THE GLEANERS 83 



"If it pays to pump water into an arid town- 

 ship west of the rain belt, why wouldn't it pay 

 us to pump water out? Water too much of 

 it is all that stands between us and pros- 

 perity." 



The suggestion to undertake the task of 

 pumping the water out of a forty-five-thousand 

 acre catch-basin as full of holes as a sieve did 

 not catch on very fast in Oakville. But the 

 State of Iowa officially inclined an ear. 



Iowa plows ninety-seven out of every one 

 hundred acres in her dominion, and she was 

 beginning to worry over the increasing num- 

 ber of her farmers who were cashing in their 

 unearned increment and escaping with it to 

 Saskatchewan. Her engineers went to work 

 quietly, and shortly they had the upper seven- 

 teen thousand acres of the Iowa Slough or- 

 ganized as the Louisa-Des Moines Drainage 

 District No. 4. Almost before the web- 

 footed farmers splashing around in their corn 

 fields back of the river wall knew what was 

 happening, steam dredges began scooping 

 arteries and laterals among the muck and ooze. 



Now it takes a community, especially a 

 malarious one, a long time to wake up to an 

 idea. Oakville slumbered on for a year or two. 



