far as can be learned. It is a well-known fact that rain storms follow
the course of streams, and as a system of irrigation multiplies
universally the evaporation of a region, besides multiplying small
streams and enlarging others, and as hollows would often be ponded by
the waste water, an increase in the area watered by local showers is
naturally to be expected. Moreover, the burning winds that so often
scorch the crops will be somewhat softened by traversing so much moist
ground and so many streams. Trees, too, grow more readily in the
moistened land, and in turn protect the land from the hot winds. Given a
proper system of irrigation in operation for twenty-five years, and the
epithet, treeless, need not be applied to Dakota.

Let us consider irrigation a moment historically. Certainly half of the
world's population depend on it to-day. Modern Egypt has the most
extensive system ever known, except the one recently unearthed in India,
so massive in construction and vast in stretch that one writer has
declared it would take the entire wealth of the British Empire to put it
again in order. The Egyptian system cost $200,000,000, and two,
sometimes three crops, are raised for one of former times.

No division of the United States has a better credit in commercial
circles than Utah, and this is not due to the peculiar institution of
polygamy, but to the perfect system of irrigation. The careful
husbanding of the waters that come down the Wahsatch Range on mountains,
has transmuted a dreary desert of sand and sage brush into what most
travellers regard as a garden, and what possibly to the faithful appears
symbolically a Paradise.

Senator Stewart, of the United States Irrigation Committee, stated that
he had inspected nearly every irrigated region of the world, and knew of
no place supplied by so vast a reservoir of water, with either the
volume or the pressure of the artesian belt of Dakota. Much of the land
in the Jim River Valley is comparatively level and susceptible of sub
soil irrigation. It would take from two to three years to put the land
in prime condition and to make each acre that is now valued at from
three to ten dollars, worth fifty, at least, and probably seventy-five.

Now, $5,000,000 would more than cover the cost of the suggested
irrigation in the Northwest--a mere trifle, if the certainty of crops is
thereby guaranteed. Nor is the certainty of crops the only object to be
considered. According to dea