“Colonel Biddle—It is impossible for them, unless they go in with knapsacks on their backs.”
“Chairman—Poor people do not visit it at all, do they?”
“Colonel Biddle—I would not say that, because it is one of the great delights of Californians, even if they are not well off, to take knapsacks on their backs and go to the Sierras; but they do not really stay long in the Hetch-Hetchy Valley. In the early summer the mosquitoes are bad, in the late summer it is too hot.”
Colonel Cosby of the Board of Engineers gave this testimony:
“Taylor of Colorado—Do you think these roads, provided for in this bill, will make it accessible to a greater number of people?”
“Colonel Cosby—I do. At present I think there are practically only two classes of people who use it, people who are unusually wealthy or people who are unusually strong and healthy and are able to make the trip.”
Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and Pueblo, Col., go into national parks for their water supplies. Los Angeles goes into a government forest reserve and brings its water from Inyo County, 220 miles, by aqueduct and more than twenty miles by tunnels.
Gifford Pinchot, testifying before this Committee, stated: “As we all know, there is no use of water higher than the domestic use. Now the fundamental principle of the whole conservative policy is that of use, to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will best serve the most people.”
George Otis Smith, director of the Geological Survey, stated: “I think we will agree that municipal use is the highest value, next irrigation and lastly power—the generation of hydro-electric energy. I believe the highest possible utilization of the Tuolumne, or of any river, is that which provides, as far as possible for a combination of these three values and the harmonizing of the different uses.”