1906 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



67 



is chief engineer, and no one of the 

 noted engineers under him gets, I be- 

 lieve, more than $4,000 or $4,500. The 

 salaries of the engineers range from 

 $2,200 up to $4,500. The only excep- 

 tion is Mr. Grunsky, formerly of the 

 canal commission, who has been as- 

 signed by the President to the position 

 of consulting engineer, at a salary of 

 $10,000 per annum. 



It would have been very easy, sim- 

 ply by an extension of this service, to 

 have taken the Panama canal within 

 the area of its work, involving exactly 

 the same problems that this bureau has 

 been devoting itself to for fourteen 

 years, and in which it has accumulated 

 an experience that no set of men, how- 

 ever great their capacity, can acquire 

 in a short time. 



I do not question the ability of the 

 engineers who have been employed in 

 this work, but I do contend that almost 

 all of them -I may say all that have 

 been brought to my attention have 

 been engaged in railroad construction 

 and not in hydraulic construction. 

 Railway engineering is comparatively 

 easy. It consists simply in surveys of 

 the right of way, in adopting a certain 

 standard of grade, in constructing tun- 

 nels and bridges across streams ; 

 whereas hydraulic engineering, as con- 

 ducted in the West, involves all the 

 things that are embraced in the con- 

 struction of the Panama canal, except 

 possibly the question of sanitation. 



Now, let me show what the Recla- 

 mation Service has done during these 

 three years. It has built JJ miles of 

 main canals. These main canals have 

 the size of rivers. You would be 

 amazed at the magnitude of some of 

 those works. It has built 50 miles of 

 distributing canals. It has built 186 

 miles of irrigating ditches, 150 miles 

 of telephone, 125 miles of road in can- 

 yons, involving deep rock cuts ; y/ 2 



miles of tunnels. It has excavated 

 10,000,000 cubic yards. 



In one of their works, at the great 

 Salt River dam, a dam which is to be 

 constructed of cement and stone, they 

 found they were held up by the cement 

 trust. What did they do? They set 

 their geologist to work, and the geolo- 

 gist discovered very near the site of 

 the dam material admirably suited to 

 make cement. And so they put up, at 

 a cost of $100,000, a Portland cement 

 mill, and there they are making ce- 

 ment at a great saving to the govern- 

 ment. I cannot recall exactly the fig- 

 ures, but it is a very large sum. 



Work is now going on in eleven dif- 

 ferent projects in as many different 

 states, and they are now constructing 

 the Shoshone dam,the Pathfinder dam. 

 the Roosevelt dam, the Laguna dam. 

 the Belle Fourche dam, the Gunnison 

 tunnel (6 miles long), and 12 miles of 

 ditches on the Colorado River. 



So this service i^ moving along qui- 

 etly, unobtrusively in a businesslike 

 way, under this system of individual 

 responsibility. Mr. Newell, the chief 

 engineer, is responsible to Mr. Wal- 

 cott, the director of the Geological 

 Survey, and Mr. Walcott, the director 

 of the Geological Survey, is responsi- 

 ble to the Secretary of the Interior; 

 and I believe that this work will be one 

 of the crowing glories in the history 

 of this republic. 



But even if the service of the irriga- 

 tion survey should not be employed , 

 even if its accumulated experience and 

 information should not be tapped in 

 this way in this work of identical char- 

 acter, it does seem to me that we 

 should give the President of the Uni- 

 ted States a free hand, so that he can, 

 if he chooses, turn over this work to 

 the Geological Survey, or so that he 

 can, if he chooses, adopt the system of 

 individual responsibility t<> which I 

 have referred. 





