t aside the proceeds of the sale of public lands for the purpose
of reclaiming the waste areas of the arid West.

Lands otherwise worthless were to be irrigated and in those new regions
of agricultural productivity homes were to be established. The money so
expended was to be repaid in due course by the settlers on the land and
the sums repaid were to be used as a revolving fund for the continuous
prosecution of the reclamation work. Nearly five million dollars was
made immediately available for the work. Within four years, twenty-six
"projects" had been approved by the Secretary of the Interior and work
was well under way on practically all of them. They were situated in
fourteen States--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska,
Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, California,
South Dakota. The individual projects were intended to irrigate areas
of from eight thousand to two hundred thousand acres each; and the grand
total of arid lands to which water was thus to be brought by canals,
tunnels, aqueducts, and ditches was more than a million and a half
acres.

The work had to be carried out under the most difficult and adventurous
conditions. The men of the Reclamation Service were in the truest sense
pioneers, building great engineering works far from the railroads, where
the very problem of living for the great numbers of workers required was
no simple one. On the Shoshone in Wyoming these men built the highest
dam in the world, 310 feet from base to crest. They pierced a mountain
range in Colorado and carried the waters of the Gunnison River nearly
six miles to the Uncompahgre Valley through a tunnel in the solid rock.
The great Roosevelt dam on the Salt River in Arizona with its gigantic
curved wall of masonry 280 feet high, created a lake with a capacity
of fifty-six billion cubic feet, and watered in 1915 an area of 750,000
acres.

The work of these bold pioneers was made possible by the fearless
backing which they received from the Administration at Washington.
The President demanded of them certain definite results and gave them
unquestioning support. In Roosevelt's own words, "the men in charge
were given to understand that they must get into the water if they would
learn to swim; and, furthermore, they learned to know that if they acted
honestly, and boldly and fearlessly accepted responsibility, I would
stand by them to the limit. In this, as in every other case, in the end