From Youth to Age as an American. 155 proper fish ladders over dams; and this point should extend to cultivated land, whether the surface is drained, under- drained or irrigated. This, from my experience as well as observation, is in the near future an absolute necessity for the private as well as for the public good; as the waste of wealth going on by washing out into rivers and down them to the main outlet of the Columbia is beyond computation, and even now demands the constant employment of constantly additional dredges. What then may be expected when all possible irrigation systems are perfected between the mountains and the naviga- ble rivers? My chance to personally observe this has been closer and more intimate than that of observing the snowfall and its melting on the higher mountains; though the latter has been extraordinary for a man supporting a family from a farm in almost the center of the great Willamette Yall^^^y. While I was taking my wife, and young children, to the mountains for her health, my connection with the Oregon Agricultural Society led to its electing me to the position of nominal editor of the "Willamette Farmer." D. W. Craig, foreman, was then owner of what is known in Salem as the "Island," a body of low alluvial land overlapping the citv by six blocks then— as many more now. Mr. Craig had lost the supposed value of the property in a newspaper enterprise for which a mortgage was overdue ; I purchased it from him, subject to the mortgage. The south arm of Mill Creek flows into the river near the north end of the Island, and across this outflow my sons ferried their teams, hauling sand and gravel as building material. When they began, in 1870, they could not touch bottom with push-poles much of the way across three hundred yards. On the south of their line is an area of about five acres, where the mill company then kept logs afloat all summer. Now that area and their line of ferriage one-third of the way is from twelve to eighteen inches above low water, and is grazed by cattle for three or four months of late summer and fall— the lodgment is fine silt. This repre- sents not more than one-third, perhaps much less, of the
