1904 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



367 



and paying no rent or tribute to water 

 companies or water bondholders. 



SMALL COST OF IRRIGATED HOMES. 



Most of these works have been simple 

 diversion propositions without expensive 

 dams and the cost has been very light, 

 land reclamations averaging, according 

 to the 1900 census, but $4.92 per acre. 

 The opportunities are legion where bands 

 of twenty or forty or one hundred enter- 

 prising farmers with a little money and 

 with their strong arms and good teams 

 may build diversion or storage dams and 

 lead the water out upon i6o-acre home- 

 stead claims, building up homes upon the 

 desert which will make each and every 

 one of them prosperous. The great pro- 

 ductivity of Montana's lands is shown by 

 the census figures. The total amount 

 invested in ditches in Montana up to 

 June i, 1900, was $4,683,073, while the 

 total value of irrigation products for the 

 one year, 1899, was $7,230,042. 



At the rate of increase in farming and 

 irrigation in the state during the last 

 census decade, the next ten years will 

 see Montana's cultivated area trebled, if 

 not quadrupled, even leaving out of con- 

 sideration the vast reclamation works 

 proposed by the federal government 

 under the national irrigation law. 



CHANGING THE COURSE OF NATURE. 



The project for storing the flood 

 waters of the Milk River in northern 

 Montana, under the direction of District 

 Engineer Cyrus C. Babb, of the U. S. 

 Reclamation Service, is one of the first 

 great works investigated by the govern- 

 ment engineers, even before the passage 

 of the national irrigation act. This in- 

 volves huge dams and canals, and will 

 reclaim, when carried to full completion, 

 a very large area probably half a mill- 

 ion acres of exceedingly rich land in 

 the already famous Milk River Valley. 

 It will be a famous engineering exploit, 

 by which the water now flowing into the 

 Saskatchewan, and thence into Hudson 

 Bay, will be carried into the Missouri 

 Basin and ultimately reach the Gulf of 

 Mexico. The government has also taken 

 up the Fort Buford project in eastern 

 Montana and North Dakota, and is like- 

 wise preparing to spend $2,500,000 in 

 the Wyoming-Shoshone project, which 



will reclaim some of the lands of south- 

 ern Montana. These are the most ad- 

 vanced of the government works. In 

 various other parts of the state the na- 

 tional hydrographers are making recon- 

 noissances and surveys, investigating 

 reservoir sites and reclaimable areas. 



A serious menace, however, to the ag- 

 ricultural future of the state lies in the 

 tendency to land absorption into im- 

 mense private holdings, which have re- 

 sulted largely through the abuse of the 

 desert-land act and the commuters' 

 clause of the homestead act, under which 

 government land is entered by specula- 

 tors and dummies and not by actual set- 

 tlers. W. W. Wooldridge, president of 

 the Montana Fruit Growers' Associa- 

 tion, in a recent address cited n great 

 ranches in Montana with an average 

 acreage each of 55,000 and showed sta- 

 tistically the greater benefit which would 

 have come to the state had these been 

 settled up into several thousand small 

 farms and occupied by settlers and their 

 families. There seems to be a strong 

 sentiment throughout the state for the 

 repeal of these laws, leaving only the 

 original homestead law, which has 

 worked so successfully in building up 

 cooperative irrigation colonies in the 

 Milk River Valley. 



IRRIGATION INCREASES MINING. 



All of this great promise of agriculture 

 will, however, but add to Montana's fame 

 as a mining state. " Speaking from a 

 miner's standpoint, "said the Geological 

 Survey official quoted above, " Mon- 

 tana's surface has been but indifferently 

 scratched. We know that whole moun- 

 tains exist of ore too expensive to work 

 because the cost of living for man and 

 beast is too high. The state has thou- 

 sands of other mountains of which we 

 know little or nothing. Montana is a 

 vast country of itself; the mountains of 

 its western half cover thousands and tens 

 of thousands of square miles. Now, if 

 we extend agriculture throughout the 

 state, lead the great streams out of their 

 deep channels and spread them over 

 some millions of acres of arid soil, and 

 this mountain wealth can be turned to 

 man's account, railroads will penetrate 

 the desert, and Montana can almost sup- 

 ply the world with the metals." 



