Part 43
The state of Minnesota has succeeded in the last few years in raising the number of bushels of wheat alone 3½ bushels to the acre. That is some of the practical conservation of the soil. Minnesota used to have the reputation of having the worst roads in the United States, and I think she fully lived up to her reputation. That condition is very rapidly being changed. The state wide campaign for good roads is being constantly conducted by the good roads commission. The last legislature, in fact the legislature of four years ago, took the matter in hand and levied a small tax for the betterment of the state roads. These roads were required to be built under the supervision of state engineers. If the roads were so built the state contributed one-third of their cost up to a certain maximum amount which to any one county did not exceed $2,000. That was the starting of the state movement. The last legislature provided for a tax that will raise something like $2,000,000 to be divided among the eighty counties of the state to aid in the work of good roads. A project is now on foot to build a state highway from the southern boundary to the northern boundary, and one across the state from the city of Duluth to the city of East Grand Forks. These to be great state highways, and all other highways radiating out from them. These experimental roads are built on scientific lines furnished by the state, and are conditioned according to the quality of the soil through which the road runs. The effort is first to get a system of good dirt roads. The state is not yet developed sufficiently to warrant us going in to macadamized roads at this time, except in the large cities.
In the matter of our mineral wealth the state long ago provided that the people at large shall receive the benefit of it. No state land is now sold except where the mineral rights are retained and the mines already opened and in operation pay very large taxes toward the maintenance of the state government, thus contributing to the welfare of the whole people. These are some of the things that the state of Minnesota is trying to do and is doing. I do not feel that I can take the time to go into detail of many other things that we are just starting, the prevention of disease—already one or two tuberculosis institutions have been started in the pine woods of Minnesota—and a general campaign against the great white plague is constantly in progress. My time is up. I thank you. (Applause)
REPORT FOR NEBRASKA.
BY GEORGE COUPLAND.
I have been very strongly reminded today in these remarks that I have heard made that the state that I represent is purely an agricultural state. That is about all the industries that we have. I thought perhaps of one manufacturing interest that we were trying to develop, that of furnishing presidential timber, but we had to give that up, and the factory is in the hands of the repairers today. (Applause.) I think that perhaps there is no more important factor in the development of a sentiment that means what it says, than such a gathering as this. I notice in the paper that I just picked up it is, “Back to the Land”—yes, I am glad that that is the story—for it is out of the land that this country has to maintain its position as a nation.
The state that I represent, I am glad to say, recognizes the importance of perhaps its only industry, and how much its future was tied up in its development. It has had in motion for quite a number of years agencies that are looking forward to the betterment of life upon the land and the development of the natural resources, the only natural resources perhaps that we have. And I am glad to say that this movement had its inception in the hearts and minds of the men who lived upon the land in Nebraska. I am also glad to say that the men who lived in the cities, the business men, have responded in splendid manner to this idea. My mind runs back to that fine pioneer of my state, J. Sterling Morton, and the idea that he had in mind, and I want, Mr. President, to impress the thought that you so beautifully expressed today, that it is not the giving of more expert ability to exploit the soil, but it is the building up within the heart of the man and the boy and the woman and the girl who live upon the land a love for the place where they live; to love the tree that father planted; to love the home that father built, to love the farm that father homesteaded. That is what we want to cultivate. If along with these other agencies that we have in motion, we will see to it that this is emphasized in our educational system, then we will have a better conception of what real country life means. I like to think of my ancestral home, the generations that were born and died on the land. I was born on the land and I hope to die on the land. My children were born there, and I hope that they will have the same sentiment, and be willing and glad to die upon the land. Our state has in motion today—I will hurriedly tell you—I do not want to take any more of your time than necessary—I will tell you the agencies that we have at work. We have a farmers’ congress; we have a conservation congress; we have a rural life commission that was authorized by our last legislature, which I consider one of the most potent agencies for the betterment of rural conditions in the state of Nebraska; an affiliated agricultural society which takes in all the agricultural organizations. Every year our state university is their host, and nearly every year we have two thousand representative farmers of Nebraska gathered in our capital city to discuss questions pertaining to agriculture. Then we also have a conservation soil survey which is doing splendid work.
