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Show ----- r-"- ' " "-- " r li -Q .. . - j x . - - ' I live! many centuries too soon. If he were to go about tiiay la the treat arii region known as the "Ir.:ani r;r.;!re." whlh lies tort: of Uua and between the western slope of the r.oclties and the eastern elope cf the Cascade mountains, tappins the rocks with his magic rod for a water supply, the Irrigation Irriga-tion coir.par.les wtu!J give him enough gilt-edge stock to enable Mm to buy out the Standard OH company, says C. F. Carter In the Brooklyn Eagle. Irrigation Irri-gation Is the one great absorbing topic everywhere In the West, except in the cemeteries and In the mining camps, where no human soul talks or thinks or dreams or knows anything but gold. The farther west one goes the more excited ex-cited la the talk about irrigation. For, on the sun-baked sands, where, a few decades ago, the Indian raised balr by brute strength, the paaco has discovered discov-ered that be can raise fifteen tons of alfalfa to the aero every year by the mere application of the water cure. Irrigation statistics, which are poured into your unwCling ears by ths yard, are a fearful bore at first It is only when your teeth close rently but firmly upon a peach as big- as your fist, as daintily pink as a young girl's cheek and as juicy and delicious as a peach ought to be, and you are told that it was raised in an irrigated orchard that you begin to sit up and take notice. Then you ask for information, always trusting that it will be exemplified by more samples. - , It is well that facts about irrigation ars dinned into the perceptions- by endless end-less reiteration, for otherwise it would be dimply impossible to believe that anything any-thing but dust could be raised upon those barren plains. Nothing more dreary could be imagined than the endless billows of sagebrush which fade into the horlson as the train rolls along for hour after hour through southern and western west-ern Idaho. It is as monotonous as the ocean. For a timo there seems to be no life, no motion, no anything but sagebrush and greasewood. But presently a Jackrabblt hops away from the track a few rods and then stops, and wiggles bis ears at you in a most offensive way. Then there is another and another, and presently the discovery is made that there are millions of Jackrabbits swarming through the sagebrush. This is an infallible sign that it is a good fruit country. The greatest of all delicacies to a jackrabbit's taste la the bark of young fruit trees. An unerring instinct that has been, inherited through countless generations genera-tions has told these jacks that the soil is well adapted to fruit growing, and that if they will only hang around long enough somebody will come along and plant some nice young peach trees for- them to nibble at. But the discovery has been made that canned jackrabblt is good to eat. or, at least, good to sell, so the poor jack may be cheated out of his long-deferred feast, after all. No less important than soil for profitable farming is climate. In climate the arid regions come out strong: Here there are no evil disposed rainstorms lurking lurk-ing around to ambush the city chap who forgets his umbrella or waiting for the farmer to begin cutting hay. The sun shines here all day long and every day. And sunshine not only makes crops grow luxuriantly, but it makes people grow healthy and happy. Not a glum face can be found in a day's travel, nor does the stranger ever get a curt answer. The unfortunate Easterner who has to exist most of the t(me under lowering skies, who sees only sunshine that Is debilitated de-bilitated by a long struggle to break through the heavy atmosphere of sea level and the smoke of cities, can have no greater treat than to get outdoors, in Utah or Idaho or Oregon and let the sun shine on him. A week in this sunshine will cause him to take a more heartfelt Interest in his vltuals than all the doctors' prescriptions that ever were compounded, while a month of it will make him so eager to do things that he will have to be watched when he gets back to. his office to prevent him from doing other people's work. Few streams and fewer farms can be seen from the trains of the Oregon Short Line, which traverses the best part of Idaho, so it is rather surprising to hear that it is the best watered wa-tered of all the arid States and destined because of this fact and also because of its fertile soil and mild climate to become one of the richest agricultural States in the Union. But one river alone, the Snake, meanders through the State for 1000 miles, carrying a volume of water sufficient; according to the State Engineer's report, to cover all the available lands in its immense basin to a depth of seventy-six inches. There are seven other large rivers flowlng through valleys many miles wide, not to speak of numberless smaller streams. But though the farms are not visible from a car window they are there Just the same. Already $9,000,000 of private capital is Invested In irrigation projects in Idaho which embrace 2000 miles of trunk canals which water 1,726,000 acres of fertile soil. There are 10,000,000 acres more suitable for irrigation, on some of which the Government is now at work. Corporations with capital amounting to millions are being organised to develop still other areas. . So It Is not difficult to see that things are going to happen in Idaho before long. Perhaps if may be well to say here that the peoplel of Idaho are not the sort who wait for things to happen. Just to be enterprising they have heated Boise, the capital, by hot Water from an artesian weU. The Boise people try to let on that this is nothing, that they could heat the whole State the same way if they wanted to. But as a matter of fact they didn't do it on purpose at all. They really bored for oU in a plot of black shiny ground on which not even sagebrush would grow. When they reached a depth of 860 feet a spout of boiling water spurted up and knocked the derrick over. The average Western man simply can't bear to see anything wasted, so they built a natatorlum, a really handsome building with a pool 200 by 100 feet and four to six feet deep to utlllss the hot water. But they found that the natatorlum' used but a small portion of the water, so they were forced to build a distributing system of pipe water to the better class of residences and office buildings, where it Is used for heating, bathing bath-ing and laundry work and warming ovens in the hotels, for it comes out of the ground at a temperature of 198 degrees, and loses but degrees by the time it reaches the most distant house. This is the only town that ever was heated by natural hot water. Idaho is going into the beet-sugar business, too. A million dollar factory was put in operation at Idaho Falls in 1908, which produced 7,000,000 pounds of granulated sugar. This year Idaho farmers received $750,000 for their beet crop, which was at the rate of $4.60 a ton, and they raised twenty to thirty tons to the acre. |