aboard himself, legs dangling over the side, like a small boy sitting on a board fence.

The cable tightened, the car lifted under us, and, swinging slightly in the gale, crept out over the abyss. I had just come from flying with the air mail from Salt Lake to San Francisco-seven hundred miles over mountains and deserts but not even there had I been aware of quite so poignant a good-by feeling as at the moment we left the edge of the rock and dangled in the gale above Shoshone Cañon.

The little car-a spider running out its thread-dropped slowly past the sheer gray concave face of the dam, down to the spray and thunder of the river, for the water, with its three hundred feet of head behind it, came hurtling out of the mountainside like a small cross section of Niagara. We saw the turbine intakes down there; compressed-air drills were thumping; men carrying dynamite. Ladders, slippery with spray, and held by wires to iron rods driven into cracks in the cañon wall, ran up the face of the rock to the top of the dam-fit for circus acrobats, you might think, rather than for ordinary men in overalls and heavy boots. And yet they, as well as the cradle in which we bad descended, were all part of the day's work.

At one place the cañon wall, a sort of conglomerate here, had begun to give way, and men, fastened by ropes to solid crags farther up, were prying loose the bowlders, to send them crashing down to the river. These bowlders were supposed to go under a footway across which workmen constantly passed, and generally they did go under, but sometimes they smashed full against it, and now and then smaller chunks shot over the bridge like cannon balls. Nobody paid the least attention to this, except that the harder the bowlders shook the supports of the footway and the nearer they came to hitting somebody the more the genial trolls working up above seemed to be amused.

Everything about Shoshone seemed to

be done with a similar Brobdingnagian humor. It was a man's-size job, and man's-size men were doing it, from the quiet giant who was superintending the work to the roomful of huskies whom we joined in shoveling in beef and beans and bread pudding and coffee. And the whole thing, from the great dam itself to the spirit in which the men were working, all set in this magnificent background of towering cliffs and rushing water and wind, seemed to show one side of America-what one might call our altruistic materialism—at its best. One was glad of a government which planned and undertook such beneficent enterprises, and of the husky, cheerful men who were carrying it through.

That was one side of the Shoshone project. We saw another next day.

We were huddled in the lee of a haystack on Frannie flat-two ex-service homesteaders, one of the Reclamation men, and myself-nearly fifty miles from the dam, down the wide, shallow valley. Behind us, in the west, were the mountains from which the Shoshone came; over in the east the Big Horns; and on the horizon, north and south, a range of bare, low, wrinkled hills that might have been made of ashes.

The same Wyoming gale was whistling, but it swept unchecked now, over miles of desolate flat, bare as it had been from the beginning of time except for the occasional spot of a homesteader's one-room shack. Some of these shacks were stuck on the gray sagebrush like thumb tacks on a drawing board; round others could be discerned squares of yellow or green where the desert had been beaten into crops. They and the two somewhat sardonic young men snuggling into the stack and recounting their troubles were the ultimate fringe of the promise that began in that imprisoned lake fifty miles behind us in the hills.

They were fairly typical of the little army of ex-service men who had come out the year before to take up homesteads on the Shoshone and North

Platte projects-men who, as often as not, knew little or nothing about farming, and came with the vague notion, inasmuch as the openings were restricted to ex-service men, that a grateful government was "giving" them something. And so it was-the exclusive right to be Robinson Crusoes on land much less hospitable than Crusoe's island, and without any well-stocked ship conveniently beached in the offing and filled with biscuits and nails.

They had to pay for this land, and pay for clearing and leveling and plowing it; pay for the lumber for their shacks and their bacon and flour and nails; pay for their horses and plows and seed; and pay for the water with which, after three or four years' grubbing and waiting, they might hope to get a decent

crop.

Now the Shoshone soil is good soil, once it is tamed and civilized, and the farms round about the little city of Powell, where the homesteaders have been working for ten or twelve years, are as good as those in most prosperous irrigated neighborhoods in the West. But 1921 is not 1840, or even 1900. The snaps were all gone long ago—the places where the pioneer had but to turn over the virgin soil to see it blossom like the

rose.