There is one feature to which I want to draw your attention, that I think is very important, and that is the question of sanitation upon the farm, sanitation in the small town. And this has been taken up by our conservation congress. We have different divisions of this congress, and we have splendid men at the head of these divisions, who during the year take pains with the particular work that has been assigned them, and then each year we meet and hear their reports. We have a lot of splendid things that are going forward in our state, and I am sure what we have heard today is inspirational, and that we will go home vowed to do better things. I do not want to boast, but I just thought as I listened to what every man who has spoken for his state had to say, I must tell you this story.
I live on a little farm in eastern Nebraska, which is typical of a large area of our state. If I had to go to the commercial fertilizer man and buy the fertilizing matter, the lime, the phosphorus, the potash, and nitrogen that are wrapped up in the first four feet of the soil that I till it would cost me $7,000 per acre. If I had to buy the same kind of fertilizing matter that is wrapped up in the first ten feet of the soil that I till, and which my alfalfa fields, when they are planted, supplied, it would cost me $28,000 per acre. I feel that we own pretty good land in Nebraska, and for that reason we are anxious to take good care of it. (Applause.)
REPORT FOR NEW YORK.
BY JOHN D. MOORE, _Member State Conservation Commission_.
On my arrival in Kansas City this morning a man at the hotel asked me where I came from, and I said I came from New York. And he said, “What have you fellows got in New York you want to get conserved?” And I said, “We have the greatest conservation problem in New York of all the states in the Union.” In the first place, we have nine million people, over one-tenth of the population of the United States. It is one of our jobs to provide these nine million people with pure water to drink. I told him about the great reservoir on which the city of New York alone has spent upwards of two millions of dollars in order to bring into New York drinking water at the rate of five hundred millions of gallons per day. I told him furthermore that in the state of New York there were 32,000,000 acres of land, and of that more than one-third wild forest land. I told him, too, that in the public parks of New York we had a conservation problem of our own which did not begin three years ago, or five or ten years ago, but began forty years ago when Governor Seymour appointed a commission in 1872 to investigate the matter of public parks and public forests.
Since that time the state of New York has accumulated more than 1,600,000 acres of the greatest parks in this Union, and of that 1,300,000 acres are in the Adirondacks, and in these parks any citizen of New York, or any other state can come and hunt and camp as freely as he will. Furthermore, of the timber land of that park, which is of priceless value, and a value which has been protected by a constitutional amendment adopted in 1894, and not yesterday, or the day before, but sixteen or seventeen years ago. This law says that these lands shall neither be leased or sold or exchanged nor taken by any person, or by any corporation, and the timber thereon shall not be removed, or cut or destroyed. That has placed a perpetual safeguard, the like of which exists in no other state in the union. (Applause.)
In the reforestation we have six state nurseries. In these nurseries there are at the present time 15,000,000 trees. A man this morning said he did not believe it. I told him they were there and he could go and count them. (Laughter.)
Last year we sold to the railroad companies, and to the lumber companies of the state of New York approximately two million seedlings, and obtained for the state of New York something upward of ten thousand dollars. The state law says we must sell those seedlings at cost. We are able to furnish to the lumbermen and the railroad interests of New York seedling trees at the rate of less than one-half cent apiece. Furthermore, the state has reforested, as an example to her citizens, more than 6,000 acres of its own land. Those trees are there, and constitute an object lesson to every visitor to the Adirondacks. This afternoon I heard some of our friends say what their state was doing for good roads. The state of New York has expended within the last five years upwards of $100,000,000 for its state roads. (Applause) Of that we have built 10,000 miles of road—not dirt road, or earth road, but the finest kind of macadam roads, running from sixteen to twenty-four feet in width. We are gridironing New York with a system of highways the like of which is not found under the Stars and Stripes. More than that, we are not devoting our attention entirely to the development of our land locomotion. We are equally strong with water ways.
The Birch canal of the State of New York will be completed within three or four years. The state has appropriated money, sold bonds, and got the money in the treasury for $101,000,000 of Birch canal improvements in order that you Western gentlemen can bring your wheat on boats to the seaboard at the lowest possible cost of transportation. (Applause) Furthermore, we have a system of fish and game laws which is extremely rigorous and has had a marvelous tendency to improve the condition of the wild life of the state. I hold in the State of New York, ladies and gentlemen, that we must not look after only our water power and our forests; we must look after the wild things that live in the water and forest—the fish and the game. (Applause) The deer have been so thoroughly protected by our laws that they have increased so that last year in the Adirondacks there were killed 16,000 deer. Trappers tell our woodsmen today that never in the history of the Adirondacks have so many deer been seen.
