ch. ii] WATER STORAGE 31 
plains of the West, where they slope upward to the 
foothills of the Rockies. It is a white man’s country. 
Although under the Equator, the altitude is so high 
that the nights are cool, and the region as a whole is 
very healthy. I saw many children-—of the Boer 
immigrants, of English settlers, even of American 
missionaries—and they looked sound and well. Of 
course, there was no real identity in any feature ; but 
again and again the landscape struck me by its general 
likeness to the cattle country I knew so well. As my 
horse shuffled forward, under the bright, hot sunlight, 
across the endless flats or gently rolling slopes of brown 
and withered grass, I might have been on the plains 
anywhere from Texas to Montana, The hills were like 
our Western buttes ; the half-dry watercourses were 
fringed with trees, just as if they had been the Sandy, 
or the Dry, or the Beaver, or the Cottonwood, or any 
of the multitude of creeks that repeat these and similar 
names, again and again, from the Panhandle to the 
Saskatchewan. Moreover a Westerner, far better than 
an Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country. 
There should be storage reservoirs in the hills and along 
the rivers—in my judgment built by the Government, 
and paid for by the water-users in the shape of water- 
rents—and irrigation ditches. With the water stored 
and used there would be an excellent opening for small 
farmers, for the settlers, the actual home-makers, who, 
above all others, should be encouraged to come into a 
white man’s country like this of the highlands of East 
Africa. Even as it is, many settlers do well; it is hard 
to realize that right under the Equator the conditions 
are such that wheat, potatoes, strawberries, apples, all 
flourish. No new country is a place for weaklings ; but 
the right kind of man, the settler who makes a success 
