THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



691 



those thousands of sufferers digged a 

 grave six feet deeper, he would have 

 found a well of life-giving water. 



It is believed by the hydrographers 

 who have surveyed the states, that the 

 artesian water from the underflow of 

 the streams and valleys can eventually 

 he utilized for irrigating an additional 

 1,600,000 acres in Nevada alone, very 

 much the greater part of whose land 

 surfaces are so arid that they have hith- 

 erto been considered as irreclaimable 

 desert. 



Mr. C. J. Blanchard, statistician of 

 the United States Reclamation Service, 

 writes in a picturesque way of that far 

 southwestern corner of the United 

 States, "where everything bears mute 

 evidence of a terrible struggle for life. 

 It is the land which some one called 

 The land that God forgot.' Everything 

 that grows is covered with a thorn ; 

 everything that crawls is deadly. It is a 

 topsy-turvy wonderland. We may not 

 drink of the waters of the desert stream, 

 for they are salty. In this strange re- 

 gion they dig for wood and climb for 

 water, for the water is found in cup- 

 shaped pools in the hills, and the wood 

 is the big root of the Mesquite." 



Down here somewhere is where the 

 Salt River has cut through the moun- 

 tains a narrow gorge, in which the Gov- 

 ernment is putting a dam of cement 

 and sandstone, which will rise 284 feet 

 above the river. This dam will be 170 

 feet thick at the base, 1,080 feet long 

 on top, with a roadway twenty feet 

 wide across it. 



Down in the bed of the canyon is 

 the city of Roosevelt, with its schools, 

 churches, and houses, with electric 

 lights, waterworks, and modern equip- 

 ments, built by the Government for the 

 dam-builders, which will soon lie 220 

 feet in the new inland sea, from which 

 canals will carry water to assauge the 

 desert thirsts below. 



Every one of the twenty-eight Gov- 

 ernment projects which are scattered 

 over the whole western half of the 

 United States presents some new and 

 interesting engineering problem to be 

 solved. * * * 



Any detailed account of one. or of 



all, of these projects, forms a subject 

 and a task by itself. This is not the 

 place to recount the details of all the 

 different projects undertaken under the 

 new national policy by the United States 

 Government. But this much is certain, 

 that the initiation of the project con- 

 sidered as a Government enterprise is 

 another silver screw in the lead coffin 

 of laissez-faire. It is sufficient to say 

 that within seven years after the first 

 recommendation ever made by a Presi- 

 dent to a Congress on the subject, many 

 thousand people have already made 

 their homes on land that was once a 

 desert, and considered worse than use- 

 less, and was the home of the lizard and 

 the rattlesnake. There are 25,000,000 

 acres of land already planned by the 

 Government into farms and homes and 

 cities, and, according to the late Major 

 Powell, there are 75,000,000 acres more 

 of this land capable of such transforma- 

 tion, where many millions of people will 

 be able to make their homes, and the 

 whole thing done on such business prin- 

 ciples as that in fifteen years longer it 

 will not have cost the United States 

 Government so much as the value of a 

 copper halfpenny in principal or in- 

 terest. 



Surveys and perfected estimates have 

 been completed for twenty-eight irri- 

 gation projects. Out of these, all be- 

 gun, many are finished and are already 

 producing abundant crops. 



A summation of the work of the Rec- 

 lamation Service for 1907 shows that 

 it has dug 1,881 miles of canals, or 

 nearly the distance from Washington 

 to Idaho. Some of these canals carry 

 whole rivers, like the Truckee River, in 

 Nevada, and the North Platte, in Wyo- 

 ming. The tunnels excavated are fifty- 

 six in number and have an aggregate 

 length of thirteen and one-half miles. 

 The Service has erected 281 large struc- 

 tures, including the great dams in Ne- 

 vada and the Minidoka Dam in Idaho, 

 eighty feet high and 650 feet long. It 

 has completed 1,000 headworks, flumes, 

 etc. It has built 6n miles of wagon 

 road in mountainous country, and into 

 heretofore inaccessible regions. It has 

 erected and in operation 830 miles of 