This may appear to you strange. It is strange, except when we consider that in primitive times before the settlers came with firearms wolves were abundant in the Adirondacks and preyed upon the deer. Now there is not, within the confines of the State of New York, a single wolf—not one. The present legislature has passed a game law which has been in effect since the first of September, and we take a fair view of the protection of wild life. We are not confined to the protection of game in New York State. We have extended it to every state in the Union. The game law says in effect this: That you cannot bring into the State of New York and sell in the State of New York a bird or animal which has been killed under the American flag. In other words, we have closed to the pot hunter and the market hunter, to the slaughterer of game, the richest and the most plentiful market which they have enjoyed in the past. We have turned it to good account. The law states that they may bring in from foreign countries outside of the United States the unplucked carcasses of birds and venison. Incidentally we expect to import this year 100 tons of venison, and we have already imported 200,000 birds, and upon the leg of each the state has fastened a tag, and exacted for the tag one nickel. So out of the 2,000,000 birds which the dealers tell us they will import this year the State of New York is going to exact the magnificent sum of $100,000 and maybe more. This game law should be a lesson to every state in the Union. It is not fair for a state to protect its own game and fish and let the state be a market for the game of its neighbors.
The State of New York, gentlemen, is more prolific and a more bountiful spender in water power and more bountifully supplied with this power than almost any other state of the Union. I won’t dispute the figures of our friend from California who says there are 5,000,000 horsepower running loose there, but I do know that whereas his state has developed 250,000 horsepower, the State of New York, outside of the St. Lawrence river and Niagara Falls, which are really international waters, and do not come under consideration, my commission has upwards of 650,000 horsepower and we know from actual survey which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and has been in progress some eight years, that a million horsepower is still going to waste, but that million is to be harnessed and put to use, so that the State of New York can get some of the profits which have heretofore gone into private coffers.
REPORT FOR OKLAHOMA.
BY MILTON BROWN.
As yet Oklahoma is not conserved in presidents like Ohio. We have conserved a lot of fads and vagaries and isms down there, but nevertheless notwithstanding all that, Oklahoma for the past two years has got down to a practical standpoint in this matter of the conservation of our material resources and a few of the items I want to mention in my five minutes are these. First, good roads. We are now constructing a road, beginning at the north line of Oklahoma and running almost through to the south, across the whole state, to be entirely of macadam. Of course, the Automobile Association started the matter in one sense, but yet all the farmers’ institutes joined in, and the two are now working together. Not only have we state aid in that matter, but we have aid in the counties. That is one item of the good roads that will make some of these older states ashamed of themselves when they come down to Oklahoma and see it. (Applause)
Another proposition is that we have gone into the development of our water supply down there for our own consumption, not only for the farmers but for the cities, and that, too, without any Federal aid. Some of the older states have been aided by donations from the Federal Government, and although millions of dollars have been taken from Oklahoma by the sales of lands to the settlers of that state, not one penny has been returned to Oklahoma in the way of any particular aid in the matter of the conservation of these resources. Yet at the last session of our legislature we appropriated $45,000 for the purpose of sinking deep wells in the extreme northwestern part of Oklahoma to get down to the underflow water, so that we can irrigate the lands out there in the extreme Northwest. They are going ahead and now have several of those wells in operation.
Another proposition is that these underground waters in the northwestern part of the state are just like the underground water in Nebraska, in Kansas and Colorado; they flow along with the country, with the fall of the country from the mountain ranges. We enacted a law at the last legislature to encourage any person, any firm, any corporation that will come in and put down wells, drains, dams or anything of that kind, and encourage them by exempting them from taxation for a period of five years. That is having its effect already. Some parties are there now engaged in the North Canadian and in the lower Canadian making surveys and putting in plants to raise this underground water by a process of gravity underflow and bring it out on the surface to spread it over our broad acres.
Also we have a pure water supply for the city, keeping the sewage separate and apart. We have laws upon that subject and they are being enforced.
We finally had to go into the Federal Court to have one proposition settled down there, so that our swamp lands could be drained under the law passed by our state legislature. We had a state drainage law by which they undertook to drain some of the lands southeast of Guthrie and Oklahoma City. That entrenched upon the railroads, and they set up the howl that the act was unconstitutional, that we could not change the bed of the river, that we could not change the flow of the water so as to bring our ditches in and drain the swamp lands. But Judge Cotterill of the United States Court held that law constitutional, and that big drainage ditch has been constructed and the swamp lands there have been reclaimed within the last year.
