THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



VOL. VII. 



CHICAGO, JULY, 1894. 



No. i 





THE PROGRESS OF WESTERN AMERICA. 



The time is near at hand when the peo- 

 and the pie of the United States must deal with 

 Arid Lands. ^ p rOD i em o f reclaiming the arid 

 lands. The problem does not assert itself; the press- 

 ure is from without. All our eras of colonization 

 have taken their impulse from men who sought 

 homes rather than from localities that sought settlers. 

 The Puritans were persecuted in England and dis- 

 satisfied in Holland, and so New England was born 

 Finally the desirable lands of the Atlantic coast were 

 occupied, and then the Ohio Valley was invaded. 

 Generations afterward the armies of the Union were 

 suddenly dissolved and then the broad valley of the 

 Mississippi was overflowed with homeseekers. The 

 summer of 1894 finds another era of colonization at 

 hand. Again the pressure is from without ; again the 

 resources of the West must be drawn upon to furnish 

 outlets for surplus population. Conditions that have 

 been swelling the ranks of the semi-idle and wholly 

 idle for some years are culminating in widespread 

 unrest, in well-defined want and at last, in the loud 

 and startling demand for more land for the landless. 

 We publish elsewhere in this number a striking ar- 

 ticle entitled " The Public Domain in its Social As- 

 rpect.'' This article was not written by an agitator 

 ;and delivered before a club of anarchists. It was writ- 

 ten by one of the conservative young men in the In- 

 terior Department and delivered before the National 

 Geographic Society, at Washington. When we hear 

 ;a note of alarm from these circles it is high time to be 

 :giving serious thought to our social and industrial 

 problems. And the article of Mr. Arthur P. Davis is 

 nothing less than a note of alarm. It is true that the 

 article referred to points out the disease rather than 

 the remedy, but a knowledge of the disease is a ne- 

 cessary prerequisite to the prescription of the cure. 

 If the men of the East will awaken the country to a 

 lively appreciation of the fact that something must be 

 done, the men of the West will undertake to show 

 the country how to do it. 



COL. GEORGE W. HARRISON, 

 Of Atlanta, Member of the Georgia Irrigation Commission. 



Already public thought in the West is 

 Western ,. ,. 



Colorado's studiously bent upon this subject ot 



Petition, transcendent importance. Recently 

 some of the citizens of the western counties of Colo- 

 rado sent a striking petition to their senators and 

 representatives at Washington. They called atten- 

 tion to the fact that a splendid tract of land, com- 

 prising one million acres in western Colorado and 

 eastern Utah, is susceptible of irrigation by the waters 

 of the Grand river, and that it would cost about $5 

 per acre to make this fit for settlement. They urged 

 the Government to immediately undertake the re- 



