the dredge, the pick and the spade;
and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all
foes--the hostile forces of Nature.... The story of how the white man
within the space of less than thirty years penetrated, explored, and
mapped this almost unknown region; of how he carried law, order, and
justice into a section which had never had so much as a speaking
acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the
necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across
this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how,
undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned
upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands,
and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches,
and filled those ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or
high in the mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil,
he replaced the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus
with cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It
is one of the epics of civilization, this reclamation of the Southwest,
and its heroes, thank God, are Americans.

"Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation--Egypt, for
example, and Mesopotamia and parts of the Sudan--but the people of all
those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than
themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of
the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help
themselves, spent their days wielding the pick and shovel, and their
evenings in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands.
After a time the government was prodded into action and the great dams
at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organizing
themselves into cooeperative leagues and water-users' associations, took
up the work of reclamation where the government left off; it is to these
energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells, plowed fields, and
dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which
stretches from Yuma to Tucson, that the metamorphosis of Arizona is
due."

The effect of irrigation wherever introduced was amazing. Stretches of
sand and sagebrush gave way to fertile fields bearing crops of wheat,
corn, fruits, vegetables, and grass. Huge ranches grazed by b