owlands and marshes and so make them fit for the farmer. We can raise
great dikes or embankments along the rivers and so shut out the flood
waters. The people of Holland have saved thousands of acres from the sea
by building dikes and pumping out the water from the inclosed fields.

While we cannot make it rain where not enough rain falls, we can do that
which is just as good or better: we can carry water by ditches and pipes
to the land that needs it. Much of the soil of the great deserts in the
southwestern part of our country is rich in plant food. All that it
lacks is water.

The Indian roamed over the rich lands of the great delta of the Colorado
River. He often went hungry and thirsty. He did not think of taking the
water out of the river in a ditch and allowing it to flow over and wet
the rich soil. The white man came and turned the river out of its
channel and spread the water over hundreds of square miles of the
richest land on the earth. Now, where once you would have died of thirst
and hunger, there are green fields and growing crops as far as you can
see.

[Illustration: The Owens River aqueduct, through which water is carried
to Los Angeles from a source more than two hundred miles distant.]

The city of Los Angeles is situated in a dry region where there is not
water enough for the needs of a great city. There has now been completed
a great aqueduct which brings a river of water through deserts and
mountains from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, over two hundred miles away.
There is now sufficient water for hundreds of thousands of people.

When it rains too much, many rivers rise and overflow their banks. The
farmer's crops are destroyed, his cattle drowned, and his buildings
washed away. We can lessen the danger from these floods, which are very
bad in such river basins as those of the Ohio and Mississippi, by
building reservoirs in the highlands where the rivers take their start.
If when summer comes these rivers are too shallow for safe navigation,
the reservoirs can be opened and the streams supplied with this stored
water.

The lack of trees upon the prairies was once a serious matter for the
settler. We must not think, however, that because Nature placed no trees
on the prairies that trees will not grow there. She may not have had
handy the seed of the kind suitable for such dry lands. Our government
has found in the dry regions of other countries trees that will grow
upon our prairies. In the