IHE CONSERVATION OF WATER :l : '-.',' w^.Mmm^M '"* LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class THE CONSERVATION OF WATER THE GUNNISON CANON CLOSE TO THE DAM SITE The dam which has been erected here returns the Gunnison water through a tunnel in the side of the gorge to the Uncompaghre Valley, ten miles away, where it provides homes upon fertile farms for thousands of families. (See page d) (D b. o S S o T3 ^ S _, o .2 -S to s - : 03 'J S > g I bo '> S rt C ^ O rt 2 3> 2 ~> co n3 C S3 ^5 C ^ ^ a o 55 3 15 .! rt si O 3^ . s . fJIH 2 M.tJ (D rt - 2 w bp- .-M 5 I 5 | 5 ^"!ll S 4> ,5 to CO ^ .P< o TJ cu cu > * ' rt ^ ; ^ O jg ^ ^ || ^ co ^ *w "S , o g .o 55 ^ o - 1 - s .S .2 ! S g S 2 JS | 'I * | J * 2 rt m" S M ^ I rt - u -^ 3 o Q -5 PH "^ o W o to >5 O -5 C 52 rt .5 to 4> tn" i- ^ o l *- 1 ^ W) a) o3 rt " * ^ T3 - ^3 ^ - "" . >^ rt , > rt >* - 2 W 4) *S M IM ( 03 + O " ^ " 81-8 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION ing channel through a bed of friable alluvium, and come at last to join the Mississippi. On the whole upland of the Missouri the rainfall averages but fifteen inches each year, and this comes at such times that much of it benefits the river very little. During the summer sea- son the ice and snow in the mountains melt and feed a very considerable flow into the river ; but the rain that makes the prairie streams, such as the James, the Little Missouri, the Platte, begins slowly in April, and is soaked into parched ground and does not until May become violent. Then through May and early June it tears swiftly into the river bed, sweep- ing with it the loose and friable earth. Filling its bed to overflowing it pours along, a turbid flood, doing enormous destruction. As quickly as it came the flood ceases, the prairies go dry and the coulees are sunbaked; and the Mis- souri, which has been a raging flood, becomes a little and inefficient river. Along the banks of this stream are produced fabulous crops which seek markets lower down but the insufficient 3 33 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER channel at harvest time renders transportation almost impossible, and makes the river useless. All through the summer the clouds sweep over the shadeless plains without dropping moisture upon them, and the Missouri dwindles away until the fall rains begin to swell it just as the ice is forming. The rainfall upon the Ohio is far different from that upon the Missouri. Averaging about forty inches, it falls in places seventy inches in a year, and produces enough in the river to maintain a beautiful boating stage every day in the season. Unfortunately the greater part of it goes to waste. The heaviest rains on the Ohio begin in February or March, when the hillsides are frozen and the earth can absorb nothing. Usually the hills are at this time cov- ered with snow which melts under the rain- fall, and the snow and rain together sweep with amazing speed down the hillsides and fill the rivers. As they rush on they tear out the soil and carry it with them, and before they reach Pittsburg those which come out of Pennsyl- 34 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION vania are already deep yellow-brown with the burden of stolen earth. All of the valley about Pittsburg is strewn with mills. Steel furnaces and iron mills border the streams, and stores of coal and coke and the bright fires of coke-ovens line their banks. The livelihood of hundreds of thou- sands of men, and the continuance of industries in every part of America depend upon the activ- ity of these mills. Night and day their fires burn, night and day men turn the great ladles which spill burning slag down the hillsides, or open the channels and let the oily, molten iron run flaming into pigs. Night and day the roar of ceaseless activity, the crash and hammer of the steel trade goes on until the flood comes, and the waters creep up out of the banks of the streams. Inch by inch they rise, rod by rod they spread back over their banks. First the casting floors and the railways are overflowed ; then the fur- naces are extinguished. Men are driven from work, and then from their homes. Boats of 35 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER coal, sheds, furniture are swept away. Stores are invaded. Industry is at a standstill and starvation faces the workingmen out of work. Able at best to live but from hand to mouth, the energy and the charity of a nation are re- quired to provide a living for those thus held from work by the flood. Three times within two weeks one has seen, in Pittsburg, the two streams which form the Ohio there, rise out of their banks, until they stood thirty feet or more above their low water level. At the first sign of the flood the shipwrights were hastily summoned and the basement openings of stores in the lower sec- tions of the city were caulked with oakum, to withstand the floods. As the waters rose the stores were closed and the first floors caulked. But, in spite of this, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even millions, were lost in this inva- sion by the rivers of several blocks of the city land. Lower down the Ohio receives the Kanawha, the Big Sandy, the Licking, the Kentucky, and 36 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION becomes even more destructive. It sweeps back over its farmlands to its bluffs and invades all the neighboring valleys and their towns. At Cincinnati it rises sixty-five feet vertically, and floods streets which at low water are sixty-five feet above the level of the river. This immense torrent, seventy feet deep, a mile wide, sweeps along at a gait of nine miles an hour, wrecking steamboats, sinking coal barges, and doing more damage than it can pay for in a whole season of service. A six-story warehouse built on the bank of the river at Cincinnati when the water is low, would be entirely overwhelmed and hidden from sight at high water ; and a shallow steam- boat might sail safely over its roof. Below Cincinnati the Ohio receives the Ten- nessee and. the Cumberland, two mighty rivers, either of which is as destructive as the Ohio above them ; and the three pour out into the Mississippi, to go on damaging property all the way to the Gulf. For it is the Ohio which makes the grand floods of the lower Missis- 37 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER sippi. The volume of water contributed by the Ohio is nearly half of all that goes into the Mississippi, and it nearly all comes in flood time. The Missouri and the Upper Mississippi contribute long, gentle swells, but the Ohio sends precipitous and destructive waves one after the other. A single flood in the Missouri valley in 1903 is estimated to have done not less than $25,000,- ooo damage. It is doubtful if the Ohio does not do this much damage or more every year in its own valley. A flood in the Seine in France in 1910 is said to have cost that nation $200,000,000 and one in the Loire in 1851 made a total loss of $67,000,000. These immense sums show the actual prop- erty loss from the waste of water, and it is only that with which we have reckoned here- tofore. So it is against this alone that we have directed our protection against floods. We have never until now considered water as a resource. Saving the water to use when we need it, preventing loss by preventing floods, 38 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION establishing, as it were, a savings bank in which to desposit in the rainy season an account on which to draw when we are hard up has hardly until now occurred to us. Content to let the floods exist, we have devoted ourselves only to making them keep within reasonable bounds. We have built stone walls and earthen levees against them. It is in the valley of the Lower Mississippi that one sees these levees in their greatest size and their most complete system. There for one thousand miles, from Cairo to the sea, the river flows through a bed which winds from side to side of a valley between bluffs forty miles apart. When it rises out of its banks and overflows it fills this entire valley, forty miles wide, and sweeps on over cities and through forests to the sea. More than a century ago the French began building earthen ramparts to hold the river off the land about New Orleans, and this work has gone steadily on until to-day, when there exist fourteen hundred miles of levee along 39 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER the river, and thirty thousand square miles of land, the richest in America, is no longer overflowed. These levees are but earthen banks, some- times two hundred feet thick at the base, sloping up about one foot for every three horizontal, and so rising sometimes twenty-five feet "attove the top of the river bank. Where the banks are stable they are close to them, but where the banks are caving the levees are set a mile or more back and the land in front is left to be devastated. These levees are built from earth by mules and scrapers, and the whole of them have cost the nation more than $60,000,000, two-thirds of which the people along the river have contributed in taxes and the rest of which has been furnished by the na- tion. There is nowhere else in the world so magnificent a system of ramparts, so great a system of defense against so mighty a river. Year after year the yellow torrent rises against them. Year after year he gnaws at them, en- deavors to overtop them, seeks to find seepage 40 A LEVEE AGAINST FLOODS A LEVEE AGAINST FLOODS This view, taken near New Orleans, shows the earthern rampart *"hich shuts out the Mississippi from the land. Owing to the floods, uncontrolled at headwaters, the river is for a considerable part of the year above its banks, and but for these levees would cover an are? o f 30,000 square miles between Cairo, Illinois, and New Orleans. Such levees are only makeshifts, easily broken. The real cure is in the storage of the flood at headwaters. In a levee such as this at Hymelia not far from the scene of this picture a crawfish dug a hole through the earthern wall in time of flood, in 1903, causing a crevasse that did more than a million dollars' worth of damage. FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION or crawfish holes through them with which to make a crevasse. And then, in a night, when the victory against him is won, he finds a weak spot ; the soft earth slumps away; there is a rush and a roar of waters ; instantly the crevasse is there, and thousands of men, equipped with every weapon known to man for the staying of floods, can make no headway against the invad- ing monster. At Hymelia, a sugar plantation in Louisi- ana, the flood of 1903 broke through a levee in the night and before it was stopped did damage amounting to $1,000,000 to the sugar planta- tions for miles around. In the same year the levee at Hollybush, Arkansas, broke and flooded fifteen hundred square miles of land, from which the people took to the trees and awaited the coming of rescuing boats. Hardships in- describable follow such a flood. Cattle are drowned, farms are ruined, buildings are lost. The poor people must begin again with nothing to establish themselves. If we had no other evi- dence we should know that these protective THE CONSERVATION OF WATER levjees, necessary now and to be maintained as long as they are necessary, are but a make- shift at which the river laughs in mockery, and are not the real solution of the problem of floods. Yet even greater than its actual destruction is the cost of the flood to us in loss of water- power. Waterpower, as we shall see in a later chapter, is due to what is called a "head" a difference in level between the water on the upper side of a dam and that on the lower. The water descending through this distance in a tube or penstock passes through a horizontal wheel called a turbine and revolves it much as wind revolves a windmill. The weight of the column of water resting on this wheel, and the speed of its descent, provide the power, and the weight of the column depends upon the height of the "head/' When floods come rapids which are very swift and even abrupt at low water become in- significant obstructions under the tremen- dously increased volume of water. Low dams, 42 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION instead of being able to hold back the water, become merely riffles in the bottom of the stream. No head is left, as the water below is as high as that above, and even if the power house is not "drowned out" the power is all lost while the flood is passing. So all this valuable water goes by without being used, and, while it is passing, the costly plant, built to employ it, is earning nothing; and, unless a duplicate steam plant is standing by to take up the work, the mills dependent upon the power must shut down and their employes be thrown out of work. But if there is a du- plicate steam plant to do the work, then that must stand idle when the waterpower is used. There must be twice as much machinery as is enough to do the work ; and the factory must earn, and must charge consumers for the extra investment. When the flood has passed and the river has come down to a normal level the head is rees- tablished and the machinery turns again. But now only a few weeks pass by before the rains 43 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER have altogether ceased, summer has come, soil moisture is being evaporated, the river is dimin- ishing, and for lack of that great, wasted vol- ume of water that went out with the flood the mill begins to work feebly. Soon it must lay off men, or start the "steam supplement" again. It is easy to see that from the point of view of the mill proprietor a "normal water" with neither floods nor droughts in his river is desir- able; and his view is shared by his employed. A ready illustration of this is given by the Connecticut river, the principal stream in New England. The Connecticut rises in northern New Hampshire, many hundred feet above the sea, and flows southward, receiving many tumultuous tributaries. It has its rise in sev- eral lakes which offer an excellent beginning for a big storage system, and these we shall take up later. Each of the principal rivers flowing into the Connecticut is employed to drive factories the Deerfield, Miller's river, the Westfield, the Chicopee, are all lined with mills which depend upon them; and the main 44 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION river at Bellows Falls and Holyoke and at other places furnishes very large power. The lower part of the river, from Hartford to the sea, is a navigable channel having a low water depth of ten feet through which vessels ply between Hartford and New York. The people of Hartford seek to obtain here a chan- nel eighteen feet deep. In the summer of 1908 the low water season which always affects the Connecticut at that time of year set in and continued for several months. Absolutely without rainfall, entirely lacking in storage, the Connecticut went prac- tically dry. There was not water enough in the river at Holyoke to use in the industrial pro- cesses, and none at all for power. Steam supplements could in some cases supply the power but they could not supply the water needed in the mills, and one after another the paper mills shut down and left their employes idle and suffering. In the fall rain came, but this rain and melt- ing snow in the early spring filled the river so 45 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER full that they overflowed the plant at Holyoke, drowned out the fall, and again temporarily rendered the power idle and shut down the fac- tories. Flowing scarcely one thousand second feet at low water, the river rose until at Hart- ford it was twenty-six feet deeper than at low water and discharged 144,000 second feet. It spread out over the meadows and did hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage. But worst of all it wasted invaluable water. Had the flood which went to waste in one day past Hartford been saved and used in June it would have kept up an eighteen foot channel to the sea through a whole month. And had that which went to waste in a week been saved and used in the dry season it would have been enough to keep the channel eighteen feet deep all through the summer and fall, until the rains came again in November. But more than that, taking it off the crest of the flood would have allowed the Holyoke mills to keep running through flood time ; and adding it to the low water would have kept them busy 46 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION then as well. This saving of the water is the real method of preventing floods not to run it swiftly to the sea, but to confine it at head- waters and save it to use when it is needed. We must establish a savings-bank account, and store the water in it. It will pay abundant interest while it is stored, and the capital can be drawn upon when it is needed. We may see this method applied successfully in many places, and for a good example we may look at the Neisse river in Prussia, Germany, and Austria. The Neisse river rises in Bohemia, a prov- ince of Austria near the German frontier. It is formed of a number of little streams, chief of which is the Goerlitzer Neisse, which come out of densely wooded hills and beautiful moun- tain valleys. It flows by a number of prosper- ous villages in which the river turns many mill wheels, and emerging from Austria crosses Saxony and enters the Oder in Prussia. Thus it involves three states, Bohemia, Saxony and Prussia, of two different empires, Austria and 47 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Germany. There is no one government which has authority over it, and besides being diffi- cult to control it appears to be an outlaw which no one authority can take in charge. It is like the Tennessee, which rises on the borders of Virginia and the Carolinas, flows through Ten- nessee and Alabama and Kentucky and adds to the great damage done by floods in Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. The states which suffer are not those in which the damage orig- inates. So when, on the 2Qth of July, 1897, the Neisse suddenly swelled to thereto unseen pro- portions, overran its banks and poured a de- structive torrent down its valley, though the mills destroyed, the homes invaded, the villages driven from their dwellings and destroyed were mainly in Prussia and Saxony, the source of the damage lay in the denuded hillsides of Bo- hemia whence the forests had recently been cut away. What then, to do? Bohemia could not act to aid Prussia or Saxony; Germany could not pay taxes to Bohemia to pay for improvement 48 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION and control ; and yet nothing was more certain than if the conditions continued the valley might expect frequent repetitions of the de- structive flood, and might expect that discour- aged people would abandon their homes and move to more favored localities. In this emergency the mayor of a little vil- lage, Reichenberg, involved in the catastrophe, called a meeting of representatives of all the governments, and of all the villages and indus- tries involved. Four hundred men, vitally con- cerned with the correction of the river, met at Reichenberg in response to this summons. They came to look upon water in two ways first, as a destructive force which must be curbed; but second, and much more continu- ally, as a public servant capable of doing valuable work, who was escaping from their control. They were not long in arriving at a conclu- sion. Following a happy suggestion they formed a " Genossenshaft " or Fellowship, known in law as a corporation "not-for-profit"; and in 4 49 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER a true spirit of fellowship all the interested par- ties entered this body. That is, they formed, and their government allowed them to form, a fellowship for mutual and public advantage, to undertake a work the organized government had no power to do. Engineers engaged by this fellowship made a thorough survey and planned six immense dams across the upper valleys of the Neisse. Tunnels through hills would divert practically all the little streams into the basins above these reservoirs. The whole work of building six dams and collecting the water would cost $1,500,000. The members of the Fellowship considered this problem. It was a large sum of money for the villagers to raise; and they had no authority to tax anyone or to compel payments. But their plan was a good one and each govern- ment could do for this little group what it could not do for a rival government. Thus the agricultural and forestry departments of the Bohemian and Austrian governments con- 50 FLOODS AND FLOOD PREVENTION tributed liberally, half a million dollars that did not require to be paid back, and half as much more which bore no interest. Saxony and Si- lesia, which had suffered from the flood, con- tributed altogether $100,000 spread over ten years. The rest of the sum was raised on bonds from the banks, and a levy was made upon the waterpower developed by the storage of water (which we shall describe later) suffi- cient to pay the interest and eventually to retire the bonds, without taxing any value which was not created by the improvement. The dams which were thus built in the val- leys of the Neisse are not crude wooden, or un- finished concrete affairs, blotting the landscape. Instead they were built massive and beautiful, after the German method. With their curving crests handsomely decorated, their fagades graceful and dignified, and their banks above low water planted with grass and overshadowed by trees, they make a great addition to the mountain landscape. Stacked with fish, at all times holding abundant water (yet with ample THE CONSERVATION OF WATER reserve space for flood times) they furnish rec- reation places for the inhabitants and attract tourists who spend much money in the neigh- borhood. The millers have a steady power which contributes to the steady employment of the people and reduces their cost of living. The danger of a repetition of the flood is gone ; and the entire result, the turning of the waste water into use, the developing of a resource out of a danger, has been carried through at no cost to anyone because a patriotic and long-headed mayor and some country-loving citizens got to- gether in Fellowship and without pay and with- out profit carried through a beautiful public work. CHAPTER III STORAGE The Mayor of Reichenberg had the right idea of the first step in the Conservation of Water. The waste water must be stored. We must secure more of Ezry Perkins' land and turn it into water farms. Water at the wrong time is a destructive nuisance. Water at the right time is a public asset of great value. The moral is easy to see. We must hold back the inoppor- tune flood and release it when it is needed. Nature does this for us in a remarkable de- gree. There is no steadier or more remarkable great river in the world than the St. Lawrence ; and this is true because the Great Lakes, which feed it, are the largest and finest reservoirs of fresh water in the world. The torrents of water which pour into them in rainy seasons do not sensibly affect their level or increase the St. 53 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Lawrence by more than a few feet ; and a pro- longed drought finds the immense reserve in them still feeding the outlet stream with an equal volume. It is only through long periods of years that their level fluctuates, and even that cannot be entirely attributed to the rainfall and drought. We cannot construct such reservoirs as these upon our other rivers, but we can store larger volumes of water upon them than we have ever contemplated doing, and we shall find this mat- ter of water storage of water farms and white coal mining growing larger in our life for many years to come. Every acre of land that we irrigate demands water stored in reserve above it. Every waterfall which we turn to electricity demands a reservoir which will carry it through drought and preserve it through flood. Every navigable channel de- mands an adequate supply of water in dry sea- sons, and demands that the floods be kept back from it; and every other use which we have for water contributes to this demand. 