as a revolving fund for the continuous prosecution of the
reclamation work. Nearly five million dollars was made
immediately available for the work. Within four years, twenty-six
"projects" had been approved by the Secretary of the Interior and
work was well under way on practically all of them. They were
situated in fourteen States--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas,
Montana, Nebraska, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North
Dakota, Oregon, California, South Dakota. The individual projects
were intended to irrigate areas of from eight thousand to two
hundred thousand acres each; and the grand total of arid lands to
which water was thus to be brought by canals, tunnels, aqueducts,
and ditches was more than a million and a half acres.

The work had to be carried out under the most difficult and
adventurous conditions. The men of the Reclamation Service were
in the truest sense pioneers, building great engineering works
far from the railroads, where the very problem of living for the
great numbers of workers required was no simple one. On the
Shoshone in Wyoming these men built the highest dam in the world,
310 feet from base to crest. They pierced a mountain range in
Colorado and carried the waters of the Gunnison River nearly six
miles to the Uncompahgre Valley through a tunnel in the solid
rock. The great Roosevelt dam on the Salt River in Arizona with
its gigantic curved wall of masonry 280 feet high, created a lake
with a capacity of fifty-six billion cubic feet, and watered in
1915 an area of 750,000 acres.

The work of these bold pioneers was made possible by the fearless
backing which they received from the Administration at
Washington. The President demanded of them certain definite