54 FOREST LANDS FOB THE PROTECTION OF WATERSHEDS. 



15th of June. In those days the Government had not undertaken 

 the care of its rivers and its waterways as within the last twenty 

 years. The result was that those who were using the rivers for their 

 commerce were obliged to have their own dredges for service in sum- 

 mer, their own lighting system for the various rivers, and their own 

 range lights to guide across the various bars which are forming be- 

 tween Hartford, Conn., and Long Island Sound. In that service 

 we could start our dredges about the 10th of May, in which time the 

 flow got so that we could reach the bar in about 20 feet, and about 

 the 1st of July we had the courses cleared out at an expense of about 

 $58.000, and the rest of the season we could go on with our commerce. 



In the last twenty years, and right down to the present time, in an 

 aggravated way, the length of high-water flow in spring has been 

 exceedingly shortened. Starting with March, freshet after freshet 

 comes with an ijnmense waste of water, freshets ranging from 15 to 

 20 feet follow close upon one another, so that we lose the use of the 

 water, and by the 20th of May, instead of the 15th of June, we arrive 

 at a point where a full loaded passenger steamer of 1,500 tons must 

 wait, must stop, or else instead of dredging in accordance with the 

 present channel of 150 feet wide, with 9 feet at low water in summer, 

 we must leave one bar and immediately go to another, where we have 

 only a 25-foot channel, just enough to drop the keel into it, and then 

 make another 10 miles, and still another 10 miles, and then put in 

 another 50 or 60 feet wide at the bottom of the slope, and gradually 

 in that way we can keep the daily line of passenger steamers that 

 operate in that river in operation by having every great steamer and 

 having the Government engineers immediately attack another bar 

 and keep going. We have been able to navigate very successfully 

 there, and in that time we have been able to dredge through those 

 bars, only half the width that the Government project calls for. 



If we continued and carried out and spent the rest of the appro- 

 priation, amounting in those days to about $16,000 for two years, 

 or about $20,000, out of which the Government received its proportion 

 for the proportionate expense of the engineering department in 

 that district, we found we were throwing away the money, that we 

 could get through with a 70-foot channel, and that we have done right 

 down to the present year for the last ten years, and I presume we may 

 continue to get along in that way for a good while to come. In 

 speaking of the moving of this sand, which I would like to take up 

 now. for I think, without having statistics that the chairman asked 

 for, I have forty years of practical experience, and I know that which 

 is coming and that which has come. I know how the sand has 

 come through the forest down there, and how it moves ; that the sand 

 is composed of a clean, white grit, as sharp as diamonds; that it is 

 heavier than the alluvial soil. At every point from Hartford to 

 the Sound, at every wide bank, this sand deposits, and that makes the 

 bar, say, from 300 to 1,600 feet across, so in the three miles we may 

 have from one to three miles of dredging in each year. As we dredge 

 those bars, that sand, under the direction of the officers of the Govern- 

 ment, is deposited in the only place where it can be put, as far out 

 of the channel as we can put it. When the river carries down silt 

 from the mountain it brings a deposit, and that deposit is dropped 

 below this bar, and in the course of the next year it brings up at the 

 next place, and in the course of a number of years it reaches the 



