If these stores of water could be utilized for irrigation it is probable that the works would eventually pay for themselves in the increase in value of cultivated lands. The water at present is largely wasted because it rushes past the lands that need it before their distress of drouth comes, and its bulk is fairly spent when they need most the water that has passed. Adequate systems of reservoirs would also prevent largely the wearing away of banks and the changing of the course of the channel and even of the river itself which now sometimes tears away the foundations of cities, obliterates landmarks, and carries off bodily many well-tilled farms. Navigation could be much improved if the stages of high water could be moderated.
The Kansas farmer complained that the Missouri river is too thick to drink and too thin to plow. Control of surplus water near the sources would make this river so moderate that commerce would move along its surface. Varying moods and shifting sands now prevent navigation on that great river almost completely.
The Chinese have a problem similar to ours. Their government esteems their board of public works as one of the highest in their country. This board has charge of the canals and embankments along the great rivers. But it is a Chinese board.
The Hoang Ho resembles our great water course in that it rises in mountains and flows for hundreds of miles through comparatively level country in its lower courses. It deposits mud along its way through the great plain so that the people are continually obliged to construct levees higher and higher until nature no longer will put up with such treatment and the great yellow river breaks its bonds and travels across the country to find a new outlet at the seacoast.
In 2500 years it has altered its general course nine times with terrible destruction of life and property. Its last great breach occurred in 1887, when it tore through the empire a new channel that caused its waters to reach the sea through the mouth of the Yangtse-kiang five hundred miles away from its present mouth. More than a million lives were lost and the devastation of the country has never been approximately estimated. The gap torn in its embankment was two-thirds of a mile in width. Efforts to close it were ineffective except in low water, and when it was at last almost accomplished the celestials had a narrow but constantly deepening breach to mend, its depth during the last days of the work being so great that a torrent sixty feet deep fought with gigantic might against the endeavors of the men. At times the bed of this river has actually stood above the level of the surrounding country, its walls having risen with the rise of the bed due to the deposit of mud till it seemed as if the great river had risen to take a look over the surrounding plain to see where it could wreak the direst vengeance on those who prevented it from running unvexed to the sea.
We may learn from the wide experience of the Chinese that there is no safety for us in merely building higher the walls to restrain the Mississippi. The nation must take hold of the matter with a strong hand. Possibly forty or fifty millions will be necessary to construct the works which will moderate the flow and distribute its waters to those who need it in their irrigating ditches. Even though it cost thrice the sum paid to Spain in settlement of the Philippine question, the people would more gladly give it.
Nothing short of a great ship canal along the bed of the Mississippi will satisfy Americans. There is but one objection to the work, and that is its great expense. But we have recently seen that the cost of one great inundation along the Brazos was far more than the figures here named, and no account need be made of the loss of life and the suffering that followed that great disaster.
Our great river must be controlled. Not in the Chinese fashion, which we know to be merely the storing of wrath against the day of wrath, but it must be done intelligently and with patience, with faith in ourselves and a determination to prevent the great loss of life which will be imminent every time there happens to be the coming of a flood from the eastern mountains and another from the western at the same time.
Our great water way, when properly controlled and protected by permanent revetments and masonry, will furnish the farmers of the great plains a natural outlet to the sea for all their produce. This will be monopolized by no railway trust; no combination of steam-boat men will put the farmer into the hands of corporations seeking to rob him of the best part of his crop on the way to market, for there will be docks along every man's water front, and the rudest flatboat will always rely upon the favoring current to bear its cargo to the sides of independent vessels plying the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth.