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National Geographic : 1908 Apr
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HOME-MAKING BY THE GOVERNMENT RAISING HOGS IN THE KLAMATH VALLEY : KLAMATH PROJECT, OREGON (SEE PAGE 267) In many parts of it Nature has placed in juxtaposition all the natural elements except rainfall required for a fruitful, prosperous country. Its climate is health ful and salubrious; its valleys and plains possess a soil of inexhaustible fertility, and from the forest-clad mountains, with summits in regions of perpetual snow, countless streams rush downward to both oceans or flow into desert sinks and there evaporate. How to overcome the absence of moisture from the clouds and thus bring the region to its proper state of de velopment is today a problem of para mount importance. Its successful solu tion will provide a safety valve against the impending dangers of congestion in the cities of the East. The future of our desert empire is, in a measure, predicated by the marvelous achievements of the pioneers. With a courage born of conviction and fostered by the hope which dwells perennial in the breast of the Argonaut of the sage brush country, they have, within the past few years, wrested from a region long regarded as absolutely worthless a crop producing, home-supporting area of in exhaustible fertility, greater in extent than the cultivated lands in Massachu setts, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hamp shire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and capable of supporting a larger rural population. More than $120,000,000 have been expended in ir rigation works in the West, and 70,000 miles of canals now carry the life-giving waters to 1o,ooo,ooo acres, which each year produce crops valued at more than $250,000,000. As good American citizens, we owe it to ourselves to extend our knowledge of this splendid country. There,is an in spiration in the breadth and vastness of this sleeping empire in the West, and a sublimity in the lofty mountains whose summits are clothed in perpetual snow. One breathes optimism and grows in mental breadth and strength in contem plating scenery which has no counterpart in the world. The economic value of national irri- 259
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