“The thing’s plain enough. How many years does a man usually spend chopping a clearing out of the Bush? Isn’t there a demand for anything that you can eat from our miners and the men on our railroads and in our mills? Why do we bring carloads of provisions in? Can’t you get hold of the fact that a man can start ranching right away on natural prairie, if he can once get the water out of it?”
“Oh, yes,” assented Nasmyth. “The point is that one has to get the water out of it. I would like Mattawa and Wheeler to notice it. You can go on.”
“Well,” said Gordon, “that man pitched right in, and spent most of two years cutting four-foot trenches through and dyking up the swamp. He went on every day from sun-up to dark, but every time the floods came they beat 113 him. When he walked over the range to the settlement, the boys noticed he was getting kind of worn and thin, but there was clean grit in that man. He’d taken hold of the contract, and he stayed with it. Then one day a prospector went into the valley after a big freshet and came across his wrecked shanty. The river had got him.”
Wheeler nodded gravely. “It seems to me this country was made by men like that,” he commented. “They’re the kind they ought to put up monuments to.”
There was silence for a moment or two after that, except for the sighing of the wind among the firs and the hoarse murmur that came up, softened by the distance, from the cañon. It was not an unusual story, but it appealed to those who heard it, for they had fought with rock and river and physical weariness, and they could understand the grim patience and unflinching valour of the long struggle that had resulted, as such struggles sometimes do, only in defeat. Still, the men who take those tasks in hand seldom capitulate. Gordon glanced at Nasmyth.
“Now,” he said, “if you have anything to say, you can get it out.”
Nasmyth raised himself on one elbow. “That Englishman put up a good fight, but he didn’t start quite right,” he said. “I want to point out that, in my opinion, the river has evidently just run into the cañon. It’s slow and deep until you reach the fall, where it’s merely held up by the ridge of rock the rapid runs across. Well, we’ll call the change of level twelve to sixteen feet, and, as Gordon has suggested, a big strip of natural prairie is apt to make a particularly desirable property, once you run the water out of it. You can get rid of a lot of water when you have a fall of sixteen feet.”
“How are you going to get it?” asked Wheeler.
“By cutting the strip of rock that holds the river up at the fall. I think one could do it with giant-powder.”