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Show 126 WESTERN WILDS. or 38, even the attempt to secure a reservoir for the summer irriga-tion fails; when the water above the dam has risen two or three feet, it seeks an underground course through the porous soil, and when most needed the aguada is dry. In Arizona I found evidences that the old race ( Aztec or Toltec?) had tried to remedy this by " pud-dling" the bottom of the aguada, in places even laying it with bricks made of most tenacious clay ; but even they were in time compelled to abandon most of the valleys by the ever- increasing drought. A Western man may be allowed a smile at the suggestion of Pres-ident Grant, that all the streams issuing eastward from the Rocky Mount-ains might be utilized by a great National work, so as to irrigate all the plains. Such a work would cost hundreds of millions, while every drop of water in all those streams would not irrigate one- tenth of the vast slope extending three hundred miles eastward from the mountains. Many suggestions are made as to new methods of cultivation to meet the difficulties. Drought might possibly be overcome, but I see not how rocky flats, gravel - beds and plains of sand and alkali can ever be made productive. If there is a total change in the climate, corres-ponding changes in the land will of course follow in due time; but that does not seem to me imminent. To sum up : At least nine- tenths of America between longitude 100 and 120 seem to me irredeemable ( for agriculture) by any art now known to man. Important political consequences follow. Such a country can never sustain a dense population. The isolated trading town or mining hamlet, with perhaps half a dozen cities of 50,000 people, and detached farming settlements, will occupy a very small portion of the whole area; all the rest will be the range of the nomadic hunter or herds-man. The limit of rapid settlement, ( unless from a mining excite-ment,) is already reached ; the phenomena of swiftly growing States like Iowa and Illinois will never be witnessed again in this country. None of the Territories, except possibly Dakota, is increasing in popu-lation as fast as are the States. Utah, for instance, has been settled thirty years by a race whose constant boast is their prolificacy ; it has barely 100,000 people. This, the most loudly blowed and persistently advertised of the whole sisterhood, has been knocking for admission into the Union since 1849 ; yet it has but one- tenth the population of New York City, two- fifths that of Cincinnati, and nothing like the wealth or intelligence of a first- class county in Ohio. In the pro-posed State one Mormon would have a power in the United States Senate equal to that of thirty Christians in Ohio, or fifty in New York. In Nevada the inequality is far worse, though that State has |