54 STORAGE The basis for such storage and for any devel- opment of water is a careful survey and meas- urement to determine how much water falls upon the watershed of each river, how much of that makes its escape by river, and how much can be held back in available reservoir sites and used profitably. To this work the Government has already given much time and money, and while the observations and records are not com- plete they constitute a large and valuable mass of information. We have now records of rain- fall in all parts of the country, carefully dis- tricted, so as to cover the headwaters of every principal stream and many little ones, and showing in detail, week by week, how much rain falls in excessively wet, in very dry, and in normal years, and how often these variants may be expected. Measurements of streams have been made with equal care, and recorded in " second feet " that is, in the number of cubic feet of water which run past a given point each second of time. It is possible now to tell with accuracy 55 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER how much water from a given rainfall runs into the rivers in the spring, when the ground is already saturated, and how much in the fall, when the ground is dry. We know why the Ohio with a given rainfall in the spring pro- duces at once a sharp flood, whereas in August the same rainfall scarcely produces a change in the river. The average " run-off " which is the percentage of rainfall which runs in the rivers, is figured very closely, and in addition to these figures maps show the exact drainage area of every tributary stream. From these figures it is possible to compute at any point on a river the average or normal flow, the amount of water which would have to be stored above that point to hold it down to that figure in wet seasons, and released to bring it up to that figure in dry seasons. It is possible to tell how much can be used in an average year, and how much reservoir ca- pacity will be needed to save the surplus of very wet years to use in very dry years. Even with this we do not hope perfectly to normalize 56 STORAGE any river ; but it is possible to reduce its fluctu- ations to a negligible quantity and keep it always at something less than a " bank full " stage. A reservoir site having been selected in which with a minimum of expense a maximum of water can be stored, the ground must be ob- tained, houses cleared away, everything which could defile the water removed, 'and the bed reduced to good condition. From both sides of the surrounding hills a retaining wall is built out to the dam-site. The dam-site must, if pos- sible, be so selected as to provide a rock foun- dation, and as narrow a dam as it is possible to find a site for. Then upon a rock founda- tion or upon hardpan, concrete, stone, some- times only earthen fill, are heaped up, to the necessary height. The designing of concrete dams is a matter of great engineering impor- tance, and the problem of the relative factor of safety, the provision against the overturn- ing of the dam by the pressure of floods be- hind it, is one on which engineers differ widely. 57 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER The dam must be provided with a spill-way in which floods may begin to discharge before the crest is overflowed. They must have releasing gates or sluices through which all the water may be drawn out as needed. If they are in navigable streams they must be equipped with locks in which vessels may pass between the upper and lower level. And in many cases they are provided with steel attachments called flashboards which may be raised as the floods recede, increasing the storage capacity of the dam, and lowered to release surplus water ahead of an advancing flood which it is neces- sary to provide for. In each dam provision is made for the development of power at the out- let due to the head of storage behind the dam ; but this power is not as reliable in amount as power from the same stream a distance below the reservoir. In the cost of such storage there are many things to be reckoned the cost of the ground, sometimes the removal of whole villages, the moving of cemeteries, the preparation of the 58 il ^ b a 1 "8 8 1 Q ^ co 8 JS is; "rt '5 -^ OF THE UNIVERSITY .* 'o = 5 > 3 8 S TT STORAGE ground, the actual construction of the dam and retaining walls. Such costs vary widely ac- cording to locality, and they are usually ex- pressed in relation to millions of cubic feet of storage capacity behind the dam. Thus on the Mississippi the reservoirs have cost about $14 per million feet. In commercial storage the cost is often $100 per million feet. Even twice that amount is not unusual in old settled parts of the country, though in New England stor- age can usually be secured for $150 per million feet. That is the whole secret of the water farm. Wherever there is land in a valley capable of] being made part of a storage basin by the erec- tion of not too costly a dam, and where there j f is a drainage area of sufficient capacity above,* that farm becomes of value in proportion to the depth to which it can be flooded and the distance the water falls in running down to sea level. Ezry Perkins alone could never develop and use the storage capacity of his farm. The res- 59 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER ervoirs of a whole river must be developed by some unit organization, public or private, like the Fellowship of the Neisse. But when it is done the water stored will return the cost of the dams and of the land at the rate of thirty cents for every million feet of stored water, for every foot it drops through turbines on the way to the sea ; that is to say, $30 a year for every acre one hundred feet above the sea which can be flooded twenty-five feet deep in water; or $150 an acre-year for the same quan- tity at an altitude of five hundred feet. Disregarding the Great Lakes, which are Nature's reservoirs, the largest water farms in the world are the basins at the head of the Mississippi river in Minnesota, created by the federal government to reduce floods and to im- prove navigation. They are an indication of the way we must go, for in time we must treat every river in America as the headwaters of the Great Water have been treated. The Upper Mississippi rises in a plateau region in northern Minnesota, where it is -fed 60 STORAGE by innumerable lakes, and surrounded by a great area of swamps cut by small and crooked rivers. Much water which falls upon this region naturally flows off quickly at flood time, and the rest lies stagnant in the swamps, use- less for any purpose in the river. Down from this plateau the river flows in a series of rapids culminating in St. Anthony's Falls at Minne- apolis. Below and between these rapids the river is navigable except in extremely dry sum- mers. In the old days the river at St. Paul had less than one thousand second feet Discharge at low water, and the channel was often less than one foot deep. The power at St. An- thony's Falls, imperfectly developed, was shut down in floods, and almost useless in late summer. Among the lakes at the hea3 of the Missis- sippi the government engineers selected the largest, Leech, Winnibigoshish, Cass, and Po- kegama, and some smaller ones as . reservoir sites. These, with the surrounding land, were set aside by Congress, and low dams, none of 61 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER them more than fourteen feet high, were set across the outlets, equipped with bear trap gates regulating gates to allow the water to flow out as needed. It required several years of accumulation to get a " working capital " of stored water in these reservoirs, and they can be drawn upon through several dry seasons without giving out. The low wooden dams have been replaced by concrete at a slight cost, and the whole system now retains in flood time 93,000,000,000 cubic feet (enough to cover 2,000,000 acres of land one foot deep). This is the largest artificial storage in the world. The result of it has been to keep the Missis- sippi at St. Paul never less than three feet deep in the lowest water and usually four feet, and to take the crest off the spring floods. At the falls it has rendered all the waterpower steady and extremely valuable. Engineers estimate that at St. Anthony's alone it has benefited the manufacturers an amount in excess of $500,000 annually. No return from this benefit is now made to the government, but it is certain that 62 STORAGE before long steps will be taken to secure a re- turn from this which will repay the cost of the reservoirs. Reservoiring is very necessary for the pre- vention of floods, for the improvement of navi- gation, and for the development of power. But it is equally important for irrigation; and in the west, where irrigation projects are carried on, we find some of the largest storage clams and some of the largest reservoirs in the world'. One of the great rivers of the west is the Flathead, which becomes the Pend d'Oreille, and which in turn helps to form the Columbia. This is a magnificent stream, flowing at times very swiftly, at times in a still, deep, navigable channel. It has on its upper course one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, Flathead Lake, a body of glacial water forty miles long and fifteen miles broad, surrounded by lofty and snow-clad mountains capped with glaciers. Out of this flows the river to furnish water for power, irrigation, and navigation. These three 63 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER interests properly conserved do not interfere with each other. An acre foot of water properly applied is sufficient to irrigate an acre of ground through a year. It is the equivalent of twelve inches of rainfall applied at exactly the right time and in the right amount and under perfect control. Flathead Lake contains a surface of nearly 400,000 acres. A dam five feet high above low water level at the lower end, not raising the water above the ordinary high water level, would store 2,000,000 acre feet, or an amount exactly equivalent to all the reservoirs of the Mississippi. This would not alter or deface the shore line, render the lake less beautiful or do anything injurious ; but it would add to the Columbia in dry times water enough to irrigate copiously and too abundantly one million acres, or under proper restrictions two million acres of rich desert land. Storage for irrigation, the enormous dams constructed to hold back the floods, we will consider again under the head of irrigation. 64 g X ** 2 g 1/5 2 w * flip v* bJO ?t .. 'o O *-> O ^ 'O O ^ S r| "S _o ^ "5 S 1 dn OJ 73 3 STORAGE It is enough to show here the need and the character of this water farming which is so necessary to irrigation farming in the west. In time on every river in America the work will be undertaken, and every lake will have its boundaries fixed, its outflow controlled by proper mechanism. But this is not the only form of water storage. The water farm must have a wood lot. The hillsides above it must be planted with trees to facilitate the preserva- tion of the water supply, and to prevent the basin from filling up with washed soil. Everyone who has lived in the country and has used a well knows that water is stored in the earth as well as in lakes and ponds. Those who live in a prairie country know that when trees are planted about a well this storage in- creases and the well collects more water. The forest affects the run-off and the storage of water in many ways. The forest shades the moist earth beneath it from the direct rays of the sun and so prevents evaporation. A pan of water set beneath the 65 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER trees will only evaporate a third as fast as one set out in the open field. Then the earth be- neath the trees is formed of vegetable mold, weathered rock, finely divided soil mixed with decayed leaves and twigs, to form a soil called humus, which absorbs water like a sponge, retains it, and gives it out slowly, drop by drop. And in the third place, the roots of the trees working continually in the soil, open little pas- sages through which the water runs deep into the earth, forming subterranean reservoirs from which flow springs, to appear far down the hillsides. So when the rain comes down upon the forest it does not run off quickly as from bare ground, but for the most part is held in check by the trees and the soft earth. After the ground is saturated and the woods are unable to retain more it runs into the streams as rap- idly as from barren ground, but not until a large amount has been placed in forest storage. The roots bind and consolidate the earth even then so that no earth is carried away by the 66 STORAGE running water. And when the rains have ceased and the barren ground has gone abso- lutely dry, when the water-courses fed by bare and open ground have not a drop left to flow in them, the forest soil by slow seepage still gives out its treasures, and the hillside springs, fed by the deep reservoirs, still flow. But the forest is able to do even more than this for the supply of water in our streams. Much of the rain which falls beneath the trees dissolves from the soil the plant food which the trees need and is carried upward through their veins to envehicle this nutriment. The trees absorb much of the water and all of the food, but the rest of the water is breathed out through their leaves,, in what is called trans- piration, and in this process a great quantity escapes into the air. This produces a coolness in the air over the forest which is felt by bal- loons sometimes three thousand feet above the trees. Rain is caused by the cooling of the moist vapor in the air. When a current of water 67 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER vapor, invisible in the sky, encounters a cooler current it condenses and forms clouds, and if the cooling and condensation continue these further precipitate into rain. On the western prairies, often during long dry spells, rich cur- rents of unseen water vapor are sweeping over- head, but the hot plains prevent its cooling and its precipitation ; and many attempts have been made to force this result by firing cannon and bombs. How much more simply the forest does this ! The cool air over the forest chills and con- denses the passing moisture and causes it to fall upon the trees. Experiments actually carried on for thirty-three years in a forest of eigh- teen thousand acres in France show that for every thirty-six inches of rainfall in the center of the forest there was but thirty inches in the edge of the forest and twenty-four inches in the open fields ten miles away. That is why the destruction of our forests has been so destructive of our river channels; but there is a greater reason. For the roots of 68 STORAGE the trees bind the soil and prevent erosion, and when the trees are cut away the water rushes pell-mell clown the hillsides into the channels, carrying with it sand and gravel. It runs away to the sea with the light and fertile elements, and leaves the sand and gravel to block the channels and prevent the use of the water for power and navigation. So the Conservation of Water requires not only the establishment of water farms, of big reservoirs, but of tree farms as well prop- erly conducted forests upon the hillside and upon the plain ; and it is one of the happy fea- tures of the work that these forests which add to the value of waterpower also furnish the material which is manufactured into useful articles at the power-sites. We have here then the big, complicated problem of our rivers rivers which flow through many states and affect both local and national things. To prevent floods, to prevent the loss of electrical energy, to preserve navi- gation, to permit irrigation, to supply our cities 69 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER with domestic water, the public must eventu- ally reservoir all the streams; and the states to add to this work and to secure a wood supply must plant forests about the headwaters. Some way must be found, then, by which this work can be carried on, and the money benefit which accrues from it may be made to bear the burden of the expense; and by which in the end the public, which owns the running water in the streams, may secure the ownership and control of these great public works which make the running water efficient. We find in the state of Wisconsin a long step taken toward this work, and a great example of reservoiring and reforesting of headwaters undertaken. A generation ago this state was covered with an immense forest containing a magnificent stand of white pine, spruce, and fir timber. Into this forest went the destructive breed of lumber men who have wasted such a large part of our heritage. They cut the heart from a small part of the forest and sent fire sweeping 70 STORAGE through the rest, burning hundreds of thou- sands of acres of primeval growth. Under its unbroken forest Wisconsin lay a land of treasure. Most of its soil is rich; its rivers run swiftly and are full of power; and their lower reaches offered fine water for navi- gation. Along the east shore extends Lake Michigan, along the west the Mississippi, and Lake Superior is on the north. From a little area of high ground in the north central part of the state flow all the streams which reach these several great waterways. Though there is no mineral fuel in the state its water powers seemed inexhaustible, drawing their summer water from thousands of ponds in the source region. It seemed a state destined to become among the wealthiest in manufactures of all those manifold things which are made from the forest. At first only the lumber men used the water- falls, and the logs that drifted to them were sawed and sent in rafts to market. Steam- boats ascended the rivers and brought in and 71 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER carried out freight. Railways crossed the state and charged low rates to compete with the waters. But as the forest burned away and was destroyed the friable soil of the upper regions washed into the ponds and the streams became less regular. Sand filled the rivers and de- stroyed the channels. The enriched lumber men, caring nothing for the future, but satis- fied with the present gain, abandoned the burned-over land to the state and deserted their fallen dams. Wisconsin should be rich. Her furniture fac- tories, standing beside the rivers which bring the lumber to them, should be among the largest in the world. Her paper mills, with an unfail- ing supply, should contribute an unlimited amount to the immense demand. Her toy fac- tories and her boat works should be known throughout the world. But instead Wisconsin found her forest almost exhausted, her rivers running wild, her navigation lost. That was the state of affairs when a young man came to the state from the forest schools 72 ' v -d .0 ^ f ^ S 5 8 s i fc ~ 3 3 S ^ |PJ! 2 ^ O -a W Ijjlj g (y 55 S f* J2 "g H-, c rt fi f-i O tn 0) i tlf 1 OF THE JMSVERSITY OF t e O 3 fa "5"^ iifi 1611 STORAGE of Germany, a man who had studieS " fellow- ships " in Switzerland and in Bohemia " fel- lowships " by which common, ordinary men, not accustomed to handling capital, give their time and their energy to developing public en- terprises for the public good. This young man, Mr. E. M. Griffith, who came to be forester, by recalling and combining the scattered com- panies of the forest army has established them as a defensive force which will restore the state. Up there in the central highland, whence all his rivers rise, he has established his stronghold, and there he has determined to gather a reserve of three million acres of trees. All over the state are or were isolated companies of the old stalwarts, ten acre and forty acre groups of pines or of cut-over ground belonging to the state. Two hundred thousand acres of this was turned over to the forester and he has been selling it off as agri- cultural land, and with the money for every acre buying and planting two or three acres of the cheap, cut-over land in his new fortress. 