CHAPTER VL 



RECLAIMING THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT. 



Months ago an article appeared in the Scientific American from 

 the pen of Professor John Le Conte, on the subject of the arid 

 regions of our country, commonly called the Great American 

 desert. Not possessing a file of the paper and having preserved 

 only a mere scrap of this article, we are unable to quote more than 

 the following: 



" A vast treeless region, stretching away from the eastern base 

 of the Rocky Mountains and the great plains, plateaus and basins 

 lying west of the same range, and constituting the arid region, 

 embracing more than one third of the entire area within the terri- 

 torial boundaries of the American Union." 



After giving a description of this vast desert, Professor Le Conte 

 proceeds to show such conditions existing as to make the lauds of 

 this region only productive by means of irrigation, and gives it as 

 his opinion that, were every spring, rill, rivulet and lake of this 

 entire region made available, not more than three per cent of the 

 desert could be reclaimed. We had solved at the time this article 

 came under our eye the problem of the conservation of the waters, 

 and were not, in any degree, disheartened on account of this 

 gloomy picture, but rather greatly encouraged by the fact that the 

 Professor re-enforced our previous knowledge by his account of 

 the great water preserves of this section the ices and snows lying 



