Washington standard. [volume] (Olympia, Wash. Territory) 1860-1921, 1907-04-05

| Plan Considers Likewise Use Of the Wa
ter that Now Creates Devastation by
Floods. and by Settling Reservoirs to
Prevent Sediment from Filling Lower
| Rivers.
(From Our Special COrrespondent)
WASHINGTON, D. c., March 20.
While the Waterways Commission
appointed by the President last week
is not yet even organized, Chairman
Burton of Ohio, is expected back in
Washington within few days, and
then the commission will meet to see
what it can do. People in many
parts OF the country may not realize
what an enormous task the commits
sion has before it and how much good
it will be able to do if it plans wisely,
and if its wise plans are carried out.
The scheme is nothing less than map
ping out an efficient system of in
ternal water transportation for all of
the country that can be now reached
by water, and in fact putting in ca
nails where they will do the most good.
TO merely map out this much of the
work seems like stupendous task.
1t is almost as though the whole rail-
road system of the country were
lacking and a few scattered horsecar
lines doing all the hauling and some
one in authority suddenly proposed
to extend the scattered horse car
lines into the present steam road
system and equip it for business
with the latest improvements of en-
gineering skill.
OF course what the Waterways
Commission can do is only to make
start and prepare a comprehensive
plan for the approval of Congress.
But one of the things it is to do in
general way is to map out an efficient
auxiliary system of water transpor-
tation for slow freight that will take
of the shoulders of the railroads the
burden of moving the immense crops
which they now. frankly confess they
are unable to handle. The people of
the middle west realize the need of
water transportation perhaps more
keenly than any other part of the
community. St. Louis is one of the
greatest jObbing cities of the country,
and a member of the commission said
this week that he was assured by the
big merchants there that they had not
shipped a bill of goods in the past
year without proviso that they were
not to be held responsible for delay in
delivery. The farmers of the middle
west and northwest know to their
sorrow the impossibility of getting
their crops to market by the rail-
roads as now run, and thousands of
bushels of last seasons grain is now
rotting in the fields and beside the
railroad tracks because of the inabil-
ity of the railroads, real or professed,
to cope with the traffic. If the COM
mission is able to map out q compre-
hensive plan Of water highways that
will serve the needs of people in NOV
ing the heavy and bulky produce, the
railroads will be left free to handle
the fast freight and passenger traffic
much more effectively.
But this is not all that the water
ways Commission is expected to do
To make effective and navigable the
larger streams will be a large and
important work, but it is planned
also to control so far as possible all
the streams of the country, and thus
save the millions of dollars lost an
nually by floods and the intellectually
greater loss by washing and erosion
of the farm lands of the country.
This is going at the problem of
stream control with a vengeance.
Clifford Pinchot, the chief of the For
estry Service, is one of the members
of the commission and one of the
prime movers. His plan for the con-
troll OF stream erosion and flood loss
looks mainly to reforesting the head
waters of the streams and thus pre-
venting the sudden down pour of
melted snow and ice that makes the
floods in the spring and has just
caused fully $40, 600, 900 of loss around
Pittsburg and the Ohio valley.
The people of the South realize this
loss also, and have constant object
lesson before them in the destruction
of the greatest rice belt in the world
through the two Carolinas where the
fields were washed out after the for
ests had been cut on the headwaters
of the streams. The same was true
of the dead fields" of the cotton
belt where washing by rains de-
Stroyed tens of thousands of acres of
land before partial stop was put to
it by contour cultivation.
The problem of erosion presents it.
self to the commission in different
form in the arid west where the
North Platte, the Missouri and a
dozen other streams all carry down
annually millions of tons of the rich
est soil to choke the channel of the
Mississippi and put the sediment
where it will do the most harm. The
Reclamation Service, whose Director,
F. H. Newell, is a member of the
Commission, will undertake to handle
that end of the problem with immense
settling reservoirs that will send the
waters of the western streams down
clear and free of sediment to join the
Mississippi and free also of the disas-
trous foods that ruin the farm lands
along their course.
The problem of light and power
from water flow will also be consid-
cred by the Commission. 1t is esti-
mated by the members that from this
source the coal consumption of the