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FOR days we drove over the gray sand and

stony mesas of central Arizona-a vast, bare, silent waste ridged with hills and furrowed with great washes, where the water rushes down in flood season from the mountains, but now as dry as ashes. The sun shone white and hot, the heat quivered from the tops of the ridges, and behind us trailed always a cloud of thin white dust. Here and there we saw a squat and thorny cactus, and here and there mesquit, greasewood, yuccas, and gray sage. For miles on miles there was no sign of living creatures; then a lean wild steer or two on the hills, a jack-rabbit, a gopher, and a hawk wheeling in the air above and waiting for the desert to do its work. And in all those hundreds of square miles of land not a drop of water anywhere, not a pool, not a spring, save in a few favored spots where some desert pioneer had sunk a well and lived there to guard his treasure and dole out the water sparingly to such travelers as might pass that way. Bones bleached as white as chalk and scattered far and near gave evidence of the consuming thirst of the desert; and everywhere silence, heat, thirst. This was the desert. Who would dream of men bold enough to come here and fight for a home?

Yet here men have come. Suddenly, at sundown, we emerged from a thicket of cactus, and there, stretching away for miles and miles, was the soft green of fields, with rows of rustling cottonwoods, the roofs of homes, and the sound of cattle in the meadows. A wire fence was the dividing-line: on this side lay the fruitless desert; on the other green alfalfa, full of blossoms and bees, brimming over the fences. At the roadside a ditch ran full of fresh, cool water; where it had broken through into the roadway-an extravagance that seemed reckless-a pool was wriggling full of polliwogs. Red-wing blackbirds whistled in the cottonwoods, and

wild pigeons flew up from the fields. Fat

cattle stood knee-deep in the adobe waterholes, still and comfortable; the men were coming out whistling to milk. A little brick house stood back from the road, almost hidden with palms and umbrella-trees; there were chickens and bees and children about it, and the scent of roses from the porch. Everywhere the landscape was serenely quiet and beautiful; here were homes and happiness. It was something to stir a man's heart, this change from the hard, dry, merciless desert to this sweet green paradise of the irrigated land. And all this change was the result of water-a very little water, too, considering-brought from the river above and spread on the sand. It had made all the difference between desolation and teeming abundance.

If ever men worked miracles, they have worked them here in these Western valleys. If ever something was created from nothing, these men have done it. Thirty-five years ago the Salt River valley, into which we had driven, was all a parched desert, uninhabited save by a few lean Indians and two or three hardy traders, whom the sand and cactus crowded down close to the water of the river. It was a thousand miles from the nearest railroad-an unknown, desolate, forbidding land, a part of the Great American Desert, which travelers said would never support human life. To-day the Salt River valley contains a population of over twenty-five thousand. It has three cities, one, Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, having electric lights, an electric car line, good hotels, churches and other buildings, residences surrounded by trees, lawns, and a wilderness of flowers. More than 125,000 acres of land round about are laid out in farms, highly cultivated, with orchards of oranges, almonds, olives, and figs, and grain- and hay-fields. Thousands of cattle feed in the rich meadows, and

there are bees, chickens, ducks, and ostriches unnumbered. Richer soil than this once desert valley does not exist anywhere in the world except in other once desert valleys. Here one may behold the startling spectacle of orange-groves in bearing worth $1000 an acre on one side of a fence, and bare cactus desert on the other, both having the same soil, the same opportunities, but one only having water. Here, when a man builds his fence of cottonwood posts, such is the soil and such the water that the posts take root and grow into trees, so that the wire of many old fences is seen running through the center of large trees. Here a farmer rarely needs to use fertilizer, for the river comes in bearing rich silt and spreads it over his fields; and he may sometimes cut two or three or more crops a year from his alfalfafields, and then pasture them during the winter-winter which is in reality a continual spring.

This is the paradise which a few determined men have created in the midst of the desert, and all by the building of ditches that divert the water from the river at the upper end of the valley, and divide it so that it will give life to the land below. About 250 miles of main ditches and some 400 miles of laterals have been dug through the valley; they have cost, together with all the necessary dams and embankments and head-gates, not more than $3,000,000. And the property which has been created-and "created" is the only word that will express it-by this expenditure has a money value exceeding $30,000,000, furnishing a living for twentyfive thousand people, supporting three cities, doing business by two railroads. Is it any wonder that these people of Arizona appreciate the value of water, that they love their valley and their Territory, and that they are ambitious for the wider powers of statehood? Something of the ancient passion of the bare land for water seems to have burned itself into the blood of these Anglo-Saxons of the West. "On this desert," says the pioneer of the arid land, "I shall build me a home." And he stands back to back with his neighbor there in the heat and sand, and they fight and toil and die, but they bring in the water to the land. No man can win the battle for himself: the desert is too strong, too well intrenched, for the feeble effort of a single arm; he must join his neighbor, he must forget his own interests and work for the interests of his valley. And thus he makes the gray places green, he grows rich orchards, and fields where cattle feed com

fortably; he builds roads where the sand once blew, and cities where the cactus once stood guard upon the desert. This he has done, but not without the loss of many lives and millions in money.