73 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER So he is assembling his force. Already there are nearly four hundred thousand acres in it. It was not long before this reassembling of the army and the effect of it upon the rivers attracted the attention of the mill-site owners at Stevens Point and Grand Rapids and all the other towns along the Wisconsin river on the head of which were most of the new reserves. The state of Wisconsin is prohibited by its constitution from undertaking public works. So a new law was passed for the mill owners creating a corporation a corporation not-for- profit, something almost unheard of in Amer- ica. It is called the Wisconsin Valley Improve- ment Company, and has a paid-up capital of one hundred thousand dollars, on which it is allowed to earn six per cent. The stock of this company must be offered to every power owner on the river, in the proportion which his own power bears to the whole power of the stream. If he does not care to buy, the rest divide it among themselves, but at any annual meeting he can come and demand his share, at par. 74 STORAGE The corporation, subject to the control of the forester, has the right of eminent domain over ponds and lands lands suitable for water farms in the source region, and the right to use ponds in the forest reserve. The forester sets two monuments. They cannot raise the water above the one nor draw it below the other. This insures the beauty of the forest, which is to be a great state park. The corpora- tion builds dams out of its capital and estab- lishes men to work the sluice gates. Meanwhile the State Railway Commission has surveyed the valley, determined the pres- ent strength of every power, and the extent to which it is improved by the use of storage. They add up the cost of operation and the six per cent interest, and divide the sum per horse- power of improvement on every power owner whether he is a stockholder in the improvement company or not. That is, they make a tax of it. The corporation can issue no stock without special permission and for money paid in. It can do nothing but improve the river by stor- 75 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER age. It pays its own way an3 nothing more. And the state can buy it at any time for the actual amount spent or for its physical value. There is no chance for a monopoly there. Now let us see what the forester has done for Wisconsin with the aid and co-operation of the mill men. There is so far developed four billion feet of storage, and surveys are made for twenty billion. The value and efficiency of every power on the river is already doubled. Instead of shutting down, or buying coal in the low water season, as the mills on other rivers do, those on the Wisconsin go ahead on their stored water. The lower river, which has so long been unnavigable, is soon to become a deep and useful stream, reducing freight rates in a large territory. And to indicate that the benefit is well under- stood, the forester has been called upon by the mill owners of the other big rivers, the Flam- beau and the Tomahawk, the Chippewa, the St. Croix, the Wolf, the Fox, the Peshtigo and the Menominee, to work out the same system for 76 STORAGE them all ; and within a short time not only will the three million acre forest reserve cover the head of all these streams, but their thousands of ponds will be turned into reservoirs, the rivers will have ceased their floods, there will be work at full time all the year round in every water mill in the state which means in a ma- jority of its great industries; the state will be saving many millions a year on its coal bills. Into the state treasury will come an increasing revenue from the forest tract; and an increas- ing volume of paper wood, furniture wood and lumber, drifting down the stream to the biggest paper making towns in the world. From the factory doors the finished products will proceed on canalized and regulated rivers, to the lakes and to the Mississippi, to Chicago, to St. Louis, to the Gulf and to Panama. The whole state benefits by this. And what is best, no man suf- fers a loss. Wisconsin now has one hundred and twenty- five thousand horsepower developed on her streams, and by the old method could develop 77 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER perhaps five hundred thousand horsepower. By the new system she will have at least one million horsepower worth now, as power goes up there, not less than twenty-five million dol- lars a year and in time to be worth much more and worth it partly because, thanks to the inexhaustible forest reserve and the great pri- vate tracts which are to be worked in system with it, the mills will have a perpetual abun- dance of the raw material for their goods. And of this sum a full half will be due to the reservoirs. That is the way the rest of us must travel; and in the end we will find not a bill of expense, annually renewed by flood and drought, but a steady income, from dividends regularly de- clared, on all we invest on the wise conserva- tion of our water supply by forestry and reser- voir construction. CHAPTER IV MUNICIPAL SUPPLY AND THE PURIFICATION OF RIVERS With a national indifference to our neigh- bors' well-being nearly every city in America pours its sewage and drainage into some run- ning stream, regardless of the consequences to those who dwell farther down the valley. With an equal indifference to our own well-being many cities pump their domestic water supplies from these same running streams and send them through their mains into their houses without purification or alteration. Those cities which seek to get away from this barbarous fashion find themselves confronted by one of the most perplexing situations in the whole story of Conservation. There is but one way, apparently, to raise a crop of pure water. That is for each city to establish its. own water 79 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER farm and grow the product under watchful supervision. In the same way that individual cities and states long fought against adulterated and unhealthy food products vainly and then com- bined in a national pure food law to remedy the situation universally, so we shall in time become discouraged with endeavoring to remedy this situation locally and shall pass a national pure water law, which will make it impossible for any city, factory or individual to corrupt a run- ning stream, and will make the water in our rivers clean, healthful and useful. Every water farm will be a source of healthful supply, and we shall secure the product through natural channels of distribution. The problem of securing an abundant supply of water for domestic and other uses is one which has always been difficult for cities to solve. The Romans spent limitless money and countless lives upon their aqueducts. New York to-day is spending fabulous numbers of dollars and wasting as many lives as Rome 80 MUNICIPAL SUPPLY wasteS to bring the water from the Catskills uncontaminated to her faucets. Chicago has recently spent $65,000,000 to drain her own sewage out of her drinking water, and will soon have to spend an equal sum to drain it out of the water of her neighbors. Pittsburg has spent a fortune to filter the water of the Allegheny and make it fit to drink, thereby greatly reducing her typhoid scourge; but she still pours her own filth into the Ohio for the benefit of Sewickly and Wheeling. Flowing on down to Cairo it combines with that from St. Louis and Chicago, St. Paul, and Kansas City, Nashville, and Chattanooga, and a thou- sand other cities, and flows on down to South- port, where New Orleans pumps it from the river bed and sends it coursing through her mains. And it is not only the cities that pollute the streams. The gas factories fill them with water impregnated with ammonia; the paper mills pour a vile slush into them ; chemical works add their waste ; and there is scarcely a 6 81 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER factory which does not discharge materials which render the water unfit for human use and impossible for fish to live in. Three wrongs are done thereby. First, the water is rendered unpotable, forcing cities to establish very expensive storage systems often at a great distance. Second, the fish are de- stroyed, thereby reducing a very necessary source of food from which Illinois alone, in her prairie river, secures an income of $1,000,000 annually. Third, and this some day to be looked upon as the greatest evil, there is wasted and lost in this way not only a lot of material from the manufactories which could be saved and re-used in the arts, but also a great amount of phosphorus, chiefly in the human waste from the sewers, which is taken from the soil in growing crops and which we have no way of replacing unless we save the sewage. For these three reasons if for no others the day will come when every sewer will enter into a conserving plant which will extract every- thing of value from it and discharge only harm- 82 MUNICIPAL SUPPLY less, pure water; every factory will develop the conservation of its waste and be carefully inspected to prevent stream pollution; and every river in America will flow pure and un- contaminated from its source to the sea so that any city which wishes may pump from it and use the water so drawn. If we should turn to almost any city in America, though there are a few now which have sanitary sewage disposal plants, we should find strikingly displayed the national careless- ness about this matter. We cannot find one more typical in this, nor one which shows more clearly the futility of the old-time methods of correction than Chicago. From its earliest foundation until a decade ago Chicago poured its sewage out into Lake Michigan and then pumped it back for drinking water, wasting at the same time the phosphorus in the sewage, and the lives of its citizens. When it decided on a change it reversed the current in its river and sent the sewage down to St. Louis, leaving Lake Michigan to purify itself by slow degrees. 83 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER All the sewers of Chicago in the old days emptied into the Chicago river and so into the lake, or emptied directly into the lake itself. At the head of the South Branch of the Chicago river at Bridgeport the state of Illi- nois owned a pumping station, through which water was lifted into the summit level of the Illinois and Michigan canal. Water it was called by courtesy. At the side of the pump- ing station was the outlet of a branch called " Bubbly Creek " from the gas which boiled out of it continually from decaying animal mat- ter beneath the surface. At the other end of Bubbly Creek were the Stock Yards and Pack- ingtown, and for years without number all the waste from the animals slaughtered in Packingtown and its vicinity went into Bubbly Creek. This creek had no natural current ex- cept when there was a heavy rain, which set it forward a little into the river. Sewers pour- ing into it kept up a current of perhaps a third of a mile a day. Entrails of animals, filth un- speakable, floated or sank to the bottom of the 84 O 'S -, ~ .ISPg g? g g S oS So tJ |.| J ^ jj 3 u a a v^ e j O> ii *J .-H Q ^ hr O bo? o-Sl ^1 " -a w2 2 1 IfiJ rt ^ ^, ^3 - 43 -73 9 + 4J s .s : .2 's - > - "C w "rt T3 ., rt O G ^ o rt 'g ^ ^ rt C ^ 3 .S S -o S W) -^ , . g o 0) ,3 C/2 5 ^ co to oT V T3 j S o "^ o d 2 e fll ^ -C rt MINING OF WHITE COAL dred yards back of the mill is the little garden and the cottage where 'Lije and his wife wait for their customers, and see them come across the ford or the slender hanging bridge over the Doe, bringing the corn to be ground. From the house to the mill runs a slender brook, to gather its waters in a "forebay" not more than ten feet across. And from this fore- bay runs a four inch wide flume, leading out to the top of the immense wheel. The wheel is rimmed with buckets, and when there is corn to be ground, and when the little brook has filled the forebay with water enough to run the mill for thirty minutes or an hour, 'Lije throws the corn in the hopper, and opens the tiny sluice gate. The water runs out and fills the buckets, the ancient wheel revolves, the mill stones be- gin to grumble, and soon out comes the grist. A handful of it from every peck that is the miller's toll for the grinding. The Doe is too big and too intractable for 'Lije Williams to harness it. The needs of the mountaineer do not require it. But some of these days there 101 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER will be erected across the Doe not one dam but a dozen at different points, each a tremendous concrete structure one hundred feet or more in height, penning up the spring flood water, and providing a head from which it will descend all through the year, steadily, night and day, spin- ning the electric generators and sending power through its wires out to distant lands. The peace and quiet of Happy Valley will be disturbed only when the workmen are build- ing the dam. The old grist mill will still con- tinue turning on the hillside. But in the valley below it the concrete dam, the tile-roofed power house without chimney or boiler, the cop- per wires on their tall towers striding over the mountains, the ceaseless purring of the power- makers, will stand in sharp contrast with the old times, marking the changes of the new. 'Lije Williams mined the white coal as a far- mer in Illinois digs black fuel from the out- cropping on his farm; but the new plant will be a modern and scientific mine. The power that turns the old wheel on the 1 02 MINING OF WHITE COAL hillside is the weight of the water which fills the buckets the force of gravity. And it is exactly the same force in the water shooting with incredible speed down the mountainside which spins the turbines and thrills the wire of the largest power plants of to-day. It is the same force which lures all rivers to the sea. Some day we shall find means to make each river turn mill wheels as it runs, even the mighty Mississippi ; but to-day we can only use this where there exists by nature an abrupt change of level, like a waterfall or rapid, or where we can create such a change of level by holding the water back behind a dam. This change of level, or rather the difference between the height of the water above the dam and the height below, is called a "head " and from it we compute how much power a given quantity of water will develop. Rivers, as we have seen, are surveyed and measured in " second feet " of running water the amount of water in cubic feet which passes a given place each second. When we wish to 103 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER develop a waterpower we must first determine how much water falls each year on the water- shed above the dam and what proportion runs off through the river. Then we must discover how much of the unnecessary flood water we can store up to release in dry times, and com- pute the lowest flow we need expect to get. If there are at least 300 days in the year when we can be certain of a flow of 3,000 second feet that is the amount for which a plant can be profitably installed. A horsepower is the power needed to lift 550 pounds one foot in one second. Measured in electric energy it is 746 watts; or a kilowatt, a thousand watts, is 1.34 horsepower. A cubic foot of water weighs 62.5 pounds. Therefore 8.8 cubic feet falling one foot each second are equal to a horsepower; but as machinery is not perfect and we lose something in the tur- bine, something in the generator, and some- thing more in transmission, we figure that twelve second feet for every foot of fall con- stitute a horsepower. Then if our river has 104 -d u u U 1 T3 rt T. G c: 83 "Eb c rt o U t3 u ^5 a ~ ta o C : is ever developed for (U M.4 ttJ o '-4- rt W 3 rt 0) > rt U C o bC & o ^r 4_l _ CJ t/3 u G U rt 5 ^c" M U rt r ELOP euo 6 _o 3 TJ rt C ^ ? U W ^ j c "^ *~ tj O "> X to 'o t/2 ^5 rt i-^ 'rt c ^ 'u *Z^ rt u .7^ C/5 cu tJ rt > rt 'o J o c_ rt e c U r /' rt 'S c '^ : " : y tr ^ TJ H .,H ^ TJ I W C 'o S o c o as J 5 1 C u IS rt 3 ^ 0) ~ > t 'E rt 43 c H C PL, rt ^ rt o So 43 tr. S c be 1 'c I 1 , , rt a rt "rt s rt ^ C ,0 ~, >, .^ A ^ U ^^ P u *- : ^ 'rt jS ,M rt CO V ^ | J /-. 