You remember the Arkansas river; if you have ridden along on the Santa Fe railroad out in Kansas you have seen it at times when you could walk across it dry shod and would not get your feet wet, for the bed was as dry as a bone. And yet from Arkansas City south there is more water. Congress passed an act, and today they are working on a survey, making the preliminaries up as far as Muskogee, and they propose to go on up to Arkansas City, so as to make the bed of that river broader and run boats. They have run boats up as far as Arkansas City in times past, and they have run to Muskogee in more recent years. Now, they are going ahead on that proposition to make the Arkansas navigable as far as Arkansas City.
REPORT FOR OREGON.
BY JOSEPH N. TEAL, _Chairman Oregon State Conservation Committee_.
On behalf of the Oregon State Conservation Commission and in response to your request, I herewith submit brief report of its work and activities.
The first conservation commission in Oregon was appointed by Honorable George E. Chamberlain, Governor of the state, on May 23, 1908. It was a semi-official organization and consisted of fifteen members. All funds were secured through voluntary subscription.
As the most pressing subject demanding legislation then was the use and conservation of water resources, a water code was prepared and submitted to the legislature for its consideration and action. The bill was adopted substantially as prepared. The act is elastic and practicable. It provides: (1) A simple, inexpensive method of determining and fixing rights initiated under earlier statutes; (2) a precise and definite procedure for initiating and perfecting new rights, beneficial use always being the basis thereof; (3) an elastic administrative board, to insure the enforcement of water right decrees and its own decisions.
The cost of administration is borne by those benefited. Water power franchises are limited to forty years with a preference right of renewal.
While it was not expected the fees provided for would produce excess revenue, the operation of the law has been very satisfactory and more than self-sustaining under the intelligent and careful administration of the State Engineer, John H. Lewis. The beneficial results following its enactment are conceded and are set forth in the official reports of the State Engineer. Since its enactment some minor changes have been made respecting practice and procedure, but none as to principle.
We are now engaged in a careful study of its workings in order to recommend such further changes as experience may show wise or necessary. That changes will be necessary is not to be doubted, but I feel I am safe in saying we have the foundation and framework of a water code based on right principles.
The legislature of 1909 also passed an act creating a state conservation commission of seven members, to be appointed by the Governor, carrying an appropriation of $1,000. Upon the enactment of this measure the original commission discontinued its work and Hon. F. W. Benson, then Governor, appointed another commission, the membership of which was selected from the original commission.
During the year 1909 the commission offered money prizes to students in the various educational institutions of the state covering the following topics: The Forests in Oregon; Irrigation Institutions in Oregon; Soils; Dry Land Farming in Oregon; Roads in Oregon; Fish in Oregon.
The prizes were awarded and paid according to announcement. The money for this purpose, as well as for other uses by the commission, was secured through voluntary contributions, no public money being used for this purpose.
In 1909 Mr. C. B. Watson, one of the members of the commission, called the attention of the commission to the beauty and grandeur of the Josephine County caves and asked that steps be taken to preserve and keep them in their original beauty as a national monument. The commission took up the matter with Mr. Gifford Pinchot, then Forester of the United States, and on July 12, 1909, the caves were, by proclamation of President Taft, duly set apart as a national monument by an act approved June 8, 1906, under the name “Oregon Caves.” These caves are under the immediate care of the Forest Service, being in a national forest. They are of great beauty and will be preserved as a public monument forever.
During the year 1910 the work of educating the public to the necessity of action in the protection of our forests from fire and other destructive agencies was carried on. In coöperation with other organizations a law was framed to submit to the legislature for action. The legislature of 1911 adopted this measure, and it was passed with but few amendments, and in connection with the bill an appropriation of $60,000 was made.
We submitted to the same legislature a bill for coöperation between the state and federal agencies engaged in gathering physical data of the state’s resources and in disseminating the information so gathered. This bill carried with it an appropriation of $20,000 in addition to the $5,000 provided by the Act of 1905, conditioned upon the Federal Government appropriating an equal amount. The legislature passed this measure with substantial unanimity.
The commission has prepared and circulated annual reports for the years 1908, 1909 and 1910; also a special report during the years 1908 and 1910 on the rivers and harbors in Oregon, setting forth their needs and requirements for improvement and justification therefor. In conjunction with the Forest Service and other associations, the commission also aided in the preparation of a pamphlet for general distribution on the use of Oregon woods.
The only appropriation the commission has received from the state was the one made in 1909 of $1,000.