Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/553

Rh the Nebraska and Kansas Boards of Agriculture will show that, in the territory lying west of the ninety-eighth meridian in those States, the acreage of land actually under cultivation, when compared with the whole area of that territory, is almost insignificant. The climate, as well as the law, pays no heed to small things.

It would not answer for the advocates of the theory only to claim that precipitation would be augmented somewhere, and not necessarily in the certain region where is found the increase of farmed lands; for it would then be very reasonable to suppose that the prevailing southwest and west winds of the plains would drive from them the moisture which the farmer there had earned. Iowa, Missouri, and eastern Kansas, instead of the dry region, would get the increased rainfall.

Prof. Frank H. Snow, of the Kansas State University, said several years ago: "But the fact that thousands of new-comers, from ignorance of the climate, have attempted to introduce ordinary agricultural operations upon the so-called plains, and have disastrously failed in the attempt, has placed an undeserved stigma upon the good name of Kansas in many far-distant communities, and has undoubtedly somewhat retarded immigration during the past few years. It is time for the general recognition of the fact that, except in the exceedingly limited area where irrigation is possible, the western third of Kansas is beyond the limit of successful agriculture." The severe seasons of drought which have occurred since the above conservative statement was written show the whole truth of the matter to be that the westward advancing line of settlement is by no means an isohyetal one, but that it is merely a line representing in a way the overflow of the population of our Eastern States. It needs but a slight acquaintance among the old settlers in central Kansas to know that they fear nowadays excessively dry weather as much as they did twenty-five years ago. The people who live farther west are losing faith in the idea of an increased rainfall, as is evidenced by the fact that over two hundred linear miles of main canals have lately been constructed for irrigation purposes nearly as far east as Kinsley, in the Arkansas Valley of western Kansas. In the Platte Valley, in Nebraska, large irrigating systems are at present being projected.

He who would provide the plains with an ample precipitation must remove the Rocky Mountains. Is it reasonable to suppose that three or four telegraph lines, small bunches of stripling trees here and there, and the turning over of a few thousand acres of sod, can be of any avail in changing a great dry territory into a garden? Can man so easily control Nature and her laws? Certainly not. Climates are immutable so far as the puny efforts