THE 1RRIGA TION A GE. 231 



parties will not do it, the Government will not do it unless it can have 

 the benefit of the irrigation when it comes. This bill provides for 

 that. 



I desire to say to the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator 

 from Wisconsin that Eastern people are not so universally against the 

 improvement of this vast region as you might suppose in the first 

 instance. Nearly the entire press of the country advocates the re- 

 clamation of these arid lands. 



A more direct wav of improving the Mississippi would be to make 

 lakes in the mountains, and you would not require so large an annual 

 appropriation for the Mississippi. I have no doubt that great results 

 can be accomplished by storing the water to mitigate the floods but 

 the objection is raised that it will benefit lands in western Kansas and 

 Nebraska, and probably western Arkansas in fact, all through the 

 West and on the Missouri river and its tributaries. That, they say, 

 must not be done. You must let all the floods come down if by stop- 

 ping them you would reclaim the arid lands. They say that must not 

 be done. Better to have the floods, they' say, than to reclaim any of 

 the deserts and so the floods keep on coming. 



You do not make objection, and I do not make objection, to build- 

 ing up the banks to protect the people from overflows. I believe it 

 ought to be done, and if that is the only way in which those States can 

 be protected I am in favor of doing it. But if you are going to protect 

 them by building up banks, why not do it also by building the reser- 

 voirs. You may say it is doing it by indirection, but you put the 

 appropriations in the river and harbor bill to build up the banks, and 

 I am in favor of doing it, not because ic is necessary for the improve- 

 ment of navigation, but because it is necessary to protect those great 

 States from overflows. That is why it is done. And if the appropri- 

 ation to build the ba.nks goes in the river and harbor bill, there is no 

 reason why the appropriation for the reservoir should not go there 

 too. 



Now, here is a case where you can not successfully irrigate the 

 lands for the Indians we have had the investigation and we have 

 reports on it without this great reservoir and canal. Nobody will 

 undertake that work unless the land is withdrawn. You can not make 

 any progress toward it unless you have a survey and the withdrawal 

 of the land. You have to make a contour survey and withdraw the 

 lands, and then undoubtedly you can find many persons and many cor- 

 porations, if you are willing to let it be monopolized when you have 

 surveyed it, to take it off the hands of the Government. It ought not 

 to be monopolized. The Government ought to do it. But that coun- 

 try ought not to be always a desert. It is the grandest enterprise I 

 know of to reclaim a very large amount of land which, when it is re- 