3 ^ > Tf: *o .0 _2 5 ;1 2 o ^ S 43 a MINING OF WHITE COAL 3,000 second feet of flow and an efficient " head " of twelve feet it will produce con- tinually 3,000 horsepower. But if there is a large pond above the dam for storing water, and if the power is needed only in the day time, the whole night flow of the river can be saved in the pond and 6,000 second feet run through during the day, giving 6,000 horse- power. This is the value of the old mill pond the value of pondage, as distinct from stor- age. Storage carries a river from high season through low season to a high season again; pondage carries a local mill over the fluctuations of a day and night. The little mill on the hillside over the Doe was the most primitive of all American water- wheels. Much larger and more complete estab- lishments were set on every brook and river of New England to turn the sawmills which ate up the white pine forests; and in Wiscon- sin and Michigan and Minnesota the mill wheels still whirr over the tumbling water, turn- ing logs into lumber. But there came a larger 105 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER development beginning fifty or sixty years ago and extending down to our own time the development of larger powers which were more costly and more powerful than a single factory needed. Dams were built in the Merrimac at Lowell, in the Connecticut at Holyoke and at many other places which turned all the water of the river into a head canal. This canal extended for a mile or more on a level and then spilled its water at the end into another canal 12 or 15 feet lower, which ran back parallel with the upper one and a hundred yards from it. Parallel with this was often a third fifteen feet lower yet, and at the lower end of this the water spilled back into the river. In this development factories located between the parallel canals, and each mill drew water from the canal at its upper or front door, and after running it through the turbines shot it out into the canal at the back. As a result a dozen to two score mills were established on a single waterpower, each having its machinery operated, and no one of them having to bear 1 06 MINING OF WHITE COAL the whole development. This cheap power thus generated gave rise to the great milling industry of New England. Paper mills, grind- ing rags and wood pulp into paper, cotton mills spinning and weaving cotton cloth, woolen mills, sprang up in every village which had a waterpower, and local industry leading to such big manufacturing cities as those I have named, to Lewiston, Dover, Manchester, 'and many more, brought prosperity to New England. This was white coal mining of a good type. Even in this method, however, the mill must come to the mine. Power can only be trans- mitted mechanically a short distance and mills which needed waterpower must locate within a stone's throw of the river bank. In many in- stances this was practical; but there remained such falls as Shawinigan, in the wilderness of Canada, Muscle Shoals and the Suck in the Tennessee, the falls of the Coosa,and countless others in the western mountains which were not near cities or in locations where cities could be profitably developed. Often an existing city 107 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER was twenty to fifty miles from a waterfall the water of which went to waste. So when the first electric dynamo was coupled to the top of a turbine shaft, and the force which dragged the water (downhill was turned into an electric current a new era began. It continued develop- ing rapidly as means were found to send the power eight or ten miles from the wheels to distribute it to motors set in shops all over the city ; to drive the street railways and to light the cities with it. Then when it could be carried one hundred miles more distant waterfalls came into use to carry city burdens; and with every additional mile this has increased until to-day St. Louis is preparing to cure much of her smoke nuisance by bringing power by wire from the falls of the Mississippi at Keokuk, Iowa, one hundred and eighty miles away. This is done by turning out electric current at high pressure, in alternating or many-phase currents, and sending it through the wires at a tension of 50,000 volts. As this business has grown many problems 108 MINING OF WHITE COAL have come up and the solution of them has made the development of waterpower a ques- tion of national importance. The uses of elec- tricity are very varied. It is needed twenty- four hours in the day to pump water in city mains. It is needed every hour of the day to operate railways and to drive many mills. Other mills need power only eight, nine or ten hours during the heart of the day. Street rail- ways need their greatest power at irregular periods but chiefly in the so-called " rush " hours at morning and night when people are going to and from work, and at the theater hour. City lighting requires its heaviest power from six at night to one in the morning, and the demand for domestic lighting comes in the early morning and in the evening. Paper mills take power twenty-four hours, steadily, and so do nitrate and other chemical electrical works. This wide variation in demand makes it certain that a power plant which is sufficient to support the " peak " load of any business will have sur- plus power during the rest of the day and night 109 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER and yet the investment often requires con- stant earning at full capacity. There has grown up, therefore, the very profitable practice of " linking up " plants that is, combining in the same switchboard a large number of generating stations, which serve a wide variety of industries. Then their combined power is always at the disposal of the enterprise which happens at any given time to be calling for its " peak " or highest load, and there is no period of the day when they are required to shut down. Of course the ideal situation is never thus attained, but every station in the linking up secures some benefit. Out of this and out of other economic con- 'ditions with which we have nothing to do here grows a tendency to combine and control waterpower development under a single head; and nearly all the great waterpower companies are already in this way loosely associated to- gether so that they operate in harmony. As this tendency increases this association inclines to become a monopoly with very harmful possi- no \ IB s S u 8 ^= o * ? ^ l=f! ^) i- O v <]_) S ^j~ oo _ '5 ,3 C 3 O n5 CJ )-H ^ J^ -" .2 ^ O * H ^ CO d, > rt S S " .S c -a 2 -^ O J3 c '3 s c ^ e~ S a) t~ -PH ^ _H g cd S K^, M-l TJ ^ 5 0) O > +3 ^ Xi ' II rt -^ rt Tj S 11 i ,3 c o *-l Is 1 ^ S -S o rt "to " 1 1 5 8 ^ s 1 1 2 g -g .2 r S fe u S NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT partly as we shall see by the saving of sewage to purify the rivers; but more directly by the use of electric power in nitrate manufacture. The three mineral elements which are neces- sary for plant growth, in any soil, are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Potassium is a common product, and when the present abun- dant mines are exhausted there are other ample supplies to be tapped. Phosphorus is a rarer substance but is only used in small quan- tities. But nitrogen is rapidly exhausted from the soil by nearly all crops, and is in constant demand for renewal. It is the largest element in most commercial fertilizers. The supply of nitrogen comes from packing house waste, from cotton seed, and other sim- ilar vegetable materials, a comparatively lim- ited supply, and, the largest amount, from the famous Chilean nitrate mines. These deposits of nitrate in the desert of Chile are the largest in the world, but they are. being rapidly ex- hausted, and when they are gone, unless some other supply existed, the world would soon THE CONSERVATION OF WATER starve to death. There is, however, a great, inexhaustible reservoir of nitrogen the air we breathe. Seventy-five per cent of the air is pure nitrogen. This aerial nitrogen, however, is useless as a supply for plants, except for such species as clover and alfalfa legumes which, owing to the presence of certain bacteria in them, are able to " fix " air nitrogen and store it in their roots. For the world's supply it is necessary to fix this nitrogen into some solid form which can be distributed on the soil and absorbed from it by all manner of vegetable life. Elec- tricity offers the only solution yet known of this problem. There are two ways of obtaining nitrogen by electricity. One of these is direct anS costly, the other indirect and cheap. The direct method is nothing more nor less than by arti- ficial lightning. Everyone has noticed after a heavy thunder storm an acrid taste in the air. That is due to the presence of nitric acid, the nitrogen having been fixed or combined 132 UNIVt.tt OF ; DEVELOPMENT by the lightning with hydrogen- and oxygen to form nitric acid. Exactly the same process is carried on to-day in Norway and in Bavaria. In big towers prepared for the purpose beside powerful waterfalls electrically harnessed, sparks like lightning are continuously dis- charged; and the air through which they leap is turned into nitric acid. This acid is caught and by a chemical process is turned into a dry nitrate which can be distributed over the soil. This process requires so much power that only where electricity is cheap can it be done. It works well in Norway, where the waterfalls are very high and current can be cleveloped for about five dollars a horsepower. The other process which is used now arid probably will be extensively used in America is less direct. Everyone is familiar with the fact, discovered some years ago, that air can be liquefied. There are several factories in operation now devoted to the manufacture of liquid air for commercial purposes turning out a steel blue liquid intensely cold, which will 133 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER freeze anything in the world and which pro- duces remarkable chemical and mechanical results. Just as alcohol and water can be separated in a still, the alcohol passing off at a low tem- perature anid the water at a higher, so the nitrogen and oxygen in this liquid air can be separated by distillation. By careful regula- tion of the temperature the pure nitrogen evap- orates, leaving liquid oxygen. This pure nitro- gen gas is drawn off as the basis of a nitrate fertilizer. Many of the largest electric industries de- pend for their existence upon the electric fur- nace a retort through which a heavy, low tension current is sent, producing an effect like an arc light within the retort, the current pass- ing with heavy resistance through the particles of the contained substance, and heating it to a very high degree. Iron can be smelted and steel made this way. Carborundum is made this way and aluminum is removed from its ores and turned into the light and useful sub- 134 NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT stance employed in arts, by the same process. A more common industry is the manufacture of calcium carbide, from which acetylene is made. Lime and coke in the proper proportions are placed in a retort, the current is turned into them melting and fusing them, and the calcium carbide the chemical union of the two results. If, into this retort containing lime and coke, or containing calcium carbide previously man- ufactured, the pure nitrogen gas from the liquid air is introduced under pressure, it is immediately absorbed in large quantities by the hot carbide. When the furnace is cooled and opened there is found in it not the white lumps of calcium .carbide which would otherwise be there, but a slaty gray powder, calcium cyan- amid " lime nitrogen " as it is commercially known a combination of nitrogen, lime and carbon. Spread upon the fields this substance quickly dissolves; the lime sweetens the soil, and the nitrogen is absorbed into it and from it is 135 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER drawn into the roots and so into the stems and leaves of plants. This is the hope, an3 as far as we know now, the sole hope of the fields and farms of America. Only by this process can the nitro- gen in our soils be renewed and enriched. And only by electric power can we obtain our supply. So the cheapening and steadying of water- power, the conservation of every part of our running streams, quickly results in the con- servation of our soil, the renewal of its fertility, and the making abundant and cheap of the things we must have for food. Cyanamid of lime, the nitrogen of the air fixed with coke and lime, has many other uses beside that of fertilizing our soil. It is a cheap source of ammonia of which we need large quantities it has only to be mixed with water to produce it. It is a necessary element of high explosives; and in addition it is the cheap and direct route to produce the cyanides which are used in extracting gold and other metals from refractory ores. 136 NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT The other chemical uses of the electric cur- rent made possible by the cheapness of hydro- electric power are almost without number, and we cannot enumerate them here. The mechan- ical uses are as important. In Minneapolis, where sixteen million barrels of flour are ground each year, it is estimated that it costs one cent to grind a barrel of flour with water- power, and five cents to grind a barrel by steam power. Paper mills in fabulous numbers are run either by waterpower directly, or by hydro- electric power from some distant station. Bleaching powder is made, copper is extracted from its ore and scores of other important in- dustries carried on by these falling waters. All along the " fall line " of the Southern Appa- lachians cotton mills draw their power from their streams, and in every city which has this cheap power the busy machines in the work- shops are turned by it. Inter-urban railways, spreading rapidly through the country, fre- quently have their base of power in a concrete dam, and offer their services in a new field, 137 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER that of collecting and distributing freights to be carried on the river which furnishes the power. One of the greatest necessities in our na- tional growth is the extension of our foreign trade. In this we meet German competition most strongly. If all our raw materials and all our factories were on the seaboard the transportation cost, which is our chief handi- cap, would be eliminated. But as it is, we must carry either the coal and the raw materials, or else the finished product to the seaboard to place them upon ships, and this rail haul, for which high rates are charged, is a great handi- cap upon us. Most of the raw materials for manufacture are found adjacent to the rivers lumber, lime, iron, cotton, wool, corn and wheat, and all the other products so used are found close to water. In the development of waterpower these streams are made safely navigable, and therefore they offer an outlet to the sea much cheaper than rail to products made by the elec- 138 NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT trie power out of the raw materials. Therefore we may expect to see our export trade advance rapidly as the Conservation movement ad- vances. And we may expect to see develop new- types of smokeless cities, founded upon public w r ork, upon public income instead of public tax- ation, at the principal falls. In the middle reach of the Tennessee, near the Muscle Shoals there should be a continuous manufacturing city for forty miles along the river with a free, deep channel to New Orleans. On the Ohio there will be a score of such cities. On the Mississippi the nucleus at St. Louis will extend far up and down the stream, and the upper Illinois Valley will hold another continuous city. The great powers of the Columbia will pro- vide for our Oriental trade a similar situation, and the current from the Sierras will establish on San Francisco Bay a like condition. A remarkable instance of the new cities that are made possible by the existence of the elec- tric power from running water is offered by the new activity at the falls of Rainy Lake River 139 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER at Kouchiching, Minnesota. All northern Min- nesota is forest covered, and much of it is mus- keg and swamp, which is being rapidly drained and turned into a rich wheat country. It is, however, very sparsely settled. Coal can only be brought there at a very heavy expense for freight, and it would at a glance appear that this could never be a manufacturing center. The Rainy Lake, however, reservoired by in- numerable other lakes along the Canadian bor- der, pours out to its river over a fall nearly forty feet high a continuous flow which scarcely varies at all from low water to high water and is capable at all stages of developing 35,000 electric horsepower. This is now being har- nessed and lo! a transformation! Canadian wheat, coming $own from the northwest for export, must go through Duluth or through Thunder Bay. The shortest route to either place, and the best grades, lie along Rainy Lake River, past the falls of Kouchi- ching. Minnesota wheat from the rich and fer- tile newly drained swamp lands seeks the same 140 NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT route. The hills and mountains around the lake are magnificently covered with paper wood. So here by a fairy wand the power creates the city. International Falls, developed to mill flour in transit and to manufacture paper from wood on either side of the International Boun- dary for the river has Canada on one side and United States on the other becomes at once the metropolis of the new region. Drawing from both countries, manufacturing cheaply, shipping by rail to Port Arthur, Du- luth or Minneapolis, with easy water connec- tion back into Canada through its river, and with water connection to the Mississippi system certain to come, this wilderness waterfall makes possible a handsome, smokeless and prosperous city which is nov rapidly developing. Not only in factory and city, but on the farm and in the home waterpower is doing the familiar common things. Plows are drawn, wagons 'driven, hay stacked, grain reaped and threshed, trees felled and cleared away, all by the power of the falling water. The house and 141 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER barn are lighted with the electric glow, the cows milked by an electric driven machine, the farmer's meals cooked in an electric oven, the house warmed, the water supply pumped and heated, the butter churned, all by the handy electric current from a nearby brook, or stepped down from the slender high-tension wire which passes by the farm from a waterfall in the open country to the city fifty miles away. There are farms in the east and farms as far west as Idaho, where everything which can be done by mechanical power is done by electricity, and methods have been devised to make this easy and simple. A brook ten feet across and six inches deep, falling eight to ten feet in crossing the farm, set up with a cheap, home- made concrete dam, forced to run out at the bottom through a simple turbine, that needs to be tended once a week and geared to a simple generator set on the crest of the dam that is the farmer's equipment. Once a day he strolls down to look it over a half hour's task. The rest of the time day and night the wheel spins 142 NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT on, sending its current now through the lights, now through a motor, now into the kitchen stove and again into the bathroom radiator and, when all these are idle, storing it up for future use in the storage battery in the corner of the barn. That is an inkling of what we are coming to of the day when every brook and river is harnessed, when the ponds at headwaters are controlled by clams, when the floods have ended and the low water has been done away with, when the rivers have grassy banks to the water's edge and the erosion of soil has stopped and the hard work of city and country, of farm and village home, is done by; this wise servant, tamed and controlled. CHAPTER VII SWAMP DRAINAGE Some years ago the state of Louisiana sold to an enterprising citizen one hundred and forty thousand acres of land for a cent an acre. The whole tract netted the state $1,400. It was sold as swamp land, and on that account was sup- posed to be useless unless it were drained. The buyer held the land for several years, and then put it on the market to sell in blocks of ten acres at $100 an acre, reserving every alternate ten acre tract for sale later at a higher price. This land sold at the high price was still un- drained, as it was the higher parts of the big tract he had bought but every ten acres was subject to a ten per cent deduction for ditches. In other words, it was still to pay for its own drainage. The whole tract is easily worth what the enterprising citizen is trying to sell it for, 144 SWAMP DRAINAGE for it is the finest alluvial silt brought down by the Mississippi, stolen from farms far up the river. It will grow oranges, figs or truck, and in vegetables will grow easily three crops a year. The anecdote is interesting because it illus- trates among other things two points clearly: one, the sudden increase in value of land which has been transferred from the public to private hands ; and, second, the enormous productivity and money value of our swamp lands. All over the United States there are such lands as this, covered with water part or all of the year, but having a rich and fertile soil to bear large crops when they are drained. Altogether these swamps have an area equal to the whole of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, 75,000,000 acres of the finest land in America, a tract which we could not duplicate if we searched the continent and endeavored to buy from our neighbors north and south the most fertile part of their domain. The drainage of this land is a part of the Conservation of 10 145 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Water. It makes available a large supply which is needed in our rivers, it renders the idle land productive, and it does away with the swamp fevers which persist in undrained localities. Water out of place is, as a matter of fact, just as bad as no water at all. Rainfall that runs quickly from a well-sloped watershed into ponds and lakes which act as reservoirs remains thenceforth at the control of man. to be released from sluice gates as it is needed in the rivers; and water which falls upon a dry land forest seeps through the soil and follows the roots, to emerge at length in a steady discharge from the little brooks and so maintain a steady flow through dry times. But water which falls in an undrained place, whether forest or meadow, stands stagnant, destroying useful vegetation, breeding pes- tiferous mosquitoes and other insects, and hold- ing useless and out of cultivation all the acres on which it lies. The water which is held up year after year on this land, to evaporate 146 P S w rt , o o ^ ^ ^ ^ . 1.8 o g, fe as s 00 13 ~ & ' s p r _- "rt 5 (J _ (J rt rt CO ^ ? rt O 6 0> I! "I" SWAMP DRAINAGE the St. Francis swamp for raw land, but had asked only four dollars an acre, she would have had an annual income of $32,000,000, of which $7,000,000 would have amortized her debt, leaving her with $25,000,000 each year to spend. Now we begin to see something in this pub- lic conservation work. Louisiana has no com- pulsory education because she cannot afford to educate her colored children. Louisiana has child labor because she is too poor to en- force child-labor laws. Ignorance, illiteracy, bad government and child labor go hand in hand with lack of schools. Twenty-five mil- lions a year added to her income think what that would do for her schools! Think of that sum, year after year, divided into things to benefit the public ! Think of two million a year spent to develop great public 'docks and warehouses in her ports to facilitate her trade and increase the education and de- velopment of her people! Think of a million a year to put a library into every village! 