Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, December 12, 1909, Page 21

PART THREE HALF-TONE VOL. XXXIX | WHAT MISSO will A NE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS—that is what the or- ganization known as the Missouri Navigation Congress wants. How to get the vast sum will be the subject of discussion at the meeting to be held in Omaha December 14, 15 and 16. it is a vast sum, but it is wanted by men who are credited with foresight in the expenditure of public money. Governor John Burke of North Dakota is the president. Behind him are 2,000 members in cities from Helena, Mont., to St. Louis. The vice presidents are business men who comprehend what $100,000,000 means. The sum is as mach as France paid for the Canal du Midi, 255 miles in length; more than twice the cost of the Kiel ship canal built by Germany equal to the sum invested by Great Britain in the waterway between Manchester and Liverpool, or paid by the Muscovites to dig the canal STEAMER HELENA, OLD-TIME TYPE OF BOAT. connection Dbetween the Dniester and Vistula rivers; $10,000,000 more than the ccst of the epoch-making Suez and equal the amount spent by Canada on all the artificial waterways of that coun- try since their construction b to n. The necessity for cheaper and better transportation facilities has forced itseif upon that m of the west through which the Mis- sourt flows, with startling suddenne Accordingly plans have been carefully laid es are preparing to march against the states for whom the west has bee years, and ask what se a pittance ment to seize the Missouri river as ‘one great enterprise navigation safe on its turbulent wate give permanency to the channel investing in elevators, warehouses po The river s n building harbors for almost 100 ms to enable the federal govern- and make construct such landings anfl will justify private capital docks and hoat lines whieh That Montana and the Dakotas are entering a intense and complex development and assuming a commercial of mpor- cond period tance which ecannot be ignored is everywhere recognize Vithin their borders are supplies of p wool and live stock, not only Iation In those states, clothes and fire When the M River Navigation Congress meets in Omaha next week to discuss ways of securing the $100,000,000 by bonds or otherwise the Missour! river will be pe net increase of debt in thre to this $100,000,000 for ous metals, coal, lumber, grains, ufficient for the rapidly growi but a vast surplus to give a hungry wo suri issu »ds of the three great states on the 1 inent reasons for urging a nation years amounts to $315,116,99858 aterwa to add improvement in the we: the raflways are again prostrated \ This congress is th Congress. Such organizati seem to which public improvements and of the National Rivers and Harbors @ the popular means through eforms can best be secured. Their talk has a way of assisting progress. It is said that our nation building has been one long conversation, checkered by dispates. such organizations and conventi are now talking about im- es we have turned our ideas out the sound of trumpet con- which have made In ns a proving the waterways of the United S over, struck out this and th duéted each other into new America great at and wit worlds of thought If opened at present the Missouri river would )r the greatest san pesition as a new line of raflroad thrown out across the “Great Plains” of Montana—a means of trans- portation in advance of the needs of the country through which it runs. But a great part of the railway mileage of the country was butlt in advanc f the actual needs and the population and wealth $/ regions traversed by the new lines grew up and gave solid value to the transportation properties, besides addng in eviry state mil- Hons of dollars’ worth of property to the sum available for taxation. part of its length OMAHA SUNDAY This condition surrounds the proposition of opening the Mis- souri river as urged by a very intelligent and very earnest or- ganization of western business men, many of whom were either opposed to the policy or not awakened to its necessity. The fairest part of the Misscuri river Is from the mouth of t Yellowstone river to Fort Benton, Montana. This of miles is through a country as yet the “‘Great Plains,” rveyed and untrodden, a country so vast that while traveling through it there is that feeling of moving with indefinite purpose, or returning to the same place each night with the same benches and the same chalky taste of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of the fingers and an all-pervading heat and smeil of cattle same black canopy dropped down from above each night In this valley and on the benches above it there are acres of land which are weary of growing buffalo grass and are capa- ble of growing wheat and oats by the dry farming process. ) n and women who have gone into the valley and streams sixty to one hundred and twenty mile m a railroad have already demonstrated that the lands will produce more and better wheat than the old sad soils of the so-called 2 states. Along that portion of the valley between the Judith and shell rivers and northwest toward the Big Dry creek mon thing