Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small]

A FEW SUGAR BEETS WAITING SHIPMENT AT
FORT COLLINS, COL. THIS PILE IS 1,200
FEET LONG, 120 FEET WIDE AND 15
FEET DEEP

have heard about irrigation. Such a vast region is thirsting for water that though mile after mile of canals and great artificial lakes has been made, only a few million acres have been reclaimed. How differently the Western farmer regards space! The hundred or two hundred acres that may make a man wealthy in New England are merely a single field to the grower whose corn may cover a thousand acres and who employs scores of laborers to gather his wheat at harvest time. About eight million acres are traversed by the canals big and little, of which 50,000 miles have been dug; the grainfields of all New England contain but 350,000 acres, and adding the rich valleys and plains of New York gives less than 3,000,000. The corn, wheat and oats of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware could be grown in the irrigated territory which is as large as Nebraska and Iowa, the two greatest cornfields on the globe. But there is yet to be conquered a domain stretching away over hill and plain and valley a thousand miles from north to south and fifteen hundred miles from east to west. Of course not all is waste, but the surveyor has travelled through its length and breadth and has mapped out the country which as yet is no man's, merely for lack of nourishment. Great regions will be forever parched as neither river nor lake is near enough to moisten them, but over a hundred million-to be exact 120,000,000acres can be made to blossom, perhaps not as the rose, but can be converted into a land of plenty when overspread by the waters above and beneath them. It startles one to con

[graphic]
[graphic]

CAYUGA STREET, CARLSBAD, N. M. SHADE TREES TEN YEARS OLD

[graphic][merged small][graphic][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »