The Donaldsonville chief. [volume] (Donaldsonville, La.) 1871-current, 1910-06-04
PUMPING OUT
A Principally.
Putting In Crops Below the Water-Line-
Four Million Acres of semi-submerged
Lands Being Reclaimed.


BY Willis j. Abbot, in Saturday Eveeing Post
Out in the northwest, where Uncle Sam
is spending his millions TO put water on
soil that needs only that life-giving fluid
to burst forth with crops of wheat, barley,
oats, beets and fruit. saw great dams
towering over foaming torrents, great tun-
nels plunging through granite hills, great
bitches distributing the water over broad
fields yet covered with sagebrush.
But with me there was one who came
from the far south, from the delta Of the
Mississippi river, that ravenous STRAIN
which SEXES all that is best Of the soil Of
its valley and carries it far down to de-
post it in the sapphire Gulf, and there
build up lands out of all of the best soil of
the ravished commonwealth of the north
and northwest.
Come said the southern man, land
see what we in the south are doing to get
rid of superfuous water just as here the
reclaimers of land are trying to put water
upon it" And so. a month later | was
looking upon the very antithesis of the IT.
rigated district of the northwest-upon the
saturated prairies of Louisiana, long held
worthless, as once was the Great fAmeri-
can Desert" but now being rapidly re-
claimed for human use and occupancy, a
true principality in extent.
When you have reached New Orleans
no longer the sleepy and picturesque town
of the past, but a busy city with that hall
mark of metropolitanism, the skyscraper-
you are within few miles of rich but
practically unknown territory. Go out to
Audubon Park, where twenty years ago
an international exposition was held;
cross the Mississippi on ferry to where
a great lock thirty feet or more in depth
guards the entrance to the canal; take a
power boat, and in five minutes you seem
as far from civilization as though the
smoke of the city curling above the fune-
real cypress trees were the vapor rising
from the abiding place of the forever lost
Dark and moss-clad, the trees rise on
eitherade Of stream, draped with the
clinging Spanish festoons of gray and
rooted in the dark-amber water of the
bayou.
BIC CROPS ON DRAINED LANDS.
New Orleans, with its more than three
hundred and fifty thousand people, is not
far away; but here is only the lonely camp
of the crabber or the occasional shack of
the concerns that pack shrimps. largely
for the Chinese market A little farther !
and the cypress brakes vanish. Here is a
farm with broad acres of waving cane, of |
corn cut to the ground at this season. of
sweet potatoes, onions ana pumpkins. 4 4 I
houseboat moored in the bayou is the
home of the farmer, and find pictures
que touch in learning that it is the old
boat of Paul Boynton, who in a rubber
suit swan from St. Louis to New Orleans,
and who later nearly precipitated an in
episode by affixing a dummy
torpedo to the bottom of British man-of-
war, in New York harboF Peaceful and
profitable purposes the house boat serves
now
Two hundred dollars an acre for my t
.weet potato. says the owner of the
and practically as much for |
'nions. You see we are within few i
hours by water of New Orleans and | f
leal direct with the marketmen. The c
and? Oh, five years ago it was water t
ogged; but levee three feet high and t
hlrty days pumping a year keep it dry. a
We get three crops year. Never day c
Ehen we can't work, and no fertilizer a
eeded.' +
We board our power boat again and a
1ake our way through a great brackish s
ike fourteen miles long and blocked in n
laces with water hyacinths For these a
quatic floating plants, twenty years ago, f
eople paid dollar a plant, while now a
.ates and corporations are paying tens of q
Of dollars for their eradication. q
oon we reach another canal and then the d
ayou Lafourche
Here is one of the centers of Hhe Louisi- d
IA sugar industry. Great sugar-mills q
Sc on either side, hardly four miles apart. lie
trough the bayou stern-wheel steamers T
nd tugs push along broad barges bearing q
le hundred or more tons of cane. In the l.
d days this bayou was one of the b,
ouths of the Mississippi river and a con tc
ant menace to the low-lying lands on W
Their side. You can still see the remains .,
the levees towering nearly twenty feet OF
Dove the sluggish tide. But the stream II
IS been damned at its connection with a,
e Father of Waters, and the residents
'low its level no longer fear its spring ii
ges. From it into the back country, the F,
nd of shallow lakes. cypress brakes, and W
hat the French Acadians used to call the al