of the Interior. The action by the Secretary effecting this change was based upon recommendations made by the Director of the Geological Survey, who gave it as his view that "the principal need at the present time is that of establishing a somewhat more direct personal contact between the Director of the Reclamation Service and the Secretary of the Interior and the cutting out of intermediate steps which are believed, through the experience of several years, to be unnecessary and to serve rather to delay than to expedite public business."

F. H. Newell, Chief Engineer of the Service, was appointed Director of the new independent service. Mr. Newell's place. as Chief Engineer was filled by the promotion of Arthur Powell Davis, Assistant Chief Engineer.

On December 13, 1913, by an order of the Secretary of the Interior, the Director of the Service was relieved of responsibility for the general administrative oversight of the Service and for making recommendations upon questions of policy to the Secretary, these functions being vested in a body to be known as the Reclamation Commission. This body was ordered to be composed of the Director of the Service (as chairman), the Chief Engineer, the Chief Counsel, the Comptroller, and the Supervisor of Irrigation. Within the division of the administration entrusted to him, each member of the Commission was responsible only to the Secretary of the Interior. In December, 1914, the Chief of Construction was made a member of the Commission.

After about a year and a half of operation under this system the Secretary of the Interior, on May 6, 1915, reduced the membership of the Commission to three, the positions of Director and Chief Engineer being consolidated and the Supervisor of Irrigation and the Chief of Construction being dropped from the Commission.

The volume of work carried on by the Service during its fifteen years of existence has varied widely. Most of the first year was spent in organization and planning work. On March 14, 1903, however, less than one year after the passage

of the act, six major projects were approved, and a few months later, on August 28, 1903, construction was begun on the first of these, the Truckee-Carson Project in Nevada. In 1904, five additional projects were authorized; in 1905, nine; in 1906, four, and in 1907, one. Since that time but one major

project has been authorized, and three minor projects located on Indian reservations have been undertaken. In addition, no less than fifty-three additional reclamation schemes have been examined and preliminary surveys made. These are known as "secondary projects," and will form the basis for any future construction work which may be undertaken by the Service.

To date the Service has initiated and brought to various stages of completion, twenty-six separate projects. Of these fifteen have been practically completed in all their units, ten have been partially completed, and one is still in the first stage of construction. The work to date has involved the construction of one hundred large storage and diversion dams, about eleven thousand miles of canals and distributaries, and some thousands of minor and auxiliary structures.

The cost of the work thus far completed is nearly $125,000,000. The total area irrigable by these works is about 3,000,000 acres. To date slightly less than half of this acreage has been provided with water, while less than a third is under cultivation. The value of the crops produced on these lands in 1917 is estimated at $52,000,000.

Development of Reclamation Policy, 1902 to Date. The basic policy enacted by the Reclamation Act of 1902 has persisted without change up to the present time. In several respects, however, the provisions of the original act have been modified. In what follows only the most important of these changes are noted.

Very early in the application of the act, it became evident that a more comprehensive policy must be adopted than had been formulated in the act, relative to the inclusion of privately owned lands in reclamation projects. In the framing of the act, provision had been made for the imposition of a proportionate part of the cost of the construction of projects upon. the private lands which might seek the use of the water furnished by such projects. It had not, however, been thought necessary to provide for any form of security for the payment of such charges, as was provided in the case of the public lands in the project, for it was assumed that the private lands in a project would in no case bear any large proportion. to the public lands. It was pointed out that there were upwards of 400,000,000 acres of arid land belonging to the

United States and that there was a water supply adequate for 40,000,000 acres.

In point of fact, however, individuals and corporations had been very active in the selection of and acquisition of title to tracts located along or adjacent to the streams, so that there were few large compact bodies of irrigable land which were not cut into by private ownership or within which entrymen had not already taken up the choice spots. When, therefore, the task devolved upon the engineers of the Reclamation Service of selecting the areas to be irrigated, they were able to find few locations in which it was possible economically to irrigate large bodies of public land without at the same time irrigating considerable tracts in private ownership.

Thus, on the Truckee-Carson Project in Nevada, where the first construction was undertaken, the lands chosen for reclamation were in the desert beyond the bounds of the Central Pacific Railroad land grant and so remote and apparently worthless that individuals had not entered upon them to any great extent. Yet even here, the best lands were privately

owned.

Moreover, in some of the cases where the limitation of the benefits of the project to public lands was practicable, it would have necessitated the absorption into the project of water courses which were already in either actual or prospective use by settlers in the vicinity. Thus, in the Salt River Valley of Arizona there were great tracts of vacant public lands which might be reclaimed, but their reclamation would directly or indirectly have forced a large part of the resident population to abandon their partly cultivated lands. Because of this condition, Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock, acting under instructions from President Roosevelt, finally concluded to permit the stored water to be devoted to the privately owned lands instead of using it for irrigating adjacent tracts of public land.

So large was the proportion of the irrigable area in private ownership found to be, that it was considered indispensable

that proper security be obtained for the payment of construction charges by such settlers as should desire the inclusion of their lands in the project. Under the conditions such security would naturally take the form of a mortgage on the lands. On even the smaller projects, however, the number of settlers already holding lands which could profitably be drawn into the project might number several hundreds; in the larger projects, as in the case of the Salt River Valley in Arizona, several thousands were involved, many of them non-resident.

The difficulty, if not the impracticability or even impossibility of dealing with each of these widely scattered owners was obvious; and the Reclamation Service therefore developed, in coöperation with citizens' organizations in the arid regions, an expedient which finds no express warrant in the law-the organization of the landholders within the boundaries of a project into a so-called water users' association, which should give to the government a collective mortgage on the private lands to be benefited by the project as security for the payment of the construction charges assessed against those lands.

The development of the principle of water users' associations has made possible the application of the Reclamation Act to large areas which must otherwise have been denied. its benefits. Of the twenty-six projects initiated to date by the Service, no less than twenty-three have required the formation of a water users' association.

In 1905 the scope of the Reclamation Act was extended to a portion of the state of Texas to permit the construction of a project in New Mexico on the Rio Grande. In the following year, the provisions of the act were extended to the whole of the state of Texas. In 1908, following the passage of a number of special acts for the reclamation of the lands allotted to various Indian tribes, a general act was passed authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to enter into any arrangement or agreement with Indian tribes for the reclamation of lands allotted to them under the general allot

ment act.