THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



299 



engage in private practice as a civil engineer. He is 

 peculiarly fitted to take up the work, as his profes- 

 sional experience includes some years of private practice 

 in California and some time in the public service of 

 San Francisco, the state and the United States. Again 

 it is to be regretted that the government loses the 

 services of so capable a man as Mr. Grunsky and the 

 public is to be congratulated upon his return to private 

 practice. 



Even those who have followed the work 

 What the of the reclamation service closely cannot 

 Government realize the extent to which the govern- 

 Is Doing. ment is going in the reclaiming of arid 

 lands. A correspondent of the Burley, 

 Idaho, Bulletin in the issiie of July 12 summarizes the 

 fifth anmial report of the reclamation service. The 

 significance of the figures cannot be overestimated. 

 More than three million acres of land are ultimately to 

 be covered by the projects now under way and of these 

 1,344,000 acres will receive water within a year. When 

 the 1.344,000 acres are taken up by settlers they will 

 yield to the government $5,372,000 annually, an amount 

 sufficient to build two large projects. The acreage will 

 make 33,000 farms of forty acres each and assuming 

 that the families settling on these farms average four 

 members which is a small estimate more than a mil- 

 lion people will have homes on lands that a few years 

 ago were considered worthless except for grazing pur- 

 poses. 



The sentiment of the people of the west is voiced 

 'is the statement of Statistician J. C. Blanchard, "Cer- 

 tainly these are pleasing facts. The proximity of the 

 day of such rich returns makes us all feel good. It 

 will inspire us to harder work, and occasion general re- 

 joicing in the western irrigation states." 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



BY G. L. SHUMWAY. 



In the early days of Nebraska, J. Sterling Morton 

 initiated a splendid work in forestry when he secured 

 the passage of the resolution by the State Agricultural 

 Society urging the creation of Arbor Day. Later this 

 was passed by the state legislature and the governors 

 of Nebraska by an annual proclamation have set aside 

 a certain day to plant trees, and it has now become a 

 custom in nearly every public school. 



Nebraska, with her miles and miles of prairie on 

 which no trees were found, was a fertile spot for the 

 birth and growth of this idea. Later on, when Grover 

 Cleveland called Mr. Morton into his cabinet, the dimin- 

 ishing forest lands were attracting attention and the fact 

 was brought out of the dull labyrinths of federal sta- 

 tistics. 



Mr. Morton saw the only sensible solution was plant- 

 ing trees. The forestry department found its birth, and 

 if Grover Cleveland did do all the wrongs of his admin- 

 istration credited to him, he atoned for it all by calling 

 the Nebraskan to Washington and by his subsequent ap- 

 proval of the creation of the forestry department. 



There is no logic in fencing the forests we have. 

 We need them to build homes. The only manner to pro- 

 vide forests for future generations is to plant more trees. 

 In this particular, the forestry department of the United 

 States, under the present management, has been sin- 

 gularly derelict. It has been stated and spread through 

 the press as an accomplishment of the department, that 

 it has planted 280,000 trees the present season. Two 

 hundred and eighty thousand as a glance may appear 

 a staggering array of figures, but without any organized 

 effort, except the inspiration of beautifying homes, 

 there are now planted annually in the United States 

 several thousand times that number of trees; in fact, 

 the estimate is 600,000,000 for the present year. 



According to the report of Chief Forester Pinchot 

 the average cost of planting a thousand trees by the 

 government is about $5. Actually, out of the extensive 

 appropriations of the forest service, amounting to about 

 two millions per annum, some $1,400 was expended in 

 following out the original intent of the creators of the 

 forestry service. That is an improvement over previous 

 years, for it is understood that last year only about 

 $400 were expended in planting trees. 



At the Denver convention a few dull statistics were 

 arrayed, which might be worthy of recapitulation. It 

 was stated that 127,000,000 acres of public domain were 

 in forest reserves, only a very small percentage of which 

 were actually forest lands, or had any prospect of ever 

 being anything but grazing land. It was stated that 

 4,000 applications for homesteads had been made by 

 prospective settlers by and under the forest reserve 

 homestead law. The law has been in effect about two 

 years, and of the 4,000 applications only about 1,000 

 had been acted upon. It was not stated the number ap- 

 proved, nor the number whose judgment the forest 

 rangers had questioned. 



It will be seen by comparison of the acreage within 

 the reserves and the number of applications which have 

 been acted upon that it will take a period far beyond 

 the expectations of the present generation, and several 

 future generations, before the public domain can be 

 occupied under the operation of that "joker" homestead 

 law. 