Even the easily irrigated neighborhoods those naturally rich, easily leveled and drained, and close to a market, are also gone. Men can succeed in country like the Shoshone, and they have succeeded, but it takes time and farming knowledge and some capital, and even then the problem of a market is not completely solved.

Imagine yourself, for example, starting through the homesteader's mill in a neighborhood like this. You are dumped out, with a few hundred dollars in savings, perhaps, on a bit of land which would look to the average Eastern city man rather like an ash heap, sprinkled with tufts of gray sage. You first haul in some lumber from the nearest town, or logs from the hills-perhaps forty miles away-and build a shack. Then

the land must be cleared. If a "Fresno " is used for this purpose, four horses are needed, and, while horses are cheaper now, the homesteaders a few years ago in this region were paying as much as fifteen dollars a day for a team. Then the land must be plowed and disked and leveled, and if you have never seen water "run uphill" in the West you will not realize just how much a trick it is to prepare a field for the water.

Grain and alfalfa may be sowed together for the first crop. The former may yield enough the first year to pay for the seed or a little better, and meanwhile it acts as a cover crop for the rather cranky alfalfa. The second year the grain will be worth nothing, perhaps, but the alfalfa will possibly be "set" by this time. Meanwhile you will have paid 5 per cent of your total share of the construction cost of the irrigation project; from about $2.50 to $5 an acre for the use of water; $300 to $500 for house and furnishings; $150 for horses; $250 for machinery; $125 for a wagon; $150 for fencing; $60 for feed-roughly, a minimum of about $1,000 for the first year.

The soil gradually acquires humus and becomes "civilized." It becomes also watersoaked, and, unless the drainage is perfect, alkali is likely to come to the surface or to be washed down with the seepage from the high-line canal. There were homesteads near us that afternoon where the ground was frosted with alkali like a coconut cake, and quite useless until it could be drained out again. But with hay at forty dollars a ton, as it was at times during the war, even new homesteaders made money. With hay at five dollars a ton and wheat at eighty-five cents a bushel, as it was at the moment in the Shoshone neighborhood, it is quite another story.

"And now," I said to one of the exservice men after we had gone over the cost of getting started, "how much do you suppose you made last year?" It was their first.

"Well," he replied, "I made about

sixty dollars out of my wheat, forty-four dollars from my potatoes, and tenthousand-dollars' worth of experience!"

"They call this an 'investment,'" put in the other. "I'd have made six times as much working for wages. I'll say it's a damn fine thing for the government to have us come out here and clear off the land for 'em and get it ready for some square-head to make money out of ten years from now! We'll be lucky if we can keep going long enough to operate another year. 'Investment'? Ha!"

There is no reason for weeping over the fate of these young men. They were certainly a long way from tears themselves. They were still typical American doughboys, as ironically humorous as they would have been in France over rain and mud. A few years' pounding would do them no harm. They might even win through to the snug cottages, silos, and electric milking machines one saw round Powell, although before these came they would doubtless have to get themselves wives who liked pioneering and keeping chickens.

As an adventure, this dash at pioneering had much to recommend it, but as an economic measure or a beau geste on the part of a grateful government, this dumping of a lot of boys, many of whom were without capital or experience, on raw land of rather unusually forbidding character, left a good deal to be desired. The Reclamation Service was aware of this fact and recommended that Congress do something toward clearing the land and possibly building houses or lending money, but nothing came of it.

We drove round the flat all that chilly afternoon until after nightfall, hunting up one little drygoods box after another. Many were empty, their owners either inviting their souls in the urban charms of Powell's one business street, or gone back East" for the winter to Kansas or Nebraska. Those who had no stock, of course, might as well go as not. Once a girl came to the door, dish towel in hand

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a pleasant, small-town girl, who evidently knew no more of farming than of

harpooning whales. She had always thought it might be "kinda fun" to homestead, but she didn't see how anybody "could keep from going in the hole here."

