50 THE IRRIGATION AGE 



people, should remain practically a desert, is not in harmony with the 

 progressive spirit of the age or in keeping with the possibilities of the 

 future/' 



The Secretary of Agriculture in his annual report for 1899, says: 

 "More than one-third of the country depends upon the success of ir- 

 rigation to maintain the people, the industries, and the political insti- 

 tutions of that area, and future growth will also be measured by the 

 increase of the reclaimed area. In a region which, in the extent and 

 diversity of its mineral wealth, has no equal on the globe, the riches 

 of the mines in the hills are already surpassed by the productions of 

 the irrigated farms in the valleys, and the nation at large is at last 

 awakening to the fact that the development of the use of the rivers 

 and arid lands of the West will constitute one of the most important 

 epochs in our increase in population and material wealth." 



Capt. Hiram M. Chittenden, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A., says in 

 report on surveys for reservoir sites: " Reservoir construction in the 

 arid region of the West is an indispensible condition to the highest 

 development of that section. It can properly be carried out only 

 through public agencies. Private enterprise can never accomplish 

 the work successfully. As between state and nation, it falls more 

 properly under the domain of the latter. " 



El wood Mead, in charge of the Irrigation Investigations of the 

 Department of Agriculture, in Agricultural Year book, 1899, says: 

 "The commercial importance of the development of irrigation re- 

 sources is being realized in the West at the present time as n'ever be- 

 fore. * * * The East, as a whole, is beginning to realize the great 

 part which the West is to have in the events of the twentieth century. 

 World-wide forces are working to hasten the day of its complete de- 

 velopment and the utilization of all its rich resources. The Orient is 

 awake and offering its markets to the trade of the Pacific Coast. 



"With the development of this trade there will come an impulse 

 for the completion of the material conquest of Arid America, by the 

 enlistment of public as well as private means in the storage and di- 

 version of its streams for the irrigation of its hundred million acres of 

 irrigable soil; the harnessing of its water powers to mill and factory 

 wheels, the crowding of its pastures with new millions of live stock; 

 the opening up of its mines and quaries; the conversion of its forests 

 into human habitations; the coming of a vast population, and the 

 growth of institutions worthy of the time and place." 



Frederick H. Newell, Hydrographer of the U. S. Geological 

 Survey, in Survey of Reservoir Sites, says: "Water storage on a 

 large scale can rarely be made profitable to individuals or corpora- 

 tions. * * * Existing conditions, laws and customs are such that 

 the person who builds a dam on the head waters of a stream is rarely 



