Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/292

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286
B. L. Steeves.

of 8,000 people, with modern improvements and buildings, and two banks carrying a combined deposit of $450,000, has been built in one year. The tract itself is a vast plain, dotted with homes as far as the eye can reach, with great irrigation canals like rivers meandering through the land, carrying a volume of water 70 feet wide and 7 feet deep, and capable of being navigated by river steamboats if it were considered advisable. Visit the Minadoka dam, which is just being completed by the Government, and which is designed to irrigate 100,000 acres, if you would learn that there is no mechanical obstacle, however great, that American ingenuity will not overcome. It is one of the wonders of the world. Southern Idaho will in 20 years he the most highly developed agricultural country on earth. Thirty thousand horsepower will be developed at the Minadoka dam alone, belonging to the farmers themselves, and every farmhouse will be lighted by electricity, and every churn and washing machine will be attached to an electric motor.

Idaho is proud of her resources, and she is proud of her citizens. She has a sturdy, independent citizenship, mostly young and mostly American-born. Idaho is proud of her institutions. We are proud that Idaho represents the highest development in civil government. That the great tree of liberty, under whose spreading branches all Nations of the earth will in due time find shelter, which first as a tender sapling struck root at Runnymede, when the rebellious barons forced King John to affix his signature to Magna Charta, and which has grown and developed and flourished through the centuries watered by the blood and tears of earth's bravest and best, has at last reached its highest flower and most perfect fruition in the Rocky Mountain States, the backbone of the American Continent, and that Idaho freely extends the ballot