THE GLEANERS 87 



of silt deposited by centuries of erosion pro- 

 vide, once drained, a bank account of fertility 

 even beyond the greedy dreams of the early 

 Reapers. There are undrained swamps in 

 Louisiana where soundings two, or even three, 

 thousand feet in depth have failed to find bot- 

 tom in the alluvium. 



Naturally, reclamation and expansion over 

 prime free land overlap. And when we seek 

 to ascertain in what localities reclamation pro- 

 jects first appear, we look to the districts 

 where the surrounding acres are producing 

 most bountifully and, therefore, are highest in 

 price. The first great projects were among 

 the rich plantations in the lowlands fringing 

 the Gulf of Mexico, lands devoted to sugar 

 cane and cotton. But the projects were 

 isolated, little heard of, until wise farmers in 

 the Mississippi River Valley began to look 

 ahead, about the beginning of the last decade 

 of the last century. The prairie farms about 

 the Illinois River, in the State of Illinois, and 

 adjacent portions of the Mississippi River 

 have for fifty years held the blue ribbon among 

 our acres, and early became so highly capital- 

 ized that the late comer who would conserve 

 labor as the worker of these fat acres was 



