The Donaldsonville chief. [volume] (Donaldsonville, La.) 1871-current, 1910-06-04

In the semi-submerged lands of Louisi-
ana there are more than four million acres
Ia vast territory exceeding in area all
that the government expects to reclaim
with irrigating arid lands. This veritabel
principality has lain fallow from all times,
its value unrecognized even by the people
who live about its borders. 1t is precisely
the same sort of land as the city of New
Orleans is built upon; but when the
founders of that city dyked, drained and
elevated its site it never occurred to them
to deal likewise with the surrounding
country, SO that the gay metropolis of the
south is hemmed in with quaking boys
and melancholy cypress brakes. All the
| Louisiana land south of Baton Rouge has
been formed in the same way, namely, by
the deposit of soil by the river and the
bayous. Along the main streams the
deposit has been heaviest, forming ridges
that extend from half mile to two
miles into the interior, where they alb
IuPtly Cllu III WdtCI-IoSSSu pAaAiC VI IAiiSh
cypress swamps. These ridges are
densely cultivated, but the possibilities of
the back country have been ignored.
THE PLANS OF THE CRAZY YANKEES.
A curious illustration is furnished by the
settlement of the French Acadians-or
Cajuns, as these remnants Of Evangeline's
sad days now call themselves-along the
Bayou Lafourche. For sixty-fve miles
along the banks of this sluggish stream,
from its birth in the Mississippi to its end
in the gulf, the little white cottages of
these simple people extend, forming what
is the longest street in the world. The
cottages are scarcely two hundred feet
apart. The plots. extending back half
mile or SO, the Cajuns plant with cane or
garden truck, making a sufficient but
modest living and building up a contented
and thrifty, but not enterprising, com
munity. Big things or new ideas are not
for them. They look with amusement
and compassion upon the Yankees eWho
are rapidly draining and cultivating the
lands that have marked tie end of their
dominion for centuries. Is there not
twenty feet of water under that prairie
tremblante? asks Pierre Has he not seen
a cow go through it to her belly, and have
not hunters dropped from sight as though
the earth had opened and swallowed them
up? The Yankees are mad, fou, crazy
And so, as these lands are being reclaimed,
made solid and fertile, the Cajun sticks to
his little strip by the bayou, and the new
territory is filling up with families from the
agricultural states of the north-which,
perhaps, after all, is not to its detriment.
From one of the little Cajun towns
drove over the prairies. The road was as
solid as any well-paeked dirt road in the
United States. Right along here" said
the young ss4i.lhe accompanied
when first ran the levels for the road
and laid out the drainage bitches | could
without effort thrust a twenty-foot pole
is whole length into the soil, and as l
1lodded across the prairie | was always
lp to my knees, and sometimes sank to
ny armpits, in the wet and mushy soil. :"
The method of draining these lands is
simplicity in the extreme. To begin with,
hey are not really under the Water-Iine,
'ut practically on level with the bayous
hat flow all about them. Take, for ex-
nipple, tract of one thousand acres.
rom the bayou around the tract a canal
s dug, usually about eight feet deep and
orty feet wide, the dredge in digging the
anal throwing up the spoil from the bed
0 form leyee perhaps six feet high, the
op of which is smoothed off and used for
road. Within this is dredged another
anal, called a reservoir canal, not so deep
nd with no opening into the big canal or
ne bayou. From this canal lateral bitches +,
bout three feet and one-half deep and
ome two hundred feet apart extend to all
arts of the land to be drained. Canals
nd bitches are dug by machinery, huge
eating dredges scooping out the former,
nd curious machine, running on wooden
wings" three feet and a half wide, dig
ing the latter at the rate of half mile
ay.
When the reservoir canal and the
tches are completed the water that has
altered in the former is pumped over the
wee into the big canal or the bayou.
hen the water in the bitches runs by
.avity into the reservoir canal, and the
nd within a few weeks is as dry as could
desired. Thereafter all the pumping
be done is to remove the surplus rain
alter; for none seeps back into the lands =
detected by the leyee. Thirty days 7
pumping a year keeps the land dry, and |
e annual cost approximates thirty cents
acre. 4
Once drained, the land is ready for cul- 4