171 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Think but you cannot think to the end of the things that an income of $25,000,000 a year, debt free, would mean to that swampy; state. More than twice the land allotted to Loui- siana, 20,000,000 acres, was patented by Uncle Sam to Florida. Nearly all of this, three-fifths of the surface of the state, was given away without return, by the legislature, to induce the building of railroads. Things went along into the 1900 decade before a governor of the state, refusing to recognize some of these transfers, plunged the whole matter into the courts and succeeded in emerging with 2,000,000 acres of the original bounty still in the state treasury. Under the leadership of Gov. Napoleon B. Broward, Florida passed a direct taxation law which lays a tax of six cents an acre on all the land in the great drainage districts. That which includes the Everglades contains some 4,000,000 acres, of which the state owns half. Into that wilderness of matted grass, islands 172 SWAMP DRAINAGE of trees, alligators and Seminole Indians, the state started four great steel dredges, each from a different angle, at the sea edge. They tore out the soft limestone and the matted grass and soil in immense gulps, cutting canals sixty feet wide and ten feet deep into the rim of rock which held the water over the land. As they advanced the water drained off and they are well now on their way toward the shores of Lake Okechobee, the central res- ervoir of the Everglades, with a million acres of dry land behind them, much of it already in cultivation. When they tap Okechobee the whole water surface will drop away ten feet or more below its former level and leave a wonderfully fer- tile region penetrated by ample and permanent navigable canals. This land tests so rich in nitrogen as to run in cases 2.25 per cent in that lifemaking element. One-tenth of one per cent is ample for most crops. It has been com- puted that every ton of this soil contains more than six dollars' worth of nitrate. Some of 173 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER this drained land has produced 6,000 pounds of dry sugar to the acre, and the million acres now dry will produce in a year more than we import in two years into the United States from Cuba. These which I have described are but a few of the swamps. Big and little they exist in every section of the country. The Reclama- tion Service is draining one at Klamath lake in Oregon as a part of an irrigation project. California is recovering more than a million acres from her two central rivers, the San Joaquin and the Sacramento. New England finds that the old bog holes, shunned by the farmers of a generation ago, are the richest parts of her farms to-day. In the end, when the drainage process has been carried to its natural conclusion, obeying the law of demanS for land, and the law of public health, there will be 75,000,000 acres of new farming land thrown open to our use. This land will produce in a year, if it is prop- erly handled, more than half as much as the 174 SWAMP DRAINAGE crop return we receive from our entire country to-day. If it were all in the South, under cot- ton conditions, it would produce with careful tillage 60,000,000 bales of cotton, five times our annual supply. If it were all in the corn country it would produce 5,000,000,000 bushels, twice our present crop. If it were divided properly it would produce all our corn crop, all our cotton crop, 250,000,000 bushels of wheat, 300,000,000 bushels of oats, and 20,000,000 tons of alfalfa and hay, a very pretty addition to the national income, all to be had by a natural step in the Conservation of Water. 175 CHAPTER VIII IRRIGATION Everything which one does toward the Con- servation of Water produces a new miracle. The harnessing of a little brook snatches the elements of life out of the air and gives them to the land to produce crops; and the same dam deepens the brook and turns it into a highway by which the farmer may cheaply market his products. The digging of a ditch transforms, almost over night, certainly in a season, a ma- lignant, loathsome swamp into a garden, pro- ducing 6,000 pounds of dry sugar to the acre, or renting for sixty dollars an acre-year to the thrifty grower of asparagus for the canning factories. The spending of millions of dollars to provide pure drinking water for a city un- expectedly provides the people with labor- 176 IRRIGATION saving power, and the public as a body with an income which turns over night into libraries, new schools, parks and help for the poor. But the miracle of them all which holds the eye, which sings in the heart of those who behold it and are of it, the miracle which means new life and hope to a great part of the nation is the wonder work of irrigation, of the addition of water to the desert. Out of the apparently sterile sands plants of every useful sort spring up in abundance and prosper. The continual sunshine of the desert country magnifies and prospers their growth. The fertile elements of the soil, not washed away by continual rains, but gently dissolved and held in position at the right time for ab- sorption by the plants, add to this growth. Plant culture becomes a factory process, but the results are the results of art rather than of machinery. Orchards such as the world has never known before, wheat and alfalfa such as no other land has ever borne, potatoes and other " truck " in many times their usual abundance. THE CONSERVATION OF WATER reward the man who opens the gate and lets the water flow upon the land. From poverty on three hundred acres of sterile land, from labor that began before day and continued after nightfall, from heartbreaking toil and inability to care properly for his children, to easy com- fort and prosperity on ten to twenty acres, to labor within the proper hours, to a rich reward in money and in self-respect, to an ability to educate his children and himself, to keep abreast of his times, to be a citizen as well as a farmer that is the effect of the irrigation part of conservation upon the farmer of the arid lands. That is why there is a rush to the west and to independence, a starting out from city and from the farm to this new, this ancient, desert land. And that is why in the irri- gation region there are springing up inde- pendent villages of farmers, intelligent, well educated, sturdy, prosperous, who travel in the winter to learn about their country, who neither buy nor sell their votes, who think strongly upon public affairs, who add, in 178 IRRIGATION short, to the nation a stability and a dignity which it needs in its affairs. And all this from the turning of a torrent into a reservoir; and the reservoired water over a desert waste. The western part of America contains sev- eral great regions which are short of rainfall; and these are the home of irrigation. From middle Kansas west to the Rocky Mountains extends the semi-arid region, having a rain- fall of ten to fifteen inches, most of it falling at the time when it is least needed for crops. In the mountains themselves there is abundant rain to water the valleys ; but to the north lies Wyoming and southern Idaho and farther east Montana and North Dakota, parched throughout the year like a desert. This south- ern Idaho desert reaches up around the famous Palouse wheat country into central Washing- ton, straddles both sides of the Columbia, and includes the Yakima region and everything up to the Cascades. It takes in the land about the Umatilla reservation, and all the heart 179 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER of Oregon westward almost to Hood river, and extends southward into California and Nevada, and southwestward to the marshy desert about Klamath lake. All through Nevada and Utah the desert predominates. As the progression is southward it becomes triumphant, and across southern California, Arizona and parts of New Mexico it marches in complete possession. There sand waste and desolation, peopled by the cactus and the Apache, have for the century of American invasion blocked all real progress. Much of the desert is rock, intractable and useless. But the greater part is sand and vol- canic ash, a varied, shifting soil, prey of the winds ancl the rare torrential rains, apparently the most worthless soil in creation. Yet it is this apparently worthless soil which yields most readily to cultivation when the water is put upon it and which creates the marvel I have described the miracle of irrigation. There is almost no limit to the amount of land in the western country which can be improved by 180 IRRIGATION irrigating ; but there is a limit to the amount of water which is available for it. Enough perhaps for 75,000,000 acres (a tract equal to all our swamps) can be provided for by close reservoiring among the mountains ; and so not three states but six states, equal to Ohio, Indi- ana, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri will be added to the nation by the Conservation of water by the drainage of the too- wet lands and the watering of the too-dry. Irrigation is a heritage from the earliest historic times. In the ruins of Babylon are found the remains of enormous and very complete canal systems which conserved the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris and spread them over the land of the desert. The overflow of the Nile long furnishecl the only fertility for Egypt, until the primitive inhabi- tants learned to dip the water from the river and elevate it stage by stage to the bench lands. India for 2,000 years has been engaged in irrigation, and under the English has ac- quired a system of irrigating and navigation 181 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER canals which is one of the marvels of the world. So this form of Conservation is new only in America, where its possibilities have burst upon the nation like a meteor suddenly blazing in the sky but not, like a meteor, as suddenly to disappear. In this land the history of irrigation begins with the Mormons who, after their hegira, found in Utah only a few watered and fertile acres and for their own salvation began turning the water from the rivers into ditches. They found their labors doubly rewarded. From that beginning, little by little the movement spread, through private ownership, leading to struggles over water, to fierce battles for the water supply of an exhausted river, to the be- ginnings as yet often crude and unsettled of a body of " water law " making the titles to water defensible in court, and from that to the sudden systematizing and extension of (irriga- tion under two great laws, the Reclamation act and the Carey act passed by the national Congress. 182 IRRIGATION Before we take these up and examine the tremendous work that has been done under them it is necessary to have a very clear idea of just what irrigation consists of, how it is accomplished, and why there is need for public action and control of it. Irrigation originated in Utah (and has developed in many other places) in the simple process of watering lands from a river which flowed through the dry sea- son. In many parts of the west there are rivers fed by the water from glaciers and from melt- ing snows, or supplied by rainfall on distant mountains, which flow through parched and desolate valleys. The Snake River is such a stream in Idaho, and the magnificent Columbia in Oregon and Washington. The latter stream, clear greenish blue, with a powerful and abun- dant discharge, passes for hundreds of miles be- tween irregular banks that are desolate yellow- gray desert, on which no green thing appears. No rain falls in this region in the growing sea- son, and the water in the river below is of no use to the land above it. 183 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER This situation prevailed in Utah, and the in- dustrious Mormons, throwing little wing dams or complete cross dams out into the bed of each river, checked for a moment the flow of water. Then from the end of this they led a ditch drop- ping with less slope than the river, and follow- ing the contour of the bank lands, until it was high enough above the river bed to be led back upon the meadow or field and divided among smaller ditches which distributed it over all the adjacent land. When the crop upon this land needed watering the landowner simply opened his head gate the gate at the head of his canal and allowed the water to flow in. This is irrigation in its simplest form. It is available at small expense only where the lands to be watered lie along the side of the stream, and are comparatively level. But even this system soon developed trouble. First one, then a dozen, then a hundred farmers settled along the stream, erected their dams, and established their canals. The little river dwindled away under the increasing demand and at last, some 184 IRRIGATION summer day, when the first comer opened his head-gate to water his fields, he found the stream bed dry, settlers above having taken all the water, and his crops perished for lack of it. This showed at once the need of some system of distributing water, and on some rivers of Utah the farmers measured the water and di- vided it up among themselves on a time sched- ule. Thus Mr. Smith would use it from three o'clock Monday afternoon until five o'clock on Tuesday, when he would close his gate and allow the water to flow on down to Mr. Jones, below, who opened his gate by schedule at that time and took the water for twenty-four hours. This gave every one an even chance but it did not solve the problem nor greatly lessen the troubles ; for more settlers still came. So there grew up the doctrine of " water rights " still one of the most complicated things about power and irrigation development in the west and much needing comprehensive settlement) This new doctrine provided that the first ap- propriator of water on a river that is the first 185 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER man who located and irrigated his land had a right thenceforth to as much water as the land he irrigated needed, or as much as he claimed and used at the time of location. He had a prior right over anyone who came after him, even though they settled higher upstream. This was undoubtedly right, for otherwise a settler having come and developed his land might be reduced to starvation by a later comer establishing above him. Step by step the prior rights on rivers were established, and as there came to be a shortage of water a settler high up on a river must often see the water flowing by his fields, water to which he had no legal right while his own fields were drying up. Moved by the common impulses of humanity and by the suffering of his wife and children this settler would often seize and use the water despite the right of the man lower down, and many terrible battles have ensued throughout the west over the right to a running stream. As irrigation developed the manner of using the water became more complicated. Large 186 ,_ o -S 2 O ^ Ml o S s g .9 ^ 8 ^ 8 1 1 ^ 1 Q * S - e P S S < B ** 2 ~ " ^ ilia IRRIGATION corporations secured entire water rights to rivers, and installed costly canals sometimes irrigating thousands of acres, carrying the water scores of miles and dividing it according to a fixed schedule so that every settler got his share; and this tended to simplify and make more reliable the whole irrigation process. Water rights, the right to draw a definite amount of water for irrigation to a given piece of land began to be recorded and sold. A buyer of land must pay as close attention to his water title as to his land title. And so by a gradual process the legal and technical side of the business of irrigation involved a semi- legal, semi-customary ritual which governed the industry. In this development of irrigation farmers ha'd much to learn. Some of the desert lands were underlaid with porous subsoil which al- lowed all unnecessary water to drain off. Others were underlaid with impervious hard- pan or rock. In the early days and it is true yet farmers ignorant of the small need 187 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER of their land allowed a great deal too much water to flow over it, and this either settled down upon the hardpan or flowed along through the porous subsoil until it found hard- pan and a resting place under some neighbor's farm lower down. Standing water under the land dissolved the alkali from the soil, and as the water increased year after year it came steadily nearer the surface until evaporation began to accumulate alkali at the surface and poison destroy the land. In Utah alone more than a hundred thousand acres of formerly valuable irrigated farm land are now brackish alkali swamps, filled with water from the too-abundant irrigation above them; and it is only within a decade that the problem of drainage in connection with irriga- tion has been solved. All irrigated land should be carefully drained by tile or otherwise, and a provision made for running the drained water back into an irrigation ditch or a river at a lower level. Then the water passes off naturally without dissolving the alkali, and is 188 IRRIGATION useful lower down. The lands which are ruined now can be reclaimed again by first putting in the drainage system, and then by flooding them heavily through one or two seasons and wash- ing the alkali back deep into the soil or out through the drainage system. Irrigation and drainage must go hand in hand for the health and best use of the land. How much water is essential for irriga- tion? That question is one on which many farmers and even engineers widely differ. At a state examination before the legislature of Montana not long ago farmers from the east- ern part of the state placed the necessary amount all the way from six inches to twenty feet per year that is, the amount which if it stood all at once on the land would be of that depth. As a matter of fact the amount of rainfall during the crop season in Illinois is seldom more than twenty inches, and anything more than that is disastrous. That rainfall is not controlled, comes often at the wrong time, and THE CONSERVATION OF WATER does not result in as much benefit as twelve inches of rain properly applied. A foot of water used with discretion and at the right time is ordinarily enough for any crop. Two feet is far too much. A guarantee of twelve to eighteen inches with an assurance that one can- not get too much for the land is a safe pro- vision for the wise conduct of an irrigated farm. Rainfall is as irregular in the irrigation country as in the east, and the streams which supply the irrigated lands in summer are often roaring torrents in the winter and spring. It was from the very earliest times evident that if the flood waters could be retained and re- leased in dry seasons the area irrigated could be increased and the business made safer. Capital, however, did not risk itself in desert enterprises, and up to 1895 there was very slow progress made in developing anything like sys- tem and reservoiring on any of the western rivers. In that year, however, Senator Carey, of Wyoming, who had from boyhood been a be- 190 IRRIGATION liever in the future of the desert, fought through Congress against heavy opposition the first official recognition ever given to irriga- tion by the government, and paved the way for the great development of the past decade. This, the so-called " Carey Act" was merely a rider on the agricultural appropriation bill, providing that in the arid and semi-arid states of the west one million acres of desert land should be given by the government to each state, the state to make the selections, provided that within ten years the state should cause twenty acres out of every legal subdivision of forty acres to be irrigated and improved. It was provided that the land must be sold to the settler practically for nothing fifty cents or one dollar an acre and that no settler could have more than one hundred and sixty acres. A year later a vital and lifegiving amend- ment was also passed at the instigation of Sen- ator Carey providing that large tracts of des- ert lands, including the irrigation improvement works, canals and water rights, might be 191. THE CONSERVATION OF WATER mortgaged to support bond issues to carry out the projects; and that as fast as each far- mer completed his payments on forty acres that forty acres was absolutely freed from the mort- gage and held no farther liability. That is, the failure of half the farmers to meet payments kept their land liable for the money, but could not hamper or throw a burden or cloud on the land of the rest who had paid their dues promptly. Under this fair law irrigation by big cor- porations has gone forward with tremendous strides. Idaho especially has worked under it, but millions of acres in other states have been turned into gardens. Under this act a big corporation having