THE IRRIGATION OF ILLINOIS. 



SAMUEL J. WALLACE. 



THE future development of agriculture.in its broad 

 sense, will differ very much from that in the past 

 and will be largely the development of irrigation. 

 And the irrigation of the future will include much 

 beyond the simple thing now known as irrigation, the 

 mere providing and application of water to the soil, 

 and will cover the whole subject of water in its rela- 

 tion to the soil. 



The future development of irrigation will include 

 not only means for storing and taking water to the 

 soil, and its application to it, but also means for taking 

 its excess away, as in underdraining, now a separate 

 thing, and means for its reapplication where needed; 

 and, also, means for storing up water in the soil, as by 

 underground reservoirs and deep trenching, to con - 

 tinually feed it, now hardly known; and, as well, 

 means to keep the soil filled all the year with live and 

 constantly active roots to take up the nitrates and 

 phophates that go into solution continually, and are 

 now largely lost by being carried away in the drain- 

 age; as by fruit and food-producing trees and winter 

 crops. 



Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and New York are the For- 

 tunate Ones among the countries of the world for 

 irrigation. These States, with their neighboring sis- 

 ters are especially ill-situated for local irrigation be- 

 cause the streams lie so far below the general farm 

 level; yet the future will spread the irrigation ditch 

 over their statute books that now know it not, and 

 over their beautiful faces the waters of everlast- 

 ing youth, bright with the riches of Eldorado. But 

 these four States are the favored ones with the 

 queenly crowns of their great lakes which endow 

 them with the waters of life and riches without lim- 

 ited measure or fail, as much as they need forever. 

 Not only are they fortunate ones in lying below great 

 lakes for irrigation reservoirs worth numberless 

 millions of expenditure, built by their grandfather, 

 the ice king, with unbreakable dams of earth and 

 gravel and overflow lips of rock but they are also 

 fortunate in having their surfaces leveled up for such 

 irrigation by the ice, and covered deep with soil rich 



with pulverized rock, and worth other numberless 

 millions of expenditure. 



Most fortunate of all is Illinois, with her great city 

 of the future, set as a jewel on her reservoir crown; so 

 fortunately set as to be ready to pour over her trib- 

 utary lands by irrigation canals the riches of nitrates 

 of potash and phosphates from many lands by grav- 

 itation as no other great city can do. 



This endowment soon or late is inevitable. The 

 minds of men, molders of history, may not awake at 

 once to what is before them, when outside of what 

 they are used to. But irrigation is too necessary and 

 its progress too resistless to stay until it has devel- 

 oped the possibilities so plainly in sight. 



So Chicago will some time turn back on to her 

 State the precious basis of life, though other cities 

 continue to draw the scant vitality from their lands 

 and send it down to the seashores forever. 



The way for this should now be left open, by those 

 who mold her drainage system and the system of 

 canals now in progress, for science and the arts move 

 so fast it will not be wise to assume that things will 

 not be done differently hereafter, and that the unex- 

 pected will not happen. 



It will not do to make a bugbear of the idea that 

 sewage will not be suited for distribution by irri- 

 gation canals before we know what the future can do. 

 Certainly, if no new art at all were used, with an ade- 

 quate proportion of water and rate of flow, sewage 

 would be reduced to its elements in a remarkably 

 short distance by microbes when open to the sunlight 

 at the temperatures that would exist in a canal; and 

 the baccilli of diseases, as well as the innocent, would 

 become innocuous or dead sooner and more safely 

 than if turned into the cold waters of the deep lake, 

 where they now go, or into the more diluted waters of 

 the river, the only other alternative open. 



So, sanitation may join agriculture in the demands 

 of iron necessity for such development. The writer 

 knows the necessity of irrigation in Illinois, from ex- 

 perience. 



