CHAPTER XXXVIII.
DESTINY OF THE MISSOURI RIVER.
What of the future? Is the useful purpose of the Missouri River in the up-building of the West already fulfilled? Is its great history a closed book? Such, it must be admitted, is the general view. In popular estimation that river to-day is little more than a vast sewer, whose seething, eddying waters bear down the sands and clay and débris from the far upper country, scattering them along its course, swelling the floods of the Mississippi, and pushing ever seaward the delta of that mighty stream. To the railroads it is a million-dollar obstacle wherever they want to cross it. As a competitive route of commerce it has sunk beneath their notice. To the husbandman along its borders it is a perpetual nightmare, for he knows not what morning he may awake to find his worldly possessions ruthlessly swept away. From all points of view it now seems like one of those things in the economy of nature which could be dispensed with and the world be none the worse for its absence.
PAST AND PRESENT.
Nevertheless the river is still there—a fact, a thing to be reckoned with in some way or other. It will not let its presence be forgotten. In its old-time fashion it carves up the lands, but with vastly greater destructiveness now that they have become so valuable. Its terrible ice gorges pile up as of yore, but are now more dreaded than they used to be on account of the property along the banks. In other respects as well it is the same peculiar stream that it has ever been. The weird sandstorms drive over its illimitable bars, the willows bend to the blast, and the swift-rolling waters are lashed into foam by the prairie gale. In periods of calm its silvery sheen stretches away under the morning and evening sun as when the pilot followed its interminable windings through the prairies; and its resistless tide rushes on, as in the blithe steamboat days, when it carried upon its bosom the commerce of the valley.
But here the likeness between the past and present ends. No aboriginal savage now roams upon its borders. The buffalo does not come to its shore to quench his thirst, or to swim its current, or to cross upon its ice. The lonely dwellers of the valley have long since ceased to watch the eastern horizon where the river runs into the sky, for the curling smoke no longer tells them of the approach of those white-winged messengers of civilization, the Missouri River steamboats. They are gone, its greatness and glory, never, in their ancient form, to return.
THE GERM OF EMPIRE.
But the river itself is still there, and those who dwell on its shores refuse to believe that its power for good has passed away. For years they have wistfully looked upon its waters, flowing by in absolute waste, and then upon the rich lands on either side, parching in a rainless climate. A vague hope of what the river may be already possesses their minds. Does it not hold the secret germ of a mighty future empire? Twenty-five millions of people these wasted waters could sustain, if only they could be scattered upon the neighboring lands. With great canals to divert them from the river, with great reservoirs to keep them from going to waste, there would follow the necessary millions of money and men to turn them to proper account.
This is the dream. Can it be realized, or must it always remain nothing more than a dream? It is an engineering problem purely. The grand desideratum would be that everywhere, whether upon the main stream or its tributaries, the water could be saved and used in irrigation. But the obstacles in the way of so complete a result seem at present almost insurmountable. The higher tributaries can doubtless all be utilized, but the main streams, in their lower courses, have so little fall that it will be very difficult to build canals of sufficient length to get the water upon the higher ground. Whether the water will ever have a value that will justify pumping it to the necessary elevation it would be unwise at present to hazard a conjecture. But even if not more than half can be utilized, it will still be enough to maintain a population equal to that at present existing in the entire arid region of the West.
A MIGHTY FUTURE.