Moreover, he knows that the battle is never-ending: if for a single season he fails to bring the water to his fields, his crops will wither down, his cattle die, and his green places return to the wilderness of gray. This is no place for fallow land and vacations. The implacable desert is forever silently crowding in along his borders, ready to beat him out the moment his ditches run dry or his strength fails. It is no business for laggards or cowards, this fight; it calls out every resource of human energy, science, and business acumen, and its victories are in exact proportion to the vigor expended.

Once before, some two thousand years ago, this valley of the Salt River was populated by a highly intelligent race of people. The ruins of their towns and of their ditches are scattered everywhere; one may pick up bits of pottery, beads, and bones from the great mounds of their fallen homes. Frank Cushing, the anthropologist, who made a careful study of these ruins, estimated that the valley must once have supported a population of over two hundred and fifty thousand people. They were expert engineers; the Anglo-Saxons of to-day can do no better than follow the lines of their ancient canals, and the present settlers find the fields ready leveled for their plows by these ancient workers. Yet the desert wiped them out of existence, closed over them, and they are forgotten. The cause of their disappearance, whether natural cataclysm, wild foes, pestilence, or some mortal waywardness of their river, no one knows positively. But their fate will be the fate of the present settlers if once the water fails. Is it anything surprising that the people of the arid West should possess a sharp consciousness of the impending desert?

I have used the Salt River valley as an example of the conditions that prevail in all parts of the arid West. The system there in use is by no means as old or as perfectly developed as in many other localities, especially in southern California and in Utah, where the Mormons, who are the real irrigation pioneers of the continent, have built a paradise along their western Jordan; but the spirit, the energy, the intense Americanism, the demand for a broader life, are everywhere the same. In southern California, for instance, where a few acres of

good orchard are worth a small fortune, the saving and utilization of water may be numbered among the exact sciences. Here the ditches, instead of being roughly dug in the soil as in most parts of the irrigated country, are often substantially lined with cement, so that no water will be lost by seepage; in other cases the water is actually carried in pipes to the farms and distributed from hydrants located at the ends of the furrows. There are regions in southern California where one never escapes the sound of engines, both gasolene and steam, pumping water from wells to irrigate the land. All this seems costly enough to the Eastern farmer, but here it has been made to pay richly, for an acre in an irrigated region can be made to yield from ten- to a hundred fold as much as an acre in the rain country. In Utah wheat has yielded from 60 to 80 bushels to the acre, oats from 70 to 100 bushels, potatoes from 500 to 900 bushels, though these are extraordinary records. In California it is not at all unusual for a fruit-grower to clear from $100 to $400 an acre, and even more, from his orange-orchard. In Arizona alfalfa-fields have earned their owners from $40 to $100 an acre. These values and conditions, it should be said in passing, are those of the irrigated regions of the Southwest; conditions in the North, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, are different. There the long, cold winters and the cool nights of summer prevent the growing of high-priced, many-cropped products, and the value of the land is much lower-rarely more than $40 an acre, and often as low as $12. The products, too, of the North are as different from those of the Southwest as are those of New York and Florida.

It is rare enough for a farmer in the East to make a fortune; but many farmers in the irrigated country who began from fifteen to twenty years ago without anything are now worth their hundreds of thousands of dollars. A farm of fifteen acres will support a large family in more than comfort, so that, region for region, the irrigated districts are destined to become much more densely populated than the Eastern farm country-perhaps, indeed, the most densely populated of any land on the continent, cities, of course, excepted.

Yet one who visits the West is astonished to see how comparatively little the desert has been touched, how much remains of what John Muir calls "wildness." In passing through New Mexico and Arizona on either of the transcontinental railroad lines,

one sees hardly an evidence of irrigation, for the best valleys are hidden away in the interior, and the stranger is impressed with the vast, unbroken stretch of dreary desert and rugged mountains. One finds difficulty, indeed, in realizing the immensity of the arid West. It includes about half the United States. The ninety-eighth parallel of latitude, which cuts down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, -a little east of the center of each State, -is the dividing-line; everything to the west of this line is within the region of scanty rainfall or aridity, except a narrow strip of rich country along the Pacific coastline of Washington, Oregon, and California. In all the remaining vast stretch of arid America no crop of any kind will mature with certainty without regular irrigation. Major J. W. Powell, one of the greatest authorities on irrigation problems, has estimated that there are over 1,000,000,000 acres of arid land in the United States. Of this he thinks that about 120,000,000 acres, or a territory equal to all of New England, with New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia thrown in, will ultimately be successfully irrigated by the use of all sources of water. At present about 35,000,000 acres, or a territory equal in size to the State of New York, is actually under ditch, the work of reclamation having cost in the neighborhood of $200,000,000. These figures show what a vast amount of hard work is yet to be done before the empire of the desert is thoroughly subdued. And even after all the water of the West is utilized and every acre of land reclaimed that can be reclaimed, there will still remain vast areas of mountain and plain which can be left in forest, or used for mining and grazing purposes, or set aside for splendid natural parks like the Yellowstone and the Yosemite. As yet these almost inconceivably great resources of the West have only just been touched; they will all contribute to the prosperity of the irrigated country, and that country will in turn supply the miner, the lumberman, the cattleman, and the pleasure-seeker with food. The West is still the name for opportunity.

The development of irrigation in the arid country is rapidly reaching a great and important climax. All of the lands most easily irrigated have already been taken up, for the most part by little bodies of citizens who formed themselves into coöperative associations, built a ditch, and diverted the water to their land by the work of their own hands. This was the method of the Mormons, and