cked rattle snake. We came soon to another little town where
there was a good hotel. Hanging on the wall of the hotel was a painting
of the proposed Lahontan Dam and the country which its life-giving
streams would touch. We decided, instead of going direct to Fallon, to
drive across country to the Dam, making a slight detour. We were very
glad that we did so, for we found the young superintendent of the Dam
construction, a Brown University man, very courteous indeed. We went to
look at the enormous pile of sand and clay which has been banked up day
after day and week after week until the Lahontan Dam is the largest
earth dam in the world. We saw cement spillways, one on each side of the
earth dam proper, their tall steps planned to break the fall of the
water at any time of great flood and pressure. We saw the lake itself
with its measuring tower and gate already sixty feet under the rising
water. Mr. Tillinghast told us that the lake stretches back into the
hills and the canyon for twenty miles. We heard of the millions of
fertile acres which this water, already beginning to be released in a
rushing stream, was to make possible. Some miles back we had seen
irrigated country, green and fertile, cut, so to speak, right out of the
desert. Alfalfa was growing luxuriantly and was being cured in high
green stacks under the sun. Settlers' little cottages were a visible
promise of the future, just as they had been in California. We
congratulated Mr. Tillinghast on his work, and told him that in days to
come he should bring his grandchildren to see the Lahontan Dam, a
splendid monument to his work and the work of the men with him.

We saw where he and his assistant engineer lived with their families.
They had small but comfortable quarters made of houses built of tar
paper. Some chicken yards were near, and an improvised tennis court was
in front of the little row of houses. Near by was a little schoolhouse
for the children of the settlement. Here New England women, city born
and bred, were living happily with their children while their husbands
built the great Dam. One lady told us that her relatives in Providence
commiserated her lot. "But," said she, "the boys are so well and live
such a free and happy life in this glorious air that we really dread
being moved to another piece of work when the Dam is finished." From
Lahontan we picked our way across the desert with its sage brush and its
spaces, to Fallon.

When we left Fal