lakes, and with its miles of swamp lands and 

 large areas of very light sandy soil. The proposition is now to 

 drain all that land, if I am right in my understanding of it. I 

 believe I saw in a paper that 11,000,000 acres of land could be 

 drained and the land made available for agriculture. I am not 

 here to warn you against draining it. I am here to warn you 

 against draining the sandy land by wrong methods. There 

 is a way that sandy land can be drained and devoted to agri- 

 culture wherever it is best that it should be so done, but it 

 should be accomplished in the right way. 



In the first place, you can never get the national govern- 

 ment through its law making body to spend the money of the 

 whole people of the United States to drain those lands that 

 drain into the Mississippi, as they have drained the swamps of 

 Indiana and turned that water down into the Mississippi river. 

 A portion of it, at least, would go into the Mississippi river, and 

 we all know that the residents of the lower Mississippi valley 

 are living along that river under the shadow of those great 

 levees in mortal terror of their lives and property with every 

 new, great flood that comes and crawls an inch higher up on the 

 levee than the last flood did. 



Why is it that there is a steady rise in the flood plain of 

 the Mississippi river? One of the chief reasons is that in the 

 early history of the country the enormous area of territory 

 which drained into that river was a grass covered region or a 

 forest covered region or a great swamp region, as it was origin- 

 ally through Indiana and a large part of Illinois, and when the 

 rains came the swamps, the matted grass, the great, spreading 

 trees and the underbrush held back to a great extent the water; 

 today it flows uninterruptedly into the river, and the volume 

 of those floods is immeasurably increased. 



Now they have waked up to the fact in the lower Mississip- 

 pi valley that if they ever expect to live in safety on the plant- 

 ations and in the cities and villages that line the lower reaches 

 of the Mississippi river the problem as a whole must be solv- 

 ed by the national government and the states in co-operation 

 along a great, broad national policy which will recognize the 

 fact that there is a broader, a better and a higher reason upon 

 which to place the building of levees and the planting of forests 

 than the mere question of navigation; that it involves the ques- 

 tion of the extension and maintenance of the agricultural area 

 of the country, which is the cause of all of our prosperity, and 



