HIGH SCHOOL BUILDING, MINIDOKA PROJECT
This beautiful, fully equipped school stands where there was only desert in 1907
The policy of national irrigation is broadly paternal and of enormous economic importance to the whole country. In the building of new commonwealths in the arid West the Government is utilizing its own undeveloped resources. It is creating opportunities for its citizens to establish themselves in permanent homes in which patriotism, loyalty and civic pride are bred and fostered. For a number of years the growth of population has been abnormal when compared with the development of the agricultural industries that must support the people. Farming as a profession has been languishing and falling behind the general development of the country. The rapid increase in land values has made it correspondingly more difficult for the man of small means to acquire a foothold on the land. Practically every progressive nation in the world has come to recognize this fact, and is making provisions to encourage and assist its citizens to undertake farming. The primary purpose of the Reclamation Law, therefore, is to make homes on the land. To the new empire in the West have flocked the young, the strong, the adventurous, and herein we are witnessing a gradual welding of all the Aryan races into a final race type. Signs are not lacking that this type in time will dominate the world, for the desert offers to every man his true birthright—room to breathe, sunshine, a sure reward for intelligent labor, the individual home, and an opportunity to become independent. Desert reclamation already has gone beyond the stage of prophecy. The material and substantial results that have been accomplished place the work of the Government on a practical and solid foundation.
The Romance of Reclamation
The history of national reclamation is as interesting and romantic as a tale from the Arabian Nights. Romance colored the vision of builders that saw in the sparkling streamlets, the unchecked floods, the wide, free plains and the vacant mountain valleys a promise of independence, happy homes and laughing children. Theirs was not the incentive of large emoluments, for Government salaries are notoriously meager. Their inspiration came from doing a signal work of splendid usefulness,—conquering nature in her unfriendliest mood for the permanent and lasting good of mankind. As they toiled in the fastnesses of the mountains, in abysmal canyons or far out in the voiceless desert, through the blazing summer heat of the Southwest or the fierce blizzards of the northern plains, this thought was uppermost, “By this work we shall make the desert blossom.”
CHICKENS THRIVE
In the dry climate of the desert
Their dramatic achievements stand out boldly in this age of engineering triumphs. The mighty floods of western rivers have been checked behind enormous masonry dams, several of which are ranked among the highest in the world. Physical geography has been altered by transferring rivers from one drainage basin into that of another. Whole rivers are now flowing through tunnels that pierce lofty mountain ranges, and the water is being distributed in thousands of miles of canals to a million acres of desert.