nyside," author and
authority, creator of The Life of George Washington, and the Broken
Heart, which made Lord Byron weep. The doughty Captain Benjamin L. E.
Bonneville, who died as late as 1878, obtaining leave of absence and a
furlough, endured the pleasure of hardships common to the explorer,
and through his happy biographer added the Trail to literature; but
his eye of vision did not see these great stones of the commonwealth,
Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The very region so
carefully pictured above as the dreariest of deserts, a veritable
Western Sahara, is the exact location of Idaho and a large portion of
Oregon; a region perfectly adapted to the sustenance of immense
population and intense development.

Moses understood all the wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do
know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's
triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the
Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the
land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being
an area of shimmering sand, where the ash-colored and dust-covered
sagebrush breeds the loathsome horned toad, the rough-and-ready
rattlesnake, and the slinking, night-hunting coyote, which preys on
the lithe-limbed, loping jack rabbit.

The modern Western American is rapidly learning a modified wisdom of
the ancient irrigators of Egypt, and already knows how to drain the
irrigated acres and leech these old alluvial plains. From the days
when the frosty glacial plowman ran his deep basaltic furrows for the
majestic Snake and other streams, these gorges of nature had been only
mossy beds over which lazily slid the unmeasured volumes down to the
western and "bitter moon-mad sea." Now man, the mightiest of all
magicians, has lured the liquid serpents from their age-long couches,
cut them into thousands of smaller streams, and sent them bravely
abroad on the face of the protesting desert, drowning its death and
making it to bloom and blossom.

As a concrete instance of the artificial possibilities of Idaho and
contiguous regions, I will here instance a statement made for me by
the Rev. H. W. Parker, superintendent of Pocatello District, and
resident of Twin Falls, under date of October, 1914: "Where ten years
ago this very minute there was not a fence nor a furrow (only the
conditions above described by Washington Irving) there are now such
municipalities as T