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Updated: June 3, 2025
Twenty-five years ago Kansas was a prairie state with few trees, and the semi-arid plains extended half-way across the state, but thousands of acres of trees have been planted, and crops have been cultivated, and the more forests and crops the farmer plants the more rain comes to water them. The great droughts which used to ruin their crops year after year no longer disturb them.
She judged him not more than twenty-two, but the school where he had learned of life had held open and strenuous session every day since he could remember. "Glad to meet y'u, ma'am," he assured her, in the current phrase of the semi-arid lands. "I'm sure I am glad to meet YOU," she answered, heartily. "Can you tell me where is the foreman of the Lazy D?"
The water right cost money sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre; in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre, or even more. Very frequently when the Eastern farmer came out to settle on such a tract and to meet the hard, new, and expensive conditions of life in the semi-arid regions he found that he could not pay out on the land.
The surface of the soil is kept broken all the time to prevent the escape of the moisture. This rule applies equally to all soils in dry weather, and will often save a crop of corn in any part of the country during a drought. These are simple rules, but the practice of them is opening up the great semi-arid regions, not of the United States only, but of the whole earth.
This vast area includes reservations of four different kinds: First, National Forest Reserves, aggregating some 63,000,000 acres, for the conservation of the water supply of the arid and semi-arid West; second, National Parks, of which there are seventeen, for the purpose of preserving untouched places of natural grandeur and interest; third, State Parks, for places of recreation and for conserving the water supply; and fourth, military wood and timber reservations, to provide Government fuel or other timber.
It is estimated that the United States has left one hundred and eighty million acres of arid and semi-arid land available for reclamation and four times as much that is incapable of being reclaimed. No other question of to-day is of such vital and far-reaching importance as that of the reclamation of the millions of acres of sleeping arid lands in the western part of our country.
After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains.
We recorded an interesting experiment with the thermometer at this camp, showing a great variety of temperatures, unbelievable almost to one who knows nothing of conditions in these semi-arid plateaus. A little ice had formed the night before. Under a clear sky the next day at noon, our thermometer recorded 54 degrees in the shade, but ran up to 102 degrees in the sun.
There can be no doubt that the region embraced, probably too large for a State under modern conditions, at that time was as logical a division as could have been made, considering the semi-arid climatic conditions, natural boundaries, generally by great mountain ranges, a single watershed, that of the Colorado River, and, in addition to all these, the highway outlet to the Pacific Ocean, to the southwest, through a country where the mountains broke away, along the course of the Colorado, even then demonstrated the most feasible route from Great Salt Lake City to the ocean.
'Well, says I, 'for a semi-arid country this is going some'; and I felt so homesick and sore, I said, 'Hannah, let's not go any farther'; and Hannah she just looked at me and said, 'See here, John, I've come out so far to go to the Black Hills and I'm going. Then, when the weather let up a little, we started out; and, after a couple of hours we stuck in a muddy creek and were all day getting across.
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