PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 223 



and forward its work, especially in California, a committee was 

 appointed by the California delegation to the National Irrigation Con- 

 gress, a committee which should be known as the California Waterways 

 Committee, and I have the honor to be secretary of that committee. I 

 make this explanation of the reason for this particular subject on your 

 program to-day. 



It has been discovered, by the investigations of these gentlemen who 

 have gone to different portions of the United States studying the ques- 

 tion of the improvement of waterways, that it is a complex problem. 

 You can not properly deepen a river unless you do a good many other 

 things, and here in California they said, "You have the very ideal 

 situation for the work of such a commission. You have here all of the 

 problems involved." If you deepen the waterways you must do that 

 in harmony with natural forces. The stream itself must scour out a 

 large part of the debris which has accumulated there. Consequently 

 there must be levees erected to confine the stream within its proper 

 channel, in order that it may gather force and scour out its channel. 

 This was demonstrated, in the first place, in the Mississippi in such 

 a wonderful fashion that it has vindicated that method for all time. 

 But in the presence of such vast volumes of water as roll down the 

 steep mountain slopes of California in times of flood, levees and chan- 

 nels and other such things are utterly disregarded. You must do 

 something else. You must make arrangements in those natural reser- 

 voir sites back in the mountains to hold back a portion of this great 

 flood until it may pass safely down along the channels, natural or arti- 

 ficial. Consequently you must not only dredge the channels, but you 

 must erect levees, you must store the floods. 



Now, then, in order to diminish as much as possible the danger from 

 flood, you must see that your mountain slopes are covered with the 

 native vegetation, the brush and the trees that nature placed there, 

 instead of allowing them to be denuded by the wasteful processes of 

 the lumberman and of the sheepman. Secondly, then, this introduces, 

 in addition to these other problems, the problem of forestry, the preser- 

 vation of the covering of the slopes of our waterways. 



You see, then, we have a very complex problem which this commis- 

 sion proposes that the American people shall undertake. You can not 

 do one of these things effectively without doing them all, and we are 

 peculiarly fortunate that here in California, within our own State 

 boundaries, we have all of these conditions presented, so that it will be 

 a typical plan, a typical instance, for the commission to start with. 

 This problem is a vast one; it is not for California alone, but for every 

 state in the Union, because it means the reclamation of vast areas of 

 swamp land, and those areas of swamp land exist in almost every 

 state. Our irrigation problem, for which we so earnestly solicited the 