been assigned a tract of one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand acres by the state secures the right to enough water to irrigate it, either by " filing " on the stream in its natural condition, or by creating reservoirs enough to add to an already approp- riated stream enough low water flow to com- pensate for what they take out. Then they 192 IRRIGATION issue bonds and on the money so raised erect the necessary dams and gates and canals, em- ploy ditch-riders to run the system, and sell the water rights outright to the settlers. Each set- tler pays the state a small sum for his land, and pays the water company whatever it is entitled to for the water, usually about fifty dollars an acre for the perpetual ownership of the water interest, spread over ten years or more for pay- ment. This payment transfers the dam and gates and ditches the entire equipment with all its appurtenances and titles to the far- mers themselves who then form an association which conducts their affairs. A water charge running from fifty cents to two dollars an acre each year is paid in to this association and that is enough to keep up the ditches, employ riders, renew and repair construction work, and keep the system in working order practically in per- petuity. This is a very practical, safe and efficient method of working out large irrigation schemes. It has been found so safe and secure 13 193 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER that large private irrigation companies have taken up the same work in other ways, secur- ing large tracts of land, putting in expensive and permanent canals and works, and selling the land and the water rights to the farmers at often an excessive profit sometimes charg- ing as high as two hundred and fifty dollars an acre for the land, or even <5ne thousand dollars an acre for land on which an orchard has been planted. But all this provides only for the schemes which interest private capital. There was needed some other power which, regardless of the preliminary expense, could take charge of entire rivers, reservoir them, create enormous storage, develop the power, put the water on the land, and sell on easy terms to the home- steaders, projects so complicated and expensive that the Carey Act promoters were not inter- ested in them. This gave rise to the national Reclamation Act, passed in June, 1902, which provides that in all the western states the money received 194 IRRIGATION from the sale of public lands, less the expenses and five per cent for education, shall be set aside to create a fund for the reclamation of arid lands. A department called the Reclamation Service was created under the Interior Depart- ment and was put and continued under the charge of Frederick H. Newell, an able and inspired engineer. Under this act the Secre- tary of the Interior may withdraw from entry the land belonging to the government sus- ceptible of irrigation, and turn it over to the Reclamation Service to be watered. This de- partment then creates the necessary reservoirs, clears and establishes the titles, constructs the canals and ditches, and throws the tract open to homestead entry. This act is very faulty and only the kindly interpretation given it by Direc- tor Newell has made it possible of execution. Thus by the homestead act each farmer is com- pelled to build his home and live on the tract as soon as the project is begun, in order to "prove up" on his land. As it may be five to seven years before the dam is built, the ditches 195 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER constructed, and the water brought, there is in the meanwhile absolutely no way for the far- mer to support himself on the land and raise any crop or even to secure domestic water. In spite of this, however, the government projects have been made popular, and immense works of tremendous strength and permanency have been developed for them. Some of these projects are colossal in their daring, their en- gineering audacity and their value to the na- tion. It is worth while at this point examin- ing some of them to see what magnitude these works attain, what a great thing this irrigation marvel has become in the short years it has been under way. (One of the government projects which has attracted the most attention because of its as- tounding audacity is that of Salt River in south- ern Arizona, made famous first by the construc- tion of the Roosevelt Dam. Salt River is a branch of the Gila, which in turn flows into the Colorado. It comes out of the wonderful mountains of the old Apache stronghold 1 O 0) _, tj ^ c - 1 c E | C vw &> q= o a (U >~ CO O r* ^ *-" - o -sM S ^T3 g 2 as (U 0) - rt P*j (4^ (j O . -g en w H -S ^ J ' &o 3 o" a ! -B -a ; 3 g ^ s S & o g ^ fe - S J= 8 ? ^ : gl'g 2-| !||sj|| S S -Sis IRRIGATION through which General Crook so long pursueS Geronimo and his bloodthirsty warriors. It is the old land of the Cliff Dwellers, the land' of sandstone and limestone cliffs, of weird and gigantic cactus, of thirst and death for the trav- eler the desert land of Arizona. In the midst of it, in a great plain lies Phoenix, a beautiful city watered from Salt River; and the Recla- mation project was to store and make useful the flood waters of this river for the purpose of watering the great plain and making about Phoenix a garden as beautiful as the city itself. For this purpose the engineers went above Phoenix into the mountains to the wonderful gorge of Salt River, sprinkling the way with wells which tapped the abundant underground waters of the desert. (Up through the canon and over the spurs of the mountain they blasted out of the rock a magnificent roadway, broad and gentle, forty miles in length, over which the machinery might be teamed./ In the valley itself above the dam-site they built the city of Roosevelt, destined to be overflowed when the 197 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER dam was built, but meanwhile substantial, pros- perous, with schools, churches and theaters, a real city for a day. They built a cement plant to make the two hundred and fifty thousand barrels of cement needed for the dam ; and built a dam for waterpower above the big dam-site ; carried the water for sixteen miles, plunged it through a tunnel in the mountain down a fall of two hundred and twenty feet to the turbines and developed a power of four thousand four hundred horse to light the works, to run the many machine plants and the cement mills and to do the multiple tasks connected with the building of the dam. Then in the gorge they erected the immense storage dam a fifth of a mile along its crest and with a twenty-foot roadway on top of it, even with the top of a twenty-two-story office building had one been erected beside it. Two hundred and eighty- four feet high, arched upstream against the current, the Roosevelt dam when it was begun was the greatest in the world; and its whole purpose was to carry out the Roosevelt policy 198 IRRIGATION of Conservation, by holding back the waste from Salt River to turn the desert into a pro- ductive land.) Apache Indians, children of the old war- riors of Geronimo, descendants of those who drove the Cliff Dwellers from the land, labored on the road and on the dam. Some of them advanced to be foremen and inspectors, and the amazing spectacle was presented of these red men, under the direction of white engineers, conveying water for waterpower through a tunnel in the mountain constructed before the dawn of our history by the Cliff Dwellers them- selves with their axes of stone. But a dam is not the whole of an irrigation project. There must be a great canal from the dam down to the point of diversion; and numerous gates and canals for separating the water into divisions and distributing it at different levels and over broad region for there are two hundred thousand acres under this dam. In the desert water is lost rapidly from two 199 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER causes evaporation and seepage. It must be kept from seeping into the ground and from wasting into the air. So enclosed concrete conduits built of semiround forms of concrete piping, really are laid in the ditches, and the water flows through these, protected against loss, to the point where it is turned into the farmer's open ditch. The town of Roosevelt, once numbering two thousand inhabitants, has disappeared now. Instead there lies a magnificent mountain lake, storing an immense volume of water and held back by the dam, the largest artificial lake in the world. At the foot of the dam the water escaping into the irrigation channel develops under this enormous pressure twenty-six thou- sand electric horsepower, and much of this is wired to Phoenix, and distributed in town and country to light the houses of the farmers and to do the work of the farms. But part of it is wired to the Sacaton Indian reservation in an act of justice seldom performed by our gov- ernment. There the Pima Indians who for- 200 C 0) ^ x -5 3 H 5 - I % O ^ *-> 2 .2 5 - fc tf> O o -i ^ 5^ 5 .2 s SJ 8 % " o 4J OJ 13 s -s ^ S S "rt ~* ^ ^ rt C ^j- ^J5 & J! I -*-> C Q o c > be ^ 1*3 5 IRRIGATION merly owned large water rights have been for years carrying on a miserable existence in land from which white men had filched their water. Now the government has dug deep wells to the underground supply for them; and power created by the running water at the Roosevelt dam, carried through a slender wire, will pump this underground water to the surface and with it irrigate the lands of the civilized Indians. Thus we see water by conservation doing a treble duty irrigating the land at Phoenix, furnishing power for city lighting, and pump- ing up other water to irrigate the Indian lands. Pumping, as it is practiced to supply the needs of these Indians is not a new feature of irrigation. Even in the most primitive coun- tries waterwheels of some sort are in use to lift water from a low to a higher level. Along the Columbia River in the most barren and desolate part of its valley one sees great water- wheels, often forty feet in diameter, set out from the bank so that the water striking their 201 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER lower blades continually revolves them. Buc- kets attached to the side of the wheel are filled as they pass through the water, and at the top of the revolution pour the water out into a trough from which it runs to a canal. This is but a slight elevation thirty feet or so above the river; but by conducting the water in a flume for a mile or more down the bank at a less slope than that of the river, it is brought high enough to flow over the bench lands and irrigate them. Fruit orchards, alfalfa fields and truck gardens as well as wheat fields ap- pear as unexpected green spots in the midst of the sand and ash of the desert. In many places, one or two of which we shall describe, the Reclamation Service and to some extent private corporations are using water- power to pump water up to high bench lands ; but the most remarkable pumping development, especially as it is a far advance in Conservation, is that in the irrigation projects of the Reclama- tion Service along the upper Missouri river. Coming down out of Montana after its union 202 IRRIGATION with the Milk and the Yellowstone Rivers the Missouri flows through a desolate region of buttes and " bad lands " where it acquires a heavy burden of silt, but does little good to the neighboring country. It is lined by bench lands on several levels and back of them high table lands, some of which can be irrigated by water brought from a long distance by canals. But for the most part the best lands are low down, near the river, and in small parcels, of two or three square miles in extent so that extensive damming and canal construction cannot be made to pay. All of these hills of the Missouri for several hundred miles are underlaid with lignite coal, a soft brown fuel of less heat value than bituminous. This lignite crops out everywhere, sometimes in veins forty feet thick; and the greater part of it is held in reserve by the government. Experiments have shown that while it is difficult to use under a boiler, it can be consumed in a gas-producer a modern machine for securing the largest power value 203 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER from coal and the gas from this pro- ducer can either be used in an internal com- bustion engine, or can be burned under a steamboiler with great economy to produce steam. Consequently the government has decided to use this lignite coal to make the Missouri table lands productive. Mines have been opened at a central point near Williston, North Dakota, and a track built from the mine entrance to a power plant a little lower down so that the coal from the mine descends by gravity to the power house. The gas-producer is the most economi- cal form known of burning coal, and takes the "mine run" as it comes, without the loss of slack or screenings. The largest efficiency is thus obtained, and the conservation of the fuel is put forward as an illustration of the possi- bilities of the day when instead of transporting fuel by rail we will turn it all into power at the mines. The power house at the mouth of the y mine produces electric current. This in turn is 204 IRRIGATION carried by wire to half a dozen irrigating proj- ects up and down the Missouri, all within one hundred miles of Williston. At each project there are several irrigating canals at various levels, the highest one hundred feet above the river. In the river floats a pumping barge, carrying electric motors and pumps which draw water from the river and deliver it in a storage basin on the lowest level. There are other motors and pumps which lift the water to the several levels above, just enough to each level to water the lands under that canal. This project has created along the Missouri homes for several thousand families; and the work will be rapidly extended. It is of remark- able benefit. The wheat and alfalfa produced on these lands are beside a navigable river and can be readily carried to market. The seeding of the land and the cultivation under the ditches lessens the erosion and tends to improve the river. Planting trees along the irrigation canals and around the farms will further increase this tendency, and a beginning will be made toward 205 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER the transformation of North Dakota and east- ern Montana into a garden. Nothing could be more desolate than this region to-day. It has long been notorious under the name of the Bad Lands. It is cut by intricate coulees water-courses torn out by torrential rains and dry and terrible during the most of the year. These coulees slope steeply so that large reservoirs can be created only in a few places; but by the damming first of the most favorable and then of the less favorable sites, by the planting of trees along the edges of the reservoirs so created, and the use of the water for irrigation by pumping after the man- ner we have just described, a great change can be wrought. The increased evaporation surface during the summer will cool and modify the summer climate; the increased humidity will cause an increase of precipitation; the green fields and the forests will check the dust storms and the loss of soil, and thus facilitate the clarifying of the Missouri. This little beginning at Williston will lead the way to re- 206 IRRIGATION markable achievements which will open up a large territory to settlement. Farther west and across the mountains from the Missouri, on the watershed of the Columbia, we find another water-pumping project equally remarkable and worth our study. This is on the Flathead, or Pend d' Oreille river, just below Flathead Lake, on the Indian reserva- tion of that name recently opened to settle- ment. Flathead Lake is one of the most beau- tiful lakes and one of the finest reservoir sites in America. Fed by Flathead and many other rivers which flow down from Lake McDonald and from the feet of the glaciers in Glacier Park, along the continental divide, it is filled with clear green-blue water, cold and very deep. The lake fluctuates very little. Along its east- ern shore is a considerable area of bench land backed by the Mission Range. North of it and on the western shore are fruit lands of great value. And at the south, rising two hundred feet or more above the lake and then descending gently toward the Clarke's Fork, many miles 207 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER away, is a grassy upland, an ideal farming land for grain or, with abundant water, for fruit. Through this upland the river finds its way, the outlet of the lake, through a narrow and extremely beautiful gorge, several hundred feet deep, in which it falls over rapids and preci- pices, green and white as it tumbles, roaring its way down to the open and gentle river below. In this gorge the Reclamation Service is erecting a dam, to hold back the water and develop power. Later another dam farther upstream, close to the lake, will raise the level of that body and add two million acre feet to its storage capacity. But the lower dam will pro- duce thirty thousand to fifty thousand electric horsepower, some of which will be sold and the rest used for irrigation. On the summit of the uplands is a great basin in the prairie ; and this will be transformed into a storage basin. Into this the surplus water of the river will be pumped to irrigate some two hundred thousand acres of the land below 208 0) D C, SI'S "5 rt _o 11} rt rt C *" _C tJO M C "* 0) J-J O o O IRRIGATION it and turn the occasional wheat crops into reg- ular and abundant grain, alfalfa or fruit crops. This is no desert even now, but it has occa- sional years of drought and too little rain for many crops. The irrigation project will give certainty to it and greater abundance, and the power will give comfort and convenience to the farmers in their homes. This project is on the headwaters of the Columbia. When this lake is turned into a res- ervoir and the other great lakes of the Columbia system are similarly treated, millions of acres of the great desert which borders the stream in Washington and Oregon will be similarly treated. A beginning of this work will be made at the Umatilla project where the river of that name flows into the Columbia. A hundred miles away, on the Des Chutes River, a tremen- dous dam will be erected to develop power. This power will be wired to Umatilla and when the water of that small river has been exhausted the surplus of the Columbia will be pumped up on the land. 14 209 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Through the whole extent of the desert this combined use of power and irrigation will be extended; enough water being reserved for power to furnish what is needed, the rest being turned back upon the land. Instead of the dry, wearisome land will be a rich farming land, and a population which will produce more from each acre than is produced on any similar tract in- the world. The Umatilla project will be an example of the power from one river being used to pump the water of another ; but the Reclamation engi- neers have gone far beyond that in their work. They have actually used one river to irrigate the valley of another, and to do so have accom- plished heroic feats and astounding engineer- ing achievements. Two such projects which have attained national fame are the Truckee- Carson, and the Gunnison-Uncompaghre proj- ects, the one in Nevada, the other in south- western Colorado. The Truckee-Carson project is remarkable chiefly for the extent of the work and the union 210 IRRIGATION of two rivers. The Truckee and the Carson come down from the eastern slope of the Sierras to lose themselves in the Carson sink, the western side of the famous " Forty-mile Des- ert" where so many of the gold seekers of the early days lost their lives. With the exception of Death Valley this is the driest spot on the continent. A dam thirty feet high has been erected in the Truckee river to divert its water into a cement lined canal thirty-one miles long. Through this it runs into the Carson River. The two rivers are thus gathered into a great basin from which in turn their conserved waters are divided into irrigation canals over the old desert land. Reno, Virginia City and Carson City and other famous towns are in the immediate vicinity. The Gunnison-Uncompaghre project is far more remarkable, and has attained celebrity for the amazing feats of the engineers of the Recla- mation Service. These two rivers flow side by side through southwestern Colorado, the Gun- nison with an abundant flow of water from 21 1 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER eternal snows, but flowing through a rocky canon in which the water is absolutely useless for irrigation; the Uncompaghre flowing through a broad valley and having more than one hundred thousand acres of irrigable land but not enough water for it. Ten miles of mountains, two thousand feet high, separated the two rivers. In the face of apparently im- passable obstacles the engineers determined to link these two rivers and compel the wasted