THE IRRIGATION PROBLEMS AND 



POSSIBILITIES OF NORTHERN 



WYOMING. 



SOME GENERAL IMPRESSIONS. 



BY CAPT. H. M. CHITTENDEN, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A. 



The especial purpose of my tour through Wyoming in the months 

 of August and September, 1897, was to investigate the question of 

 the construction of reservoirs in .the arid regions through the agency 

 of the general government. As the result of my investigations of 

 that particular subject has been embodied in an official report which 

 has been made public, and as Mr. Mead in his paper has covered 

 pretty thoroughly all other matters relating to irrigation and water 

 supply in the country traversed, I will attempt to give here only my 

 general impresssions of the trip. 



The section of the country in the neighborhood of Piney Creek 

 prt sented one feature, not mentioned by Mr. Mead, which particularly 

 attracted my attention, and that was the extent to which irrigation 

 may be carried in a very rough and uneven country. Accustomed as 

 I had been in visiting other se'ctions of the west, to find irrigation 

 generally practiced on broad, flat areas where the distribution of 

 water seemed to be a matter of great simplicity, I had involuntarily 

 arrived at the conclusion that this class of topography is alone well 

 adapted to irrigation. But what I saw in the above locality altered 

 my opinion in this respect. I cannot call to mind another tract, out- 

 side of the mountainous areas themselves, where the topography is 

 so uneven and broken as that just north of the divide between Piney 

 Creek and the upper tributaries of the Tongue River. Yet nearly the 

 whole of this tract was under cultivation, the ditches winding in and 

 out among the hills and the slopes covered with meadows and fields 

 of grain. -The general effect was on the whole more pleasing, though 

 less impressive from the point of view of vastness, than the broad 

 expanses of even land in other localities ."here cultivated fields succeed 

 each other as far as the eye can reach. 



Piney Creek was about the most favorably conditioned of any of 

 the streams which I \isited in regard to storage reservoirs. There 

 will be no difficulty in conserving the entire flow of that stream above 

 a point about opposite Lake De Smet and utilizing it in agriculture. 

 There is reservoir capacity enough clearly in sight, and land enough 

 to absorb the full resources of the stream. Fortunate would it be if 