for a farmer to produce thirty-eight bushels o Red winter wheat to the acre, a recent investigation by th showing the following averages in seven fields visited in Fergus county: Winter wheat, 13.5 and ‘White hulless barley gave a yield of from twenty-one to twenty bushels in nine flelds and sixty-day oats from thirty-eight 'c the which is stretch er; th on the the then settled along th western agricult t is no north 17 19 MORNING, ALL THE “EW H MAHA BEE JEST (N THE WES Ox o 1909, SINGLE COPY FIVE CENTS. e URI RIVER NAVIGATION CONGRES Campbell, Secretary of the Organization, Writes of Its Objects and How Its Members Hope to Make the River Useful by ~~EAWILLIAM) Q ivi cE PR:eSIDENI o which weighed from forty-two to forty-eight pounds to the bushel, oats in Montana being so heavy that forty-two pounds is the accepted weight of a bushel, and instead of thirty-two, as in Nebraska any points fn the Missouri river vall worth anything. It is practi question is becoming more and more a world prob! modity raw or finished is of le or no value until of its irty-five bushels of win farms of the Missouri river val it cah be fed to hogs and ¢ wheat is mnot ally worthless at a tim plac use. To grow t r wh one of the great dr: pria fam To haul 100 pounds of whea egion to the railroad costs from $1 to $1.50, and then to 45 cents more to haul it to the primary marke polis. . , except under special conditions, will not stand wagon haul of more than ten miles. Thus the farmers in Mon a thing, have not only to compete with the farmers in the whose lands are along the right-of-way of railroads, but om these dry fa a general riow rs sell their wheat and oats must I buyers hundreds of miles nearer the primary many hundred miles nearer the sea. V nd vaterway ansportaticn rate The key ompete w mark h this longer haul as a dis- s offers a means of overcoming it by the les antage a er another situation is believed to De held somewhere ix TYPE OF BOAT NOW SUCCESSFUL ON THE RIVER—THIS CRAFT PLIES BETWEEN WILLISTON AND FORT BENTON—IT IS OF 00 TONS AND 1S DRIVEN BY GASOLINE. S WANT Restoring Its Commercial Importance WILLA CAMPBELL decy Treas the alluvial mattress of the Missourl river. Little by little the sheep bar- ons of the state of Montana are being crowded northward away from the lines of the Northern Pacific and the Chi 0, Milwaukee & St. Paul rail- Ranges along the upper Yel- being fenced and ed into ted farns and su beet fields. to drive great flocks to the big shearing plants near the railways, permitting the sheep to graze for weeks on the way. In these planis the fleeces we: slipped off like garments, put into bales and loaded on t} the flocks are being crowded toward the Missouri ri ht be driven to the docks! But there are no docks! Montana clips 35,000,000 pounds of wool from its sheep eac nd pays $610,000 to haul the fleeces to Boston and Philadelphia o of 1% cents per pound. If to this must be added the co reighting’’ the big bales of wool from 75 to 150 miles from the , *¢hich would be on the average of 1% ceats per pound, the lowstone a con- It is no longer possil » formerly HELENA ON THE I AFTER THE BIG RISE IN 1881 sheep barons are going to have a transportation charge of 3% cents against their clips for man years to come. Here the friends f the Missouri river step in and say, wool to market by water ‘Send your Instead of paying $610,000 annually, and almost as great, drive your flocks to the river, then send your wool to market for 25 cents per water and save $530,000 to the wool growers Then sdds the old wool grower: “The wool will soak up moisture if it goes by river and weigh a lot more when it gets to Boston ’ the freighter’s charge shear them hundred pounds by each year.” there. Already the Benton Packet company, good boats between Bismarck, N ng sompany, ¢ tana, does tation the const which operates a line of D., and Fort Benton, Mont., is mak- handle the wool clip, but even this enterprising ex-United States Senator T. C. Power of Mon- | that it will be able to furnish steamboat transpor- tes much under those charged by the railways because of 1t expense of maintaining landings and the loss of time in at night when the boats should be running like freight twenty-four hours in the day. preparations to wned by ot £ tying up trains In Montana there are 34,000 square miles of bituminous, bitu- minous-lignitic and lignite coal Many of the best beds ‘of lignite are along the Missour! river. Few ranches but have a coal mine within & few hundred feet of their hoilmes, and as the steam plows turn over hundreds of acres of the Great Plains they literally plow up the coal they plow with. This great lignite coal area down the Missouri river across North Dakota to the South Mne. Geologists say there are staie extends Dakota 500,000,000,000 tons of it in the some lands being worth $200 per acre for the coal when it is estimated at 10 cents per ton. Lignite is a commercial coal Electric light and great pumping stations in North Dakota fire with it and tests made by the Northern Pacific railway show its boller efficiency is satisfactory. Chemical analysis shows thess lignites contain more fixed carbon than almost (Continued on Page Foy