402 THE IRRIGATION AGE. - 



and you have to provide for it; and therefore you have to depend on 

 the irrigated lands, and those lands to be available have to be dis- 

 tributed throughout the range country because when the storms come 

 in the winter you cannot supply stock 50 or 100 miles from a railroad, 

 even if you had an unlimited supply of feed at the railroad. It is im- 

 possible to transport it; you must store it where it is needed, and the 

 needs of the livestock business have been one of the greatest incen- 

 tives to irrigation and furnish one of the best markets for crops grown, 

 principally native hay and alfafa. Those are the two leading general 

 crops. I do not think corn can ever become a general crop under irri- 

 tion. It is grown in restricted areas as a part of the system of rota- 

 tion, in places as a cultivated crop; but there is a considerable portion 

 of the arid land where it is too cold nights. That is a characteristic 

 of the arid region that it is too cold nights to make it a corn-growing 

 region. Besides, alfafa is a better stock food, and you could not grow 

 corn at a profit if you had to ship it out. 



"Now the same thing is true of wheat. Unless there shall be a 

 market in the East so that you can get it to the ocean without exces- 

 sive railroad charges, there will never be any large development of 

 the wheat growing industry in the irrigated regions. You cannot 

 grow it and ship it out. The great bulk of the wheat grown now is 

 consumed at home, and in a good many of the arid states they do not 

 raise enough to supply their home demand, do not begin to raise 

 enough. Montana, Wyoming and Idaho are all importers of flour. 

 They are considerable importers of oats. They have not reached the 

 point where they supply the home demands, and this is true of nearly 

 all those states, that the development of mining the precious and use- 

 ful metals and the growth of the home demand for the local food 

 supply is going on now faster than the extension of irrigation. Fur- 

 thermore when we have done all we can, there will not be 10 per cent 

 of the territory west of the 100th meridian, uatil you get over into the 

 rainy districts on the Pacific coast, that can ever be brought under 

 cultivation. Either there is not the water or it is not available; you 

 cannot make use of only a small fraction of the Columbia. It is ques- 

 tionable whether we can ever utilize all of the Colorado, and it is 

 doubtful if we can make a complete utilization of the Missouri. 



' 'The system that ought to be adopted is to attach, if possible, 

 the grazing to the irrigated lands; give a man who has 160 acres of ir- 

 rigated land a preference, a perfect right to lease a certain area and 

 not a very large area of the contiguous pasturage so as to have the 

 pasture lands divided up as irrigable lands are into small holdings. I 

 would not permit anybody to lease more than four sections. Now, 

 that is not a popular doctrine in the West today. That is not popular 

 with the men who use it because they keep much larger areas. It 



