COMliATINd DROUTH. 1243 



COMBATING DROUTH. 



PKOF. \v. w . ji:m>ek<.a.-t, lU Tl1JIN.SO.\. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: I know the hour is g'etting late, so I will 

 take only a few minutes of your time in talking; about a suJjject that 

 wasof ^reat interest to me last summer while I was traveling through 

 the western part of this country, especiallj- along that semi-arid re- 

 gion in Washington, along the banks of the Columbia river and 

 extending back fifteen, twenty or more miles from that stream. I 

 never was so much surprised, so completely taken back in my life 

 as I was to see what could be done with a region of country that I 

 had been looking upon for more than a thousand miles as being 

 absolutel V valueless. It looks like a veritable desert. I went up the 

 Coluinljia about twenty-eight miles, striking off to the right, up 

 through the canon in the mountains in the Great Bend country-, the 

 Great Bend of the Columbia river, and at every step of the way I 

 said to mj'self, it is an absolute Sahara. After about eleven miles of 

 travel through that drear and desert country'. I came to Mr. Taj'lor's 

 little orchard of ten acres, and I felt a great deal like the traveler in 

 the caravan going to Timbuctoo when he strikes an oasis. There 

 in the midst of that great waste of what was apparently' sand, there 

 was the most beautiful orchard, the most promising I had ever seen 

 or imagined to exist. I got out and went up through that orchard 

 and saw those trees, everj- one hardy, strong, hale and promising, 

 and almost every one of them thoroughly loaded down with fruit. 

 You have no idea, no conception of the vast amount of apples, 

 peaches, plums, apricots, mulberries and other fruit raised on those 

 trees, and still that country is known the world over as a desert. 

 The soil consists of volcanic ashes. It has come from those ever- 

 lasting moufitains, continually crumbling down, and as I looked up 

 the side of them I found little pieces of shale that had been broken 

 off by the frost and wereslidingdown. At one place I found a rock that 

 weighed several hundred tons. This desert is covered with sage 

 brush, greasewood and yarrow. Those are the three things, and the 

 only three plants that grow naturally. This Mr. Taylor had found a 

 little mountain brook with a stream as big as my arm. I saw he 

 had brought it down the canon in the simplest form, two eight inch 

 boards nailed together in the form of a trough. It was running 

 down two rows of those trees: one-half ran down one row and the 

 other half ran down the other row, and he had it so arranged that 

 when the water had reached the end of his orchard it had all soaked 

 in the ground. He told me that the next day he would run the 

 water to the next row of trees, and the next daj' to another row and 

 so on until all his trees have been watered; and when he got around 

 to all the trees he then began over again. Since then I have heard 

 from there that the lower limbs were all resting on the ground, the 

 weight of the fruit had bent them down. On my visit there he had 

 some propped up and tied to keep them from breaking. 



A little ways bej'ond that I found another man who had an orchard 

 which had no irrigation whatever; he had very fine fruit, about half 

 as many apples as Mr. Taylor had, but not so large. But they also 

 told me that those men who raised fruit without irrigation would 