Gunnison to water the desert of the Uncom- paghre and to create upon it homes for fifty thousand persons. Even the preliminary work was accom- plished only at the risk of life and at the cost of remarkable hardship. The Black Canon of the Gunnison was two thousand feet deep, and at the foot of it the river flowed or rather tumbled down repeated falls, over hidden rocks, between walls so precipitous that there were apparently no places on which the engineers could obtain a foothold for miles at a time. 212 IRRIGATION Into this apparently certain death plunged two young engineers of the Reclamation Ser- vice, on inflated mattresses, determined to ex- plore the gorge and determine whether the waters could be dammed and diverted through a tunnel to the Uncompaghre. Their sufferings and their narrow escapes on the trip make a story too long to relate here yet without dupli- cation in the history of American exploring. At one time it was necessary for them success- ively to plunge into the river from a temporary resting place in the heart of the gorge, and allow a flood to sweep them, helpless, over the brow of a waterfall the foot of which was hid- den from them and might, and probably would, be a mass of rocks on which they would be dashed to death. Nevertheless they had no alternative; and having made the leap fortu- nately were plunged into a deep pool and escaped alive. Out of this trip and the information it pro- duced the plans for the diversion of the Gun- nison were completed. Even then the task was 213 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER terrific in its hardships and handicaps. Many times men were lowered over the canon walls by ropes, hundreds of feet, before a foothold was obtained and a road begun. Then a road sixteen miles long, often twenty-three per cent grade, had to be blasted out of the side of the canon to obtain a route to the mouth of the tunnel down which machinery could be carried. A power plant had to be built in the Gunnison at heavy cost in hardship and labor, and when this was all done a tunnel must be driven through the mountain, six miles long, and ten and five-tenths by twelve feet in section. Hid- den water and obstacles of many kinds inter- fered with progress, but the engineers solved the troubles as they arose; and at last, in the summer of 1909, President Taft, on his first trip to the west after his election to the Presi- dency, pressed the button which opened the gates and the Gunnison river flowed across into the valley of the Uncompaghre. One hundred and forty thousand acres of fine land, which had never appeared to have a 214 IRRIGATION a water supply, which lay under the burning sun beside a feeble and exhausted river, sud- denly became available for homes, and people flocked to it in great numbers. The canals, lined with concrete, had been created while the tunnel was being bored; and in 1910 the desert of the Uncompaghre began to blossom under the efficient labor of the long-idle Gunnison. All over the great west this labor of irriga- tion is going on, sometimes alone, sometimes in combination with waterpower, sometimes with swamp drainage. About Klamath and Tule lakes, in southwestern Oregon, an enor- mous irrigation project is under way which involves the draining of a great area of lake and overflow lands. In many places, as in the Tieton project in the Yakima Valley, the flow in the natural stream has been exhausted by previous work, and it is necessary to create storage for the full amount of water desired in the new work, and to use nothing but the otherwise wasted floods; yet this flood water 215 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER is after all the most abundant part of the supply. This exhausting of the natural flow, and the conflict of waterpower and irrigation for the use of water, bring sharply to us the problem of the title to water water ownership which has already created an astounding situ- ation in Oregon, in California and in Montana, and which requires careful study and a diffi- cult rearrangement of many of our laws. Most of the problems of irrigation have been solved; but the benefits are just beginning to accrue. More than two million acres have been or are being put under water by the Reclama- tion Service alone. In Idaho nearly as much more is being irrigated under the terms of the Carey Act, and in Washington and Oregon similar amounts will shortly be taken up under Carey and private irrigation laws and turned into homesteads. If only thirty million acres out of the whole west were so treated the re- sult would be to produce new homes for fifteen million people, besides those who will populate 216 0) rt o _ O 3 > s I? u. '2 -, c- 1 2* g B - - : .^ & O r" "^ S W ' f2 4-> t^ Q 2 , 5 .S iJ rt ^ ;-; j: 3 x! I'? bX) ,_ S o; I 2^ S* *i en " p, ^o^S CX, Pj O ^ rt < t: si S 2 CTI IRRIGATION the cities which form the markets of the irriga- tion districts. And these people are farmers of a new type. By the necessity of the case, by the intensiveness of irrigation operations which make ten acres frequently all a family can oper- ate upon, these irrigation farmers develop scientific methods, and become as no other part of our population has ever been, scientific agri- culturists. Living in compact communities, they develop along entirely different lines from the settlers on the prairie whose homes were often more than a mile apart. Living in close neighborhood with one another, in what are really extended villages, they have, owing to the irrigation, every convenience in the way of do- mestic water, electric light and the usual con- veniences of a city, so that the communities are attractive to the city-trained population. The dwellers in them are independent. Each man instead of investing his money in some distant corporation or insurance company which man- ages it for him, invests it for him and bears the responsibility for it invests it in his own 217 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER land and in the enterprises of his own town, and is responsible for them. Individual respon- sibility and individual independence increase together. Compact settlements make for bet- ter education and more frequent discussion of public questions; and as a result of this form of life we have more active citizenship, better public life and a prospect for the highest devel- opment our form of government and of civi- lization have yet attained ; and this is the direct result of Conservation of Water as applied through irrigation. The product of these irrigated lands are destined to play an important part in the life of the nation, altering the national diet and slowly but surely altering through that the home life of the rest of the nation. Millions of acres of apples and other fruits have been planted. The lands of the Salt River project produce astonishing amounts of dates and oranges. The staple products, wheat, alfalfa, oats, barley, etc., are equally abundant. And it is the abundance of these fruits, and of the 218 IRRIGATION vegetables that are raised on the same land, that will lessen the large meat item in the American diet and by substituting fruits and vegetables gradually tend toward a national economy. 219 CHAPTER IX CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL In the two years during which it has been a public policy Conservation has brought for- ward an astounding mass of information re- garding many subjects on which the public was previously totally uninformed. Of these sub- jects none is less known or more important than that of the conservation and preservation of our soil. Reckless farming methods alone, by the exhaustion of fertility and by permitting con- tinual and increasing erosion, destroy every year many times as much as is turned into crops; and every river in the land carries off to sea a vast amount of earth which represents the best part of our heritage. The Mississippi alone carries to sea every year enough finely divided silt the choicest alluvium and the most fertile part of America 220 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL to spread one foot thick over 350 square miles of land ; and this amazing wealth, repre- senting centuries of slow weathering of rocks, abrasion by running water, and accumulation of vegetable mold, is irrevocably lost, either swept away in the Gulf Stream, or deposited upon the bed of the sea. The Savannah and the other rivers of the eastern seaboard run deep red with the stains of erosion, and the Colorado and the other western rivers are equally guilty. The total loss is a billion tons each year. The prevention of this loss is a part of the work of river control which is directly involved in navigation; but it is also a special part of Water Conservation itself, involving the employment of our waterpower, the planting of forests along the river banks and the storage of floods at headwaters. The erosion of soil is a process which has been going on from the earliest days of the solid earth and has had a very important part in shaping the continent. When the glaciers retreated to the north after the last great glacial 221 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER epoch they left behind them mud and slime, bare rocks, morains, refuse of all sorts gathered in their slow advance or ground up under their tremendous mass. The melting of the retreat- ing ice, the continual and torrential rains due to the great humidity of the atmosphere, gath- ered up this debris and swept toward the sea. When the great lake of the upper Mississippi burst its bounds and ate away its outlet to the Gulf, this debris was carried downstream to fill up the entire alluvial delta of the river from Cairo, Illinois, down to the present gulf shore line; and this entire region of rich silt is the result of erosive process just as it is now the chief victim of the same process. All over America this process went on, re- sulting in the wearing down of the mountains, the leveling of the hills, the final definition of the great river systems, until the forest, ad- vancing over the land on the heels of the re- treating glaciers, bound the surface of the earth with its roots and stopped the destruction. When man came and cut and burned away 222 0) yT H | C d) rt -C fe * 2 c P ^ S S rt % 2 . en "5b bJO iu "^ - J2 > ^^ o jS '-S bjj fi 2 s " C K*^ ^ o > ^ CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL the forests he released this great destructive force of nature again, and allowed the falling water to sweep into the sea the accumulations of centuries of forest growth. Nothing fol- lowed more rapidly on the cutting away of the white pines of the Great North woods than the filling up of the navigable channels of our northern rivers with sand swept down from the deforested regions. Lakes and ponds were filled with it also, and reservoiring capacity lost. And nothing is checking this more completely than the work of the Wisconsin forester, who is gathering together his scattered pine lots into a compact and powerful forest army on the headwaters of the rivers of his state. This destruction of the land following the cutting of the forest is not a unique experience for America. It is a world-wide development, of which Germany and France have had their turn. And we can do no better here than to examine the catastrophe which befell France when the forests of the Savoyan Alps were destroyed. 223 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER The wonderful mountains of the south and southeast of France, below Lake Geneva, have from the earliest times been heavily forested. In the days before the French Revolution these forests were strictly protected by national edict. But after the revolution the destruction began, at first in the plain, then ascending the moun- tain, as each landowner, fearing new changes of government, attempted to turn his property into cash. Out of these mountains run two important streams and many lesser ones the two being the Rhone and the Durance. The Rhone was a navigable river of a swift current, emptying into the Gulf of Lyons; and the Durance was its chief tributary. When the forests were cut away these rivers began to receive increas- ing amounts of sand and gravel, which rolled along in their currents and made bars and ob- structions and rapidly advanced the delta. For nearly a century navigation of the Rhone was practically impossible. In that hundred years and the process is going on to-day it has 224 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL extended its delta from the point where it had been practically stationary since Roman times, out into the deep water of the Gulf of Lyons more than four miles, and in that advance has ruined the sea entrance to the river. That four miles represents the agricultural land of the mountains swept down and lost in the sea. But the loss has been far heavier than that. All through the mountains were little villages which had lived for centuries upon the products of the hills. In each village was a waterwheel turned by a steadily flowing mountain stream. The villages were prosperous and contented. With the destruction of the forests all this changed. The streams no longer flowed stead- ily but came in torrents, wrecking the mills and many houses, and then going completely dry. With the torrents came earth and gravel, so that in several cases villages have been within the past few years entirely buried in the debris brought down by the flood, the business streets being piled six or eight feet deep in gravel and bowlders in a single night. 15 225 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER Such destruction as took place in the Alps was repeated in the valley of the Garonne. All along the north slopes of the Pyrenees the shep- herds burned the forests off to increase the pasturage. Their hope was vain, for once the forest was gone the sandy soil quickly followed it. The Garonne became unmanageable and so remains, and the sand swept out to sea was borne back by the sea upon the Gascogne coasts and there piled in great dunes which marched steadily inward, overwhelming farms and vil- lages in sand, destroying fields, blocking rivers and brooks, and finally turning the whole of Gascogny into a marsh, a great unhealthy terri- tory known as the Landes, where shepherds went about on stilts to be above the bogs, and people died of the ravages of malaria and swamp fever. To remedy this, as to correct the troubles in the Alps, France is spending millions of dol- lars. On the headwaters of the Rhone she is planting forests, planting meadows, setting up all manner of devices to arrest the erosion, and 226 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL most costly of all, in the beds of streams she is building numberless masonry dams to hold back not the water, but the moving bed of the stream itself. In the delta of the Rhone she is spending other millions to make a canal in place of the natural river mouth choked by debris. In the upper Garonne also she is re- planting forests and building the costly dams to hold back the mountains. And on the Gas- cogne coast she has planted 2,000,000 acres of pine forest on the dunes to stop their traveling, to permit the opening of the drainage streams and to aid the sanitation of the Landes. These lessons which every country in the world can repeat, and which have led the Swiss and the Germans to develop their Protective Forests upon the mountainsides, we also have had to learn by hard experience. Not only in the mountains but upon our hillsides, where reckless plowing by the farmer in land which should be planted to grass or tree crops has often destroyed an entire farming region. We find this on the hills of northeastern Ken- 227 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER tucky, and we find there also a remarkable eco- nomic revolution produced almost entirely by this soil loss and the failure either of individual or government to provide against it. Along the Ohio river in the counties of Mason and Bracken and their neighbors, the ground rises abruptly above the river, and tumbles south- ward and westward in a very uneven but very beautiful hill region. In this region, about fifty years ago, the first Kentucky crops of White Burley tobacco began to be raised, the plant having been discovered in Ohio and brought across the river. Burley grew well on the hillsides, and paid good prices as high as twenty cents a pound. In the early days a crop could be grown every second or third year on a given tract but as the fertility was exhausted this extended to every five years. For a long time the Burley farmers plowed the hillsides, even the steepest of them, and raised tobacco on them. Every time the hills were plowed and the earth loosened the next rainstorm swept the best elements of it down 228 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL into some creek bottom. Gradually the cultiva- tion of Burley extended into Blue Grass, the central counties of the state, where the rich bottom lands produced more than twice as much to the acre. The Blue Grass farmers not only had more to sell but they could raise tobacco cheaper and so competition grew keener and the hillside farmer plowed his hillside oftener and grew poorer and poorer. One may tramp over the hills and drive over the Kentucky roads and watch them strewing straw and earth in a gully in a vain effort to stop the erosion. One may see a wearied and very poor farmer, with his wagon and mule team, down in the bed of the creek, shoveling into the wagon the earth which the rain has washed down, and carrying it back on the hill- sides to strew it again on his land. Wearisome and little repaid toil ! The next rain will undo his efforts. Three things, which the state of Kentucky must initiate, will restore this soil and make its place permanent and will at the same time 229 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER advance the prosperity and contentment of the landowners. One of these, which is a custom in all hilly countries, is the establishment of terraces on the hillsides with proper drainage, so as to check and direct the running water. This is a tedious and expensive process which properly carried out remains for generations with little repair, and which makes this land till- able and productive. The second is the development of forest tracts interspersed with meadows upon the hillsides, the production of timber crops from fast-growing trees, and of cattle upon the meadows. The tobacco barns turned into cattle sheds, the fields into pasture, will bring new life to the hill counties. But the third method is even more remuner- ative and equally useful for the prevention of erosion. It is the substitution of fruit crops for the tobacco crops, a substitution for which Kentucky climate and soil are admirably suited. Hardy pecans, grafted with paper shell nuts, walnuts, butternuts, apples, cherries, plums 230 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL and peaches can be grown there with great abundance and success. On the hillsides their roots will consolidate and bind the soil. Grass grown beneath them will serve for pasturage. The markets for the fruit are close at hand and pay good prices. And with such soil conserva- tion as the state could introduce these hillside farms would grow steadily richer, and pay each year better returns with an entire elimi- nation of the hard and degrading labor of the tobacco field which is now the lot of the farmer. This hillside erosion takes place in striking extent all along the fall line of the Appalach- ians, through the Carolinas, Georgia and Ala- bama, where the sandy red soil is worn into deep gullies, destroying fields and farms, cut- ting through roads, and burdening the rivers with the elements which are needed in the cot- ton crop. It takes place on the headwaters of the Tennessee, where the torrential rivers, sweeping down from the deforested hills into the Doe, the Nolichucky, the French Broad and 231 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER the Holston, overwhelm the little bottom land farms with gravel, carry off the thin soil which the mountaineers have tilled, and leave waste and ruin where they found contentment and plenty. The worst example of it all is in the valley of the Mississippi to which I have referred. Throughout the entire course of the running water of the Missouri-Mississippi from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico the stream is continually tearing at its banks, dissolving, overwhelming, undermining. The richest farm lands in America line these streams, and fall into them, sometimes an acre at a time. Drift- ing down the Mississippi I have been aroused in my boat by a roar like a continual thunder- storm, to discover, a mile or so away, a forested bank caving into the river, the rich earth fall- ing away, the mighty trees, a century old, crashing over one after another into the stream. I have seen a mass of land an acre in extent and standing forty feet above the level of the water, fine black soil all through, able to produce more 232 e co w III o> , - I ^ TO u ~ .S " rt -g nj >, (A3 ^2 3 w 8- I ^ < rt rt .S3 c 3 ^3 4) ,_r u *o .S M w .2 M g c = rt ^ 2 3 .