Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 March 1902 — IRRIGATING ARID LANDS. [ARTICLE]

IRRIGATING ARID LANDS.

What an Artesian Well Can Accomplish in Central Dakota. The question of the irrigation of the arid lands of the West is now the most important domestic concern before the American people. There are between 75,000,000 and 100,000,000 acres of such lands which without irrigation are virtually valueless, but which if watered are capable of raising an abundance of crops of all kinds. In some sections of the West, notably in central Dakota, water for Irrigating purposes is procured from artesian wells. The flow from some of these wells is very great. At Chamberlain a 600-foot well yields 5,760,000 gallons of water daily; at the Yankton Indian agency there is a flow of 3,000 gallons a minute. The result of the ceaseless flow from such wells in a country like Dakota, where the rainfall seldom exceeds fifteen inches yearly, can hardly be appreciated by one who has never witnessed it, says a writer in the National Magazine. Dry hillsides become covered with flags and water grasses; arid fields are heavy with verdure; trees, shrubbery, rose bushes, vegetables, grain and flowers grow luxuriously and are often untouched by frost weeks after everything around them is sere and withered. The cost of such wells is high, ranging from $4,000 to $6,000, and is beyond the reach of most fanners. The cost of one first-class battleship, $3,500,000, would sink and equip In the Dakota artesian belt 600 first-class wells, capable of irrigating 600,000 acres of arable land; giving an increase yield of 10,000,000 of bushels of wheat, valued at $5,000,000 yearly; besides keeping every dried-up watercourse In perennial flow, increasing the local precipitation, giving thousauda of farms a constant supply of water for stock and home use, increasing the bird life and vegetable development and largely modifying the rigors of the climate at all seasons. From many of these wells —without In the least diminishing their flow—power, light and heat could be supplied for a great variety of uses, and in a single decade after the establishment of such a system, men would wonder that it had ever been thought possible to exist without such potent agencies of good.