REDEEMING A DESERT.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 242, 12 October 1908, Page 6

REDEEMING A DESERT.

Something like irrigation, j

(By Frank Morton.)

In the number of the Sunset Magazine which has reached me irom ban Francisco, the editor, Mr. Cnarks S. Aiken, tells how American enterprise has converted an arid desert into the most fertile oasis °n earth. It lies at the head of the Omit or California, and there is nearly a million acres of it. It was treeless and trackless. There was no lite on it. But to-day three hundred thousand acres of it are already being cultivated, and its products last year were of the value of over two million dollars. "Here is a region," writes Mr Aiken. "that is little known to-the average American citizen, m spite ot much writing of guide-books and novels. The knowledge of what is here, of these marvels, both natural and man-made, of deserts surprised and made fruitful, of mountains that humble the Alps, of gold mines and orange groves, of sequoia trees that were old when the Druid trees of England were young, of lakes miles above and far below the sea—all this cannot but help to broaden,_ and to brighten, to rub off'provincial dust, and to crack the rivets in the chaplet that binds the brow of the man who thinks the world ,has little new to offer him," That is good talk, and the story Mr Aiken has to tell is about the most interesting I have seen m any magazine for ever so long. I make extracts, just to show you how wideawake the\folk are keeping," over there beyond the Pacific. You will bear in mind the fact that all this was desert till American enterprise toot a hand. But now— "Her,e are budding cities with banks, hotels, business blocks, electric lights and ice plants; here, from Indio to Calexicb, are fully fifteen thousand people, and there's easily room for ten times as many more. The desert waste, with its coyottes; and horned toads and tarantulas, burning sun and barren sands, has been surprised into riotous luxury. "Four young men,, wearing Stetson sombreros, dust-coloured clothes , and a business air, watched me as I walked across the platform at Imperial Junction. They followed me from the new melon-coloured hotel into the melancholy smoking car, and surrounded me. The red plush of the seats held itself erect in the sizzling June heat like the fur of a cat crossing a hot stove. I swept a cantaloupe (that word rhymes with antelope) from the floor to make room for my suit-case, and cleared my mental decks just in time to receive a-fire of: " 'This your first trip in?' " 'Looking for la,nd?' " 'Ever been to El Centro?' xc 'Down like melons?' " 'Are^you going to Brawley?'

"I responded variously and sinfully. The three cars of the valley train tha^takes men to melons and melons to men were crowded. There seemed no special reason for singling me out for attention. ' Evidently I had won notice because I wore a starched collar. Only six •other men on the train were likewise costumed. The brakeman wore celluloid. My surrounding friends were as quick in giving me their confidence as they were in trying to gain mine, and the talk ran on to water and to melons as the train ran southerly up grade through the heart of the desert. One man

said he dealt in real estate at Brawley, another ranged droves of hogs 'on a quarter on the east side;' another cautioned me to remember that a cantaloupe isn't ripe until the netting is white, _yet another J told of his profits from jumbos. . "My mind struggled blindly back to visions of New York's east side— I thought of nets and minnows at Bar ELirbour—all in a vain endeavour to adjust myself to present conversational conditions, to a new life and a now lingo". I looked over the car ait my fellow-passen-gers. I was in the heart' of the Great Southwest, speeding towards the borders of Mexico, across the desert wastes decorated with, the bones of pionefer frontiersmen and of lost prospectors. All about me Were clear-eyed, alert young men.. Across the aisle sat a pretty girl in a white linen waist and an amethyst pin in her necktie. I looked for 'Texas Jack' or Tuma Bill' or some sign of the border desperado, but ..he was as tar out of the picture as if T had been travelling _over the New York and the New Haven road from Bridgeport to PittsfLeld. Civilisation and life and culture were all here, although the dress was far away from New England, for the tropic sun of this country presistently demands its tribute in the matter of clothes. . ' He gives some details illustrative of the fact that this reclaimed desert is about the most fertile bit of country in America. It sent away six hundred refrigerator-ear loads of melons last year, and this year will send away eighteen hundred. It grows nine, crops of alfalfa in twelve months. Its wonderful soil, six hundred feet deep, is "bringing apricot trees into profitable bearing in two years; making cottonwoods and eucalyptus and other timber-trees from, saplings into logs a foot in diameter in sixteen months ; crowning Muscat and Thompson Seedless and Tokay grape . vines with heavy clusters within two years of the time of planting; letting crops of barley and onions, or of kaffir corn and cantaloupes, -grow on the same land the same year with profit to the owner for all." Let us glance at the sort of settlers America gets for its new lands. Mr Aiken tells how he reached El Centro, the country town •of the oasis.