& * ^ c w S Jg r H 1I ^ o ^ 7^ CX O CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL than a bale of cotton to the acre, suddenly and without warning crack loose from its neighbor and sink swiftly and noiselessly beneath the surface of the Mississippi. Such slips occur not occasionally but daily in a thousand places on the river ; and the result is to shift the chan- nel, to endanger navigation, and to bring a heavy loss upon the landowners adjacent to the stream. Thousands. of farmers have been rendered homeless and poor by .this theft of their land. Within a few years at Point Pleas- ant, Missouri, the Mississippi has moved side- ways two miles, swallowing up a strip of land two miles wide and ten to fifteen miles long, with all the farms, houses and cotton gins which stood upon it. This was rich and produc- tive land, capable of producing all told probably 1 5,000 bales of cotton each year ; but it has been entirely lost and in place of it the river will build up a sand bar, on which it will take a century of silt-depositing to make land equal to that destroyed. Of all the soil loss in America this from our 233 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER river banks is the most easily stopped. In order to transform the Mississippi into an orderly stream suited for navigation it is necessary to fix its banks in place so that the water will always flow in the same channels. This prob- lem the engineers have worked out in detail, and for thirty years they have been applying the solution under niggardly appropriations in a few scattered localities. It consists briefly in covering the bank against which the current strikes with a mattress woven of willow brush and galvanized wire, which we will describe in the chapter on navigation. This mattress is impervious and no earth can slip, slide or be eroded from behind it. Above low water line the forty- foot bank is sloped back to a gentle angle and covered a foot deep in broken stone. This whole process is called revetment, and is the standard and the only method of withholding this soil from the river, of saving the levees from destruction, of protecting the farmers and of establishing a safe navigable channel. Such revetment prop- 234 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL erly constructed is almost perpetual and needs very little repair in the first thirty years of its existence. In a few years the movement now under way will lead to the construction of at least eight hundred miles of such work on the Mississippi below Cairo alone, and fully as much on the lower Missouri. Erosion on the hillsides is more difficult to contend with ; but in the main it can be greatly reduced by the methods outlined for Kentucky. The steeper hillsides should never be plowed, and since soil loss is a state and national loss the state will some day assume the right to say that they shall not be plowed. Then they will be planted to berries, to vines, to forests, to orchards, to pasture, or otherwise so conducted that a vegetable covering of some sort shall hold them intact. The real purpose of this is double first to bind firmly the surface of the soil to prevent its washing away; second, and perhaps more important, to retain upon the surface a soft mulch of absorbent earth into which the rain will sink and be absorbed as it 235 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER falls, instead of rushing swiftly away over the surface. The gentler hills and the rolling country should be plowed along the contours, so that each furrow lies level and affords a holding place for floodwater until it sinks into the ground. The plow and cultivator passing along such furrows close the breaks in them and keep them tight. All through the cotton country this contour plowing is spreading with beneficial results ; and one may travel for miles through Georgia and Alabama and see everywhere the winding rows following in and out the curves of the hillsides. This work, how- ever, should be seconded by " balks " or strips of unplowed land, parallel to the furrows also, at frequent intervals, but left unplowed to check the gullies that may start and to afford a holding place for depositing the earth which has started to wash. Such balks in a hillside maintained for several years tend to form ter- races by the gradual accumulation of earth upon them, and in fifteen or twenty years the 236 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL farmer finds his field approaching a condition of level benches following the curves of the hill. These measures, including those of sylvicul- ture above, are, after all, concerned with the mechanical depreciation of our soil; and on level ground they should be supplemented with good drainage which will keep the soil always in condition to hold and absorb rainfall. But there is another sort of soil depreciation which has already reduced the crop production of the country to a remarkable extent, and that is the over-cropping without fertilization. Every field which is planted continually in one crop year after year exhausts the elements which produce that crop; or disturbs the balance of elements in the soil so it will no longer yield them; or sets up in the soil some actively op- posing element, sometimes a plant poison, which prevents crops of that character prospering. It was this which the Ozark backwoodsman had in mind when, looking regretfully at the half- acre clearing which had been his only corn sup- 237 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER ply for forty years, and in which a few yellow- ish stalks were trying to grow, he said : " That were a good bit of land, fifty year ago but she done been corned to death." From New England to the Pacific coast there is not a state in the Union in which some land has not met the same fate. New England is filled with abandoned farms, abandoned solely because they would no longer without proper care produce the old crops in abundance. New York is filled with them, and the abandon- ment is spreading westward. But every once in a while someone who knows comes to an abandoned farm and by skillful cultivation turns it into a magnificent producer. In Illi- nois there are farms cultivated under the old, shiftless fashion which do not produce over twenty bushels of corn to the acre ; and imme- diately adjacent to them farms of no better soil, but of better management, which produce seventy-five to a hundred bushels of corn in the same area. Land in the South is frequently classed as " bumblebee " because it will not pro- 238 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL duce anything but the scraggly remnants called by the farmer bumble-bee cotton; and yet the same land properly taken in hand may be made wonderfully productive. There is, for ex- ample, at Rome, Georgia, a school for moun- tain boys where they are taught agriculture. To this school come the unlettered mountain- eers who have never seen any form of agricul- ture other than the continual light plowing of the hillsides with its swift erosion, which produces a few bolls of cotton and a little corn for the mountain family. They come to a school which has for its cotton fields abandoned land " cottoned to death " before the boys come to it; and there they are taught to plow deeply, to stir up the better elements below and to return the old plants deep into the soil for new nourish- ment. They, are taught to put on fertilizer suited to the soil, and put it in abundantly and to make the cattle barn provide this plant- food. And as a result they see this abandoned and exhausted land returning every year better yields, soon to produce a bale to the acre, then 239 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER to reach a bale and a half, eventually, without doubt, to produce two bales to the acre on the sandy flat lands of Georgia. This matter of the internal economy of the soil is one of the least understood by the farmer, by the public and even by scientists. No more important work is being carried on to-day in our country than that of the Bureau of Soils, in the survey and examination of the soils of every state, and the tests made to determine the action of these soils under widely varying con- ditions. It has long been a common theory that the plants were nourished on mineral constit- uents in the soil, and' that if an abundance of phosphates, nitrates and potash were added to it the plant would select them for food and in- crease accordingly. If an opposite result were obtained (and it sometimes happens that the wrong fertilizer reduces the yield of a crop with startling quickness) the farmer affirmed that it had 1 " burned " the crop, and used less next time. As a result of this theory we have been over- 240 CONSERVATION OF THE SOIL whelmed by the prediction that our soils would be chemically exhausted in something like one hundred and fifty years and we would then, as a nation, starve to death unless we found new ground. Nothing could be more baseless than such predictions. Soil is not merely a matter of mineral elements to be subtracted by the plant; it is a dynamic thing, a moving body, continually alive, added to by the winds and the rain, moving about with the running water, disturbed by earthworms and insects, aerated and oxygenized by plowing and cultivating, never remaining long in the same condition. It contains not only the plant-feeding minerals and many others, but also a percentage of or- ganic matter, continually varying in nature and in action. Over the country at large there is in the surface soil an average of more than two per cent of organic matter; and this matter is as likely to be harmful as it is to be helpful to the growing crop. Part of the work of the Bureau of Soils consists in the examination of these organic elements, and the discovery of 16 241 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER which of them are harmful and how they can best be removed or counteracted. Southern Illinois possesses as rich a soil as one can find anywhere, heavy black, clayey loam, which requires strong underdrainage, deep plowing, continual cultivation to keep it in condition. Instead of producing twenty-five to thirty-five bushels of wheat to the acre as such soil ought, and as it does elsewhere, this southern Illinois land produces on an average only about eleven bushels of wheat. Examina- tion by the chemists found nothing lacking of the so-called fertile elements, but too much or- ganic matter of an evil nature present. Owing to the internal reactions the soil was what is called a " sour " soil, unsuited for growing wheat. Over its surface is being spread, and deeply plowed in, finely powdered limestone, practically a lime flour. The effect of this is neither to add food for the plants, nor to re- lease the fertile parts, but to alter and better the action of the organic elements in the soil and so bring about more favorable condition 242 bJO 3 C rt I . >- en c * .S rt 1 o rt i *Q o> r, -C 1, C o 5 u * c t g g > 3 .2 ^ JT co ^ -c > E-< c M u . 1- 8 I i 9 i r- 1) -)- g 2 o a 5 *j 2 3 T3 O SIS I s I - > I ' : ^3 *j nj c "~ wi j3 ^ ^ -a -~ ^ (U 3 rt O to ,- CX .!- -rt cr 1 rt M O i'i rt I -S 5 1 fe ? ^, = o 5 ill 5 = ^3 S p 3 '5 S NAVIGATION them and how we extend them, aside from this protection by revetment. The reservoir system for navigation must consist of great storage basins at headwaters, and of forested hillsides above the reservoirs and we find this is the same storage of water, the same Water Farms which are essential for the development of power, for flood protection, for municipal supply and for irrigation. They require no additional quantity for navigation, no alteration in operation, no change or addi- tional expense whatever. But let us see what they will return on the Ohio. This river has a total available fall which can be transformed into power of nearly 500 feet. It has an average flow of 158,000 second feet. If we sufficiently normalize the flow on that part of the river above the Tennessee to secure a constant dis- charge of 40,000 second feet so that that amount could be made the basis for power de- velopment, we would have at fifty fixed dams, of ten foot head each, 1,800,000 electric horse- power an d it is certain that the river could 259 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER be normalized to 80,000 second feet so as to produce not less than 3,500,000 horsepower. Figuring only on the first estimate the power is worth at the lowest wholesale prices, nearly $50,000,000 a year. We have spent on the Ohio more than $40,000,00 and we propose to spend twice that hereafter in completing a system of movable dams which will give us a navigable channel but no other return whatever and which will still be subject to floods and droughts. But here we have Conservation applied to the same channel. If we issue bonds for the work to be repaid over a long period, and if we employ those bonds to create storage what will be the result? Let us assume that the Ohio has no water at all during low periods and that through four months in the year we must create a river of 40,000 second feet simply by releasing the water from reservoirs. That will require 335,000,000,000 cubic feet of water stored in the mountains nearly four times as much as 260 NAVIGATION we have stored now in the Mississippi. But this amount is not enough, for there are some years of double floods and some of longer droughts. We must nearly double it to 6oo,ocx),ooo,ooo. Storage on the Mississippi cost $14 per million feet. A good average price for expensive storage on the Ohio would be $100. But let us double this and go at a very high price, and estimate the cost at $200 per million feet. It would be but $120,000,000 for a protection from floods which would save the Ohio Valley ten to twenty million dollars every year. Then we must erect fifty concrete dams and the adjacent power houses at $4,000,000 each which will cost us $200,000,000. Alto- gether this involves less money than the Panama Canal, but unlike the latter it pays its own way. We have spent but $320,000,000 and we need to add but $50,000,000 to this for the electric distributing system and all that goes with it, and we shall have our waterpower re- turning big dividends to the natidh. Instead of expending $100,000,000 with no 261 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER return for a navigable channel, and still suffer- ing from floods, Conservation proposes that we shall invest five times as much the equivalent of the cost of the Panama Canal for a bigger work, avoid the floods, increase municipal sup- ply, prevent soil erosion, save the power and have an income, gross, of 13 per cent, net of probably 9 per cent on the money invested, to retire the bonds. We are dealing in big figures, but with a big subject. Hamburg in Germany has spent $100,000,000 on its harbor. Bremen has spent nearly as much. We have ourselves spent $250,000,000 on the Mississippi system simply working at it in the old-fashioned back-handed manner which spent the money for navigation alone without return and gave away the by- products. Now we propose to spend the money on other things that pay big dividends, and let the navigation come as a byproduct of them all. Let us apply this method to the greatest of American waterway projects and see where it brings us and what we have already accom- 262 NAVIGATION plished. I refer to the Lakes-to-the-Gulf chan- nel, the route for ships from Chicago to New Orleans which it is proposed shall be at first fourteen and later twenty feet in depth. This channel begins in Chicago with the Sanitary Canal. That canal has cost Chicago all told nearly $60,000,000 and when it is in full operation it will return from waterpower $750,000 yearly, from rentals along the bank not less than $1,000,000 (rentals made possible by the deep waterway) and eventually $2,000,- ooo. Its sanitary value to Chicago alone, in the reduction of the death rate has made it money well spent. The next section is a drop from the end of the Sanitary Canal to Utica, a fall of more than a hundred feet. In this reach more than 100,000 electric horsepower can be developed and Illi- nois has voted to spend $20,000,000 on the con- servation of this waterpower for the use of the state, the navigable channel being a byproduct. The waterpower will return not less than $2,500,000 annually to the state, first paying off 263 THE CONSERVATION OF WATER the bonds, then giving her a surplus for other improvements. The reach from Utica to Cairo will involve three great dams, one at Alton and two below St. Louis. Each of these will generate 200,000 electric horsepower and the total result will be power worth about $16,000,000 a year, to repay channel and electrical construction of not over $100,000,000. The reach from Cairo to the sea we have already considered. So here we have a magnificent illustration of the Conservation of Water in which the several elements, waterpower, flood protection and soil protection are the principal parts of the work; and return liberal dividends ; while the navi- gable channel is a free gift to the people of the nation. This is the new idea of navigation. It came upon the engineers suddenly when President Roosevelt proposed his great doctrine of Con- servation. But it is bound to sweep through the country. And it is certain that there will be no more granting of waterpower privileges 264 o> ^ ^ : Sir* C to ~ "~ T3 O OJ T3 G fill rt > rt c o pr *2 3 C 9 rt T, $ rt - J.I r- G X ^j fi c ^ ^ ^: S 2 ^ c U rt H X! ^ co S e - to " I & " ^ - " 208, 209 Pyrenees, the, 226 RainfaU, 5, 31, 34, 55, 56, 124, 189, 190 Rainy Lake river, 139, 140 Rainy river, 27, 125 Reclamation act, 182, 194-195 Reclamation Service, 174, 195, 202, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216 Red river, 154, 169 Reelfoot, 156, 157 Reichenberg, 49, 53 Reno, Nev., 211 Reservoirs, the making of, 57- 60; at head of the Missis- sippi, 60-62; necessary for irrigation, 63-64; their effect in Wisconsin, 77, 78; at Roosevelt Dam, 200; at headwaters of Columbia river, 208-209; i n Truckee- Carson project, 211; their use for navigation, 259 Revetment, 234, 255 Rhone, the, 224, 226, 227 Riparian rights, 15, 19 Rock Island rapids, 122 Rocky Mountains, 32 Romans, the, 80 Rome, Ga., 239 Roosevelt, Arizona, 197, 200 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 113, 264 Roosevelt Dam, 196-201 Sacaton Indian reservation, 200 287 INDEX Sacramento river, 174 St. Anthony's Falls, 61, 62, III, 122 St. Francis river, 154, 157, 161, 162, 163 St. Francis Swamp, 153, 154, 156, 158, 163, 164, 165, 167, 171 St. John, Bayou, 157 St. Lawrence river, 53, 125 St. Louis, Mo., 83, 108, 122, 123, 139, 150, 264 St. Paul, Minn., 61, 62 Salmon river, 124 Salt river, 196, 197, 199, 218 San Francisco, 87, 92, 93, 124, 126, 127, 128, 139 San Joaquin river, 174 Savannah river, 221 Saxony, 47, 48, 51 Sea Island, 153 Seattle, 87, 124 Seine river, 38 Sewage, its pollution of mu- nicipal water supply, 79- 88 Sewickly, Pa., 81 Shawinigan falls, 107 Silesia, 51 Snake river, 124, 183 Soil preservation, 13 South Carolina, 148, 166, 231 South Pass, the, 152 Southport, La., 81 Spokane, 112, 123, 128 Spokane river, 123 Stevens Point, Wis., 74 Storage. See Water storage Suck, the, 107 Swamp drainage, 12, 13, 144- i7S Switzerland, 4, 23, 73, 112 Taft, President, 214 Teche, Bayou, 154 Tennessee, 32, 48, 157 Tennessee river, 37, 48, 122, 139, 231, 259, 265 Tensas river, 153 Texas, 148 Thunder Bay, 140 Tieton project, 21, 215 Tigris river, 181 Tobacco, 228, 229, 230 Tomahawk river, 76 Truckee-Carson project, the, 210 Tule lake, 215 Tuolumne river, 92 Twin Falls, 124 Umatilla project, the, 209, 210 Umatilla reservation, 179 Uncompaghre river, 212-215 United Missouri River Power Co., 22, 126 Utah, water law in, 19-20, 185-187; irrigation in, 182, 184, 1 88; mentioned, 30, 180 Utica, 111., 263, 264 Valley Forge, Term., 100 Vermont, 115 Vicksburg, 152, 153 Virginia, 121, 148 Virginia City, Nev., 211 288 INDEX Wachusett dam, 89 Washington (state), 123, 179, 183, 209, 216 Washita river, 123, 153, 169 Water, its importance, 5-8 Waterpower, amount wasted, 10; law as applied to, 14-27; its loss by flood, 42-46; its development, 97-143; men- tioned, 13, 21 Water rights, 185-187, 194 Water storage, 13, 38-78, 105 Water titles, 14, 21, 23, 26, 114, 187, 216 West Virginia, 32 Westfield river, 44 Wheeling, W. Va., 81, 249 "White Coal," derivation of phrase, 4 White river, 123, 153 Willamette river, 23 Williston, No. Dak., 204, 205, 206 Winnibigoshish lake, 61 Wisconsin, preservation of for- ests in, 70-78; mentioned, 26, "3, 147 Wisconsin river, 32, 74, 76, 127 Wisconsin Valley Improve- ment Co., 74, 115 Wolf river, 76 Wyoming, 179 Yakima valley, 21, 179, 215 Yazoo Delta, the, 153 Yellowstone river, 203 Yosemite National Park, 92, 93 289 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 5O CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. ' -:.-; ;. M# JAN 71963 APR 29 1S37 __ flt SEP 24 MAY- MAR 11 194f SAKITA 27MarS2DP NTERLIBRARY 27Nlar52ll' JUN 15 1971 T-^ r '. WttKS AntR RECHPT 7Dec'62BV SITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY