THE IRRIGATION AGE 405 



prevailing before the war. The crop is harvested by hand cut with 

 the sickle and bound by hand. The reason it is so much more suc- 

 cessful in Louisiana is the application of modern machinery. The 

 crops there are cut with a self-binder. There have been economics 

 brought into the field labor, and the methods of applying and dis- 

 tributing water are patterned after the West rather than after the 

 Carolinas. There is an economy in the distribution of water, and 

 there is another very marked economy in the harvesting of the crop. 

 An industry that was not before remunerative has been made exceed- 

 ingly profitable. 



"The southern territory is also likely to develop irrigation in the 

 growing of forage crops. Alfalfa grows in the south. It will not 

 grow in the middle east; it freezes out in the winter and does not seem 

 to thrive, but it will grow and live through and become a perennial in 

 Louisiana. There seems to be quite a field for the use of irrigation in 

 the growth of alfalfa and other forage crops in the South wherever 

 you can get water at sufficient cost. 



"Now the same questions arise in the East, where development 

 has gone far enough, that have arisen in the West. In the South the 

 question has arisen between the different canals as to who has the 

 better right if they pump out more than they will supply. They will 

 in time have to establish some system of priorities there. They wiU 

 have to determine how they are going to operate under the doctrine 

 of riparian rights. That is an unsettled question there as yet. On 

 one of the streams last year so much water was pumped out that the 

 river changed its direction and ran up stream for a distance of fifty 

 miles. The current changed and ran back, and salt water came in 

 from the Gulf and ruined the pumps farthest down the stream. Those 

 are matters that will require adjustment. If there should be in the 

 East any considerable demand on the streams, the right to take water 

 from eastern streams will be called in question, so that the economic 

 and legal phases of this question have already ceased to be sectional . 



"There is a very large district, reaching from the Gulf of Mexico 

 to the Canadian border, where this question needs to be studied. It 

 embraces western Texas western Kansas, western Nebraska and the 

 western Dakotas These states were first settled up in the humid 

 part. They were settled up and became states or settlements quite 

 sufficiently important in the western arid or semi arid part to render 

 irrigation problems important. They are in some respects among the 

 best parts of the arid region, because ditches can be built at small 

 cost. It is a country well adapted to the distribution of water, and it 

 only requires a comparatively small amount of water to supplement 

 the rainfall. As you go farther west, if you have only ten inches of 

 ainfall and an increased evaporation, you must supply more moisture 



