began to shrink in size until the roseate
descriptions of prospectors and land speculators led one to believe that
this whole region needed only a touch of the plough and the harrow to
produce the most bountiful crops grown anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, the great domain extending from the
twenty-five-hundred-foot level to the crest of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains is a region so deficient in rainfall that, for the greater
part, ordinary foodstuffs will not grow without irrigation; so farming
must be confined mainly to the flood-plains of the rivers. Here and
there considerable areas have been made fertile by capturing rivers,
damming their streams so as to create great reservoirs, and then
measuring out the waters to the farm lands below. The Salt River dam in
Arizona, recently completed, will supply water to two thousand square
miles, or about twenty-five thousand fifty-acre farms.

But in spite of all that man has done and can do to make this region
fruitful, not far from half a million square miles will ever remain
barren so far as the production of foodstuffs is concerned. Now this
whole region, irrigated lands included, does not produce more wealth
than the State of New York alone--possibly it does not produce so much.

Indirectly, however, it is worth more than two thousand million dollars
yearly to the rest of the United States; for it is a great highland
whose rims, the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, are about
two miles high. Now, these lofty ranges wring almost every drop of
moisture from the rain-bearing winds of the Pacific Ocean, leaving them
too dry to shed any moisture over the eastern half of the United States.
Because of this great mountain barrier, the winds that bring rain and
bountiful crops to the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic slope, follow
an easier passage, flowing directly from the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean Sea. And the copious rains are the chief wealth of this
midland region.

But the arid western highland possesses a great wealth of its own--a
wealth whose influence is world-wide, for it is one of the world's chief
storehouses of gold, silver, and copper. Gold and silver are the mediums
of commercial transactions, and copper is the chief medium for the
transmission of electric power. These metals, therefore, are quite as
necessary as are iron and steel. Moreover, this great waste, a seeming
incubus on the face of the earth, is each year disclosing more and m