"As I slipped from train to platform at this youngster country-seat —it \yas incorporated only last April—l was 'reminded of a similar scene of ten years ago on the wharves at Seattle, when the nation's strong men .were yearning for the nuggets of the Klondike. Here were the same set, I'm-here-to-win character of faces, but the rougher, more sordid types of early Alaskan days were noticeably absent no shiny hats or checkerboard waistcoats or gold-cable watch-chains. Lithe, tall, tanned, unshaven young men, clad m khaki or duck or denim, are here by the hundred. Few women are here. They'll come in later, when the men can stop from money-making long enough to build cabins, ten£s, or cottages for wives or sisters or mothers. Dusty farm-waggons, drawn by fat and restless horses, were backed against the depotplatform by the dozen, or waited at a distance for expected guest OE partner. . . ; " 'Tell me,' I said to a ravid Imperialist at the hotel that evening, *v/ho is that short person with the purple shirt ajid prosperous air?' " 'That,' said he, 'is cur mayor.

He is rich; he. de,als in melons; melons make th^ money come.' " 'And who,' I pursued, *is yonder thin Cassius-iike man wren r the Turkish-towel trousers, and deckels edge collar, and the speckled handbag?' ■'■'■ . " 'That,' replied Imperial, 'is our doctor. He's rich, too; he bought and sold melons, and he has just fitted up a hospital for the special treatment of rural meloneaters.'

" 'And who this?' again I queried, painting to an elderly man in a tlack-striped • shirt and duck trousers, who was. idly crushing handfuls of crickets which had met death, on the clustered electric light bulbs. " 'That is the president or our express company; he hauls the lopes to town.' " 'Lopes?' I said, with rising brow. " 'Meaning cantaloupes,' he answered. 'Some call them cans, some lopes, but most of us just melons!'

"Adown the street, with a steady stride, a cotton hat, eye-glasses and a few other clothes, cam© a scholar-ly-looking man. "'And he?' I asked. •'..-•. "< That's Doc Shepherd,' came the prompt response. 'He has a farming school six miles out. He came here fresh from Columbia, where he took his Ph. D. He has another degree from Cornell, two from Harvard, and one from Jena. He was working for more degrees when he came here—guess he found 'em all right last summer when that thermomei ter touched one-hundred-sixteen!' " 'Who's that brown-faced youth with the ragtime shirt and the a,zure trousers?' I continued curiously. " 'That?-oh, that's Phil Brooks,' said my vocal Blue Book. He came here from Boston four years ago. He has six hundred and forty acres, worth about one hundred dollars an acre, out on the east side, and about three thousand hogs worth, twenty dollars apiece. He's1 Amherst '03. Brooks came out here with Roy Pier, Harvard '03, a brother of Arthur Stanwood Pier, editor of the Youth's Companion. Pier has four hundred and twenty acres down near Heber.' " And so the glad tale goes on. This Imperial Valley has been reclaimed and made fertile by one of the most audacious feats of irrigation ever attempted. The Colorado River, one of the biggest and most turbulent rivers in America, has been forced into order and put into harness. Incidentally, the engineers ■made an inland sea forty miles in length, with an area of • nearly four hundred square miles—a great lake that teems with fish, and has a surface nearly 200 feet below sea-level. It has been a great work, this damming of the Colorado. There wore one of two bad breakaways in the early days, but the engineers persisted till they won. Mr T. Cory, the chief engineer, "came to the task new and untried, tackling apparently losing fight.. Tlie spectacle of this young college man—he is only

in the thirties now—slight of figure, crippled in one arm, planning, directing, executing, marshalling his army of men against an enemy that never slept, the very personification of grit, makes a big part of the story of that campaign. Cory, who is a Cornell man, was professor of engineering in a Cincinnati college a few years ago. He resigned to get field experience. He's had it."

It is a great story, and a story very typical of modern America. It has many quaint features, too. It is a quaint thing that American cities should be drawing their supplies of fruit and vegetables" from a valley that still stands a desert on our maps. It is quaint, too, that in what we have been accustomed to consider the wildest region of the United States there should be a. fertile new country' without a gaol, a" country run on rigid prohibition' principles.