CH. II] WATER STORAGE 31 



plains of the West, where they slope upward to the 

 footliills of the Rockies. It is a white man's country. 

 Although under tlie Equator, the altitude is so high 

 that the niglits are cool, and the region as a whole is 

 very healthy. I saw many children — of the Boer 

 immigrants, of English settlers, even of American 

 missionaries — and they looked sound and well. Of 

 course, there was no real identity in any feature ; but 

 again and again the landscape struck me by its general 

 likeness to the cattle country I knew so well. As my 

 horse shuffled forward, under the bright, hot sunlight, 

 across the endless flats or gently rolling slopes of brown 

 and withered grass, I might have been on the plains 

 anywhere from Texas to Montana, The hills were like 

 our Western buttes ; the half-dry watercourses were 

 fringed with trees, just as if they had been the Sandy, 

 or the Dry, or the Beaver, or the Cottonwood, or any 

 of the multitude of creeks that repeat these and similar 

 names, again and again, from the Panhandle to the 

 Saskatchewan. Moreover a Westerner, far better than 

 an Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country. 

 There should be storage reservoirs in the hills and along 

 the rivers — in my judgment built by the Government, 

 and paid for by the water-users in the shape of water- 

 rents — and irrigation ditches. AVith the water stored 

 and used there would be an excellent opening for small 

 farmers, for the settlers, the actual home-makers, who, 

 above all others, should be encouraged to come into a 

 white man's coimtry like this of the highlands of East 

 Africa. Even as it is, many settlers do well ; it is hard 

 to realize that right under the Equator the conditions 

 are such that wheat, potatoes, strawberries, apples, all 

 flourish. No new country is a place for weaklings ; but 

 the right kind of man, the settler who makes a success 