Her husband came up while we were gossiping, a railroad clerk by trade and able to hang on to his job thus far by going on leave. He had got $56.11 for his first year's wheat-the seed alone had cost him $65. It was impossible to make anything the first year, he said. His neighbor, a tall farmerlike-looking man who had built silos "until I had this job wished on to me," talked in similar strain.

a

Another homesteader had brought a tractor with him and had made money by renting it to his neighbors. His wife, Middle - Western college woman, chatted with us for a time in the parlor of her two-room house, with a certain air of calm and complacency as one not unaware of "doing well," and possibly acquiring merit more rapidly than her neighbors. They had good alfalfa already and fifteen or twenty bushels to the acre of wheat. Her husband, she thought, intended to "stick," though she at least was going back East for the winter. Potential capitalists they, one of the "best families" of a few years from now.

In one or two places on the flat, alkali had risen badly and the Reclamation Service's big Bucyrus drag-line excavator was coming to the rescue. A dragline is similar to a steam shovel except that the shovel, instead of scooping, up and outward, is dropped out and hauled in. Picking up and laying its own logmat track as it went, dragging its own huge weight over the soggy ground, scooping and dropping neatly on the bank above its couple of tons of earth at each bite, it would have been a fascinating monster in any place, and here, where it was coming to save desperate people from ruin, it was more than usually human.

The homestead through which it was gnawing its way was frosted white with

alkali. The abandoned house lay like a stranded ship.

"I had a place like this myself, once," said the boss in charge. "A layer of shale and hardpan below the surface soil stopped the drainage and sent the alkali up. I cleaned it out at last, but it took three years to do it."

By digging a deep drainage canal below the level at which the alkali comes out it is generally possible to wash the soil clean. It is a long, slow process, but nature generally moves slowly, and those succeed who can adjust the tempo of their lives to that of the land itself, and oppose to its stubbornness and occasional enmity a compensating patience and sustained intelligence.

Here, as in the case of the Flathead country, I must not-by accenting difficulties-give a wrong impression of the project as a whole. Frannie flat will be like Powell flat one of these days, and Powell flat is an even green, with pleasant bungalows and trees. And when the motor buses come rumbling up to the Powell "consolidated" school at nine in the morning, bringing in their scores of children from all the valley round, you might think you were in a city ten times the size.

No, the Shoshone country is all right, but it is a place for regular farmers, like Potter on Flathead, for instance, and not for boys without capital or farming knowledge who come West with the notion that they are somehow to get something for nothing.

Nothing is the matter with the Shoshone country that is not the matter with most of the unoccupied land left in the West to-day-it is far from a good market and it demands a lot of work and patience. A good many people in the government and out of it have begun to realize this change in our pioneer conditions and to act accordingly. In California, the state, led by the university and Dr. Elwood Meade, has passed a Land Settlement Act providing that the

state shall buy up tracts of unused or ill-used land, divide it into farms, and resell these farms to settlers on terms much more favorable than those hitherto offered by the federal government. At the state colony at Durham they have a resident manager who gives advice of all sorts and acts as a sort of central dynamo for practical suggestions and general encouragement. Not only are the payments stretched over longer terms, but the state lends money for improvements and sends its agricultural experts from time to time to talk to the settlers.

When private capital wished to dispose of a large tract of raw land in Idaho last spring and brought the much-talkedof Brooklyn "caravan" across country for that purpose, the promoters had the land cleared, lumber ready for houses, and did all sorts of things to make the newcomers feel at home. In North Carolina a group of public-spirited people are undertaking an experiment similar to that already put into effect by the state in California. They are to buy a large tract of land, drain and divide it into farms, with intelligent arrangements for a community center, and resell the farms to settlers on long-term payments, with no profit to themselves beyond a normal interest.

In short, the time has come in America when the cost of raw land and the difficulties of beating it into shape are such as to demand something more than the old laissez-faire habit of dealing with homesteaders. Such fast and loose methods as those by which settlers were attracted into the Flathead country to whistle for their water, or by which exservice men were dumped on the Shoshone project without realizing just what they were up against, are, if nothing more, uneconomical and out of date. Nothing untried or unduly paternalistic is suggested. We have merely to do what has been done in Europe long ago, and loan to the individual, for the ultimate benefit of all, some of the state's surplus capital and expert intelligence.