The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-12-02
IRRrGATIoN IN CANADA.
The Biggest Ditch in America Under Construction.

SVMHauCthVms
 T stopped at Calgary just in the east ern shadow of the Canadian Rockies. to see the digging of the biggest irri- gation project in America, excelled on- ly by one in India and one in Egypt" writes Mark Sullivan in The Boston Transcript. T expected to see an army of men with shovels, and saw not one shovel. Instead, three colossal steam giants, with monstrous arms which the earth. rose slowly and dropped the dirt to one side. Dipping and biting. these three machines advance just small river, sixty feet wide and from twelve to twenty feet deep This ditch begins at the river and crawls in a score of miles into the country. The biggest irrigation ditch on the conti- nent is simplicity itself. There is nothing complicated about an irriga- mill race on a big scale. You tap the river at high level, run your ditch along that level, with just the slight est drop that will make water flow at all. Then from the big ditch run smaller lateral ditches and from these still smaller ones, till every few acres has its little rivulet. The ditch at Cal gary will supply an area of about 15o acres-more territory than is included in some Eastern States. When the work is done--but what irrigation will do for semi-arid country is an old rigation is as different from ordinary farming as hothouse gardening is from raising wheat. Farming with irriga- tion comes very close to being an oper- ation In chemistry. You have your sunlight. you have your soil, in fixed quantities and of known chemical con- quantities as needed. And if you wish you can put fertilizing elements, salts of potash, for example in your water. istry indeed. And the results to the farmer are as different as a chemists operations must be from the results to Ia farmer who lets the caprices of of his principal ingredients. If piece of ground which depends for water on rain will raise a hundred bushels, the same piece irrigated will raise i've support family in ample comfort. and forty acres irrigated is as large a farm as one man can we'll manage.
 When one seeks for the broader sig nificance of this big irrigating project here on the western plains of Canada. one wonders at first why such work should be done at all. Canada has lit- which does not need irrigation Can ada Is so rich and prodigal with fer tile land that she gives 1t away-i6o acres to any man who will merely set tie on 1t and improve 1t. The Canadian Pacific Railroad is almost equally rich in land. It has millions of acres which 1t sells at $4 and s6 an acre. Why, then, this costly irrigation of waste land, as if land were scarce7 It suggests, instead of the very sparse population, a country that teens with people, land like India, where every square inch must be utilized that life may be kept in the people. The ex- planation made by people here which may be true is this: The Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railroad are absolutely sure of Can foundations broad and deep for a pop ulation as dense as our own. They are preparing for the time when their free land will all be gone. l hesitate to dwell further on this, for The Transcript alone of American papers scope of the. empire-making that is going on up here, and readers of The Transcript must be as familiar with 1t as one can be who merely reads and does not see. The situation is like this: Winnipeg. with about sixty couver,. with about half as many, is Canada's San Francisco. In all the vast country between those two-ft takes three days to cover on a rail- road train-in all that country there is but one town of over ten thousand Denver, no Omaha, no Minneapolis, no one of a score of cities. That, in a few decades Canada will have its Dem yer, its Omaha, its Kansas City, Is as certain as the cooperation of govern ment, railroad and tremendous each other for an early chance can