PULSE OF THE IRRIGATION INDUSTRY. 



271 



A NURSERY BY IRRIGATION. 



The Walla Walla country in Washington is most 

 noted for its wonderful crops of wheat and its great 

 fruit orchards. As represented at the World's Fair 

 it informed the nation of the great possibilities for 

 horticulture in the far Northwest. Dr. Blalock's great 

 fruit farm astonished the eastern horticulturist with its 

 $2,000 per acre product of superior pears. Of no less 

 interest are the nurseries of C. L. Whitney at Walla 

 Walla, where are produced the stocks fora large pro- 

 portion of the orchards of the Northwest country. It 

 has become a cardinal principle with the experienced 

 orchardists of Washington, Idaho and eastern Oregon 

 to choose their stocks from nurseries within the ter- 

 ritory bounded by the Rockies on the east and the 

 Cascades on the west natural barriers against the 

 introduction of insect pests and fungoid diseases from 

 the wet regions of the West coast and the infected 

 nurseries of the eastern States. The nurserymen of 

 that great inland empire between the mountains ap- 

 preciate these conditions, which are specially favor- 

 able to their industry, and with Mr. Whitney, who is 

 President of the Northwestern Nurserymen's Asso- 

 ciation, unite heartily in cooperation with the fruit 

 growers to prevent the introduction of the pests by 

 rigid quarantine, and when any do get in wage a 

 rigorous and unceasing war against the enemy. Mr. 

 Whitney's nursery is a product of irrigation and is a 

 model of its kind. We hope soon to present a careful 

 article on the Walla Walla region and shall then 

 attempt a detailed description of the highly interest- 

 ing methods practiced in these nurseries. 



A MONTANA CANAL. 



Many irrigation canals are being commenced 

 in Montana. The El Dorado canal, taking water 

 from the north bank of the Teton river, is ten 

 miles long, fifteen feet wide on top, twelve feet wide 

 at the bottom, carrying two feet of water. Ira Mey- 

 ers, of Great Falls, the President of the company, in 

 a late interview estimated the capacity of the canal 

 at 12,000 miner's inches. He says there are between 

 30,000 and 40,000 acres under the canal, the soil be- 

 ing a gravelly loam, and that the ditch can water 

 nearly all of the land. No reservoirs have yet been 

 built; at present they are not needed, as only a small 

 portion of the land is in cultivation. The principal 

 crop so far has been hay, timothy and blue joint do- 

 ing particularly well and yielding enormous crops 

 where irrigated. The land is well suited for raising 

 oats, wheat, barley and potatoes, and this is a great 

 advantage, lying as it does in the center of a vast 

 stock-raising district. 



TEXAS ENTERPRISE. 



That Texas people are becoming fully aware of the 

 importance of irrigation to their State is evidenced 

 by the large number of irrigation enterprises now 

 under way. Here is a recent enumeration of im- 

 portant projects of that sort now in progress: Sev- 

 eral on an extensive scale on the San Antonio 

 river near San Antonio; on the Pecos, near Menton, 

 in Loring county; on the San Saba river, near San 

 Saba; on the Concho, near San Angelo; at Brown- 

 wood in Brown county ; on the Colorado river near 

 Ballinger and near Colorado City in Mitchell county; 

 on Sweetwater creek, in Nolan county, near Sweet- 

 water; on Elm Fork of the Brazos, near Abilene, in 

 Taylor county. 



WHAT ELECTRICITY WILL DO. 



A number of experts have been giving their opin- 

 ions as to what the world of 1900 will see in the 

 development of electricity. They say all the street 

 cars and those of railways to points within 100 miles 

 of the large cities will be propelled by this agent. 

 Electric brooms will sweep the streets, electric fans 

 will cool the air of homes in summer, electric cookers 

 and lighting will do away with coal gas, and the do- 

 mestic millennium will begin. 



Both the arc light and the incandescent lamp will 

 be superseded by the Tesla illuminator, which gives 

 a beautiful and mysterious light without the inter- 

 vention of either globe or lamp. 



We shall telephone as easily across the ocean as 

 we now do to our friends in the next square. 



Wherever there are water powers or coal fields 

 electrical energy will be transmitted to points a hun- 

 dred miles away. Instead of loading coal upon cars 

 and conveying it to the factory or machine shop to be 

 converted into power, the power itself will be con- 

 veyed in the form of electricity, and this in turn will 

 move all the necessary machinery for manufactur- 

 ing and pumps for irrigating. 



At this time a machine is at work in several large 

 offices which receives and prints as fast as it arrives 

 all the news of the day. It is like a constant news- 

 paper being printed all the time. Printed matter is 

 rolled off upon a piece of paper in much the same 

 fashion as the ticker prints. 



THE GREAT QUESTION OF THE NATIONS. 



That conservative and patriotic newspaper, the 

 New York Commercial Advertiser, speaking of the 

 address before the Trans-Mississippi Congress at St. 

 Louis last month, by Wm, E. Smythe, on "Irriga- 

 tion as a Great National Issue," discusses it as fol- 

 lows : " This title will seem rather sweeping to the 

 Eeople of the cis-Mississippi States, in which the rain- 

 ill is usually sufficient to guarantee good crops. It 

 is not generally known that west of the 100th meri- 

 dian, on a line drawn north and south through the 

 western third of the State of Kansas, rainfall cannot 

 be depended on, and that the farmer must resort to ir- 

 rigation. There are a few favored spots, like western 

 Oregon and Washington, to which this does not ap- 

 ply. But it can be stated in a general way that fully 

 three-fifths of our territory, leaving out Alaska, cannot 

 be cultivated without irrigation. From this we can 

 see that the title of Mr. Smythe's paper is not too 

 sweeping. 



" It is to be regretted that only the barest skeleton 

 of this address has been sent us, yet to those who 

 have given the subject thought the outline is full of 

 suggestion. While ' the Great American Desert ' of 

 our childhood has long since vanished, there are in 

 the West hundreds of thousands of square miles of 

 the most fertile lands in the world, that only await 

 the coming of water to be converted into Edens. 

 The Mormons have illustrated this in Utah. The 

 traveler can see the effect of water on the torrid alka- 

 line stretches to the east of the Coast Range in South- 

 ern California, where a luxuriant and tropical vegeta- 

 tion has sprung up about artesian wells sunk in the 

 desert. 



"The Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, Canadian, 

 the Pecos and Rio Grande Rivers, will yet be so con- 

 trolled that they will fertilize millions of acres, and 

 their arid valleys will yet teem with an opulent agri- 

 cultural population. Other rivers of the West can 



