entirely of sand and clay in about ten or twelve years. It was estimated that it would take $4,000,000 to dredge it out. Mr. Cocks. Have you ever seen any such dam in a forested area which filled up? Mr. GLENN. I have not seen any such dam in a forested area. Mr. Cocks. There is no such dam? You do not know of any? Mr. GLENN. No, sir. Mr. Cocks. Could not a dam be so constructed, by having openings in the lower part of it, as to allow the stream to run through at times and wash out the silt? Mr. GLENN. Our southern mill engineers have abandoned all attempts of that kind, and one of the mill engineers in the South, who has had the largest experience on that line, told me a few years ago, in discussing the matter with him, that he counted on nothing but the stream flow; he did not, in other words, count the storage capacity of dams. Mr. Cocks. Why was it impracticable to have openings at the bottom to wash it free of silt? Mr. GLENN. I do not know that I can answer reliably on that. I would suggest, however, that when the dam has been filled with silt it packs itself in so that it would not wash itself out, even if you opened the dam. Mr. Cocks. It would not be necessary to keep it closed until the dam had entirely filled with silt. Mr. GLENN. No; that would not be necessary. But I doubt if the use of flood gates at the base of the dam there is sufficient to keep that clean. Mr. Cocks. Have there been such dams constructed with gates at the bottom? Mr. GLENN. Yes. Mr. Cocks. With large openings there? Mr. GLENN. The cotton mills that have been developed on large water powers have openings at the bottom of their dam. They have, in addition, centrifugal dredges which operate to cut up and loosen up the material and aid in carrying it out. Mr. Cocks. Were those large orifices, so that the water could pass out readily? Mr. GLENN. I do not know; but the dams were constructed for the purpose, and they have failed, and the engineers in building new dams have abandoned all attempts along that line to keep the dams clear. Mr. Cоcks. My purpose in answering that question was this. I have noted that the great dam at Assouan, on the Nile, has forty orifices such as I speak of. Of course, the Nile there is checked, not during the flood, but after the crest of the flood is past; but the principle would be the same. I know that engineers predicted that that dam would not stand with those numerous openings, but the dam has been constructed and has stood for six or eight years. Mr. GLENN. In my country they have often found that a mill pond fills up, and they never can successfully clear that out. They have cut the entire dam out, perhaps, but the water just cuts down a narrow channel, and it does not clear the pond; it just makes a narrow channel through this silt. Mr. Cocks. I can understand that when there was a great semicircular pond it would do that, but I should think it would be different where there was a gorge. Mr. GLENN. You do not hold any water in a narrow gorge. Mr. GLENN. Yes, but you would have to back it up a great many miles in order to get a pond that amounted to anything in a stream of that sort. Mr. Cocks. Suppose we started on this proposition, would it not be years before we could stop this erosion? Mr. GLENN. I do not know whether five years would be sufficient or not, but in a few years, I think, we would get results that would either justify us in continuing it, or show us that we must stop it. And in regard to the expense, one of the members of the committee was asking a moment ago about that; I do not imagine that the Treasury would be called on to pay, say, at the rate of $2,000,000 a year, any such length of time as would take out of the Treasury $50,000,000 or $100,000,000. Long before such a sum as that would be taken from the Treasury we would begin to get returns from the forest lands by the sale of the forest products-the timber-and it would not be very many years before the scheme would be self-supporting, and the same history that has characterized such legislation in Europe would be repeated here, it would become a source of positive revenue to the Government, and it would be, in other words, a money-making investment-better than selling 2 per cent bonds, for instance. Mr. Cocks. Your idea would be that it could not be made a profitable investment by the utilization of the water power that these dams afford? Mr. GLENN. I should not include dams in my scheme at all. Mr. Cocks. I understand; but as a proposition to make it selfsupporting? Mr. GLENN. I should not put up dams as a portion of it at all. Let the private interests down the stream that is regulated build the dams and take care of that phase of it. There are plenty of men ready to do it in the South. Mr. Cocks. How about the reclamation projects? Will not those dams fill up in the same way? Mr. GLENN. I am not personally familiar with them, but I think some of them will, and I think they are trying to provide against it. Whether they are going to be able to do it effectively or not time alone can tell. I think it is too soon to pronounce any opinion. The CHAIRMAN. It is true that when America was discovered there was a bar at the mouth of every river emptying into the sea? Mr. GLENN. I suspect so, in most cases; but that is far afield from this whole question. The CHAIRMAN. It leads to this question. Take the mouth of the Columbia River, for instance. Does the fact that a bar exists there lead to the conclusion that if a dam had been built up at the headwaters of that stream the sand and silt, which in the absence of such a dam has drifted out to sea, would have been held behind that dam and filled up that reservoir? Mr. GLENN. No, sir; I think that does not follow at all, because of this fact, that the greater amount of the sand at the mouth of the Columbia came from wave action along the shore. If you take our North Carolina streams that flow into Albemarle Sound and Pamlico Sound, you will find off the mouths of those sounds-that is, where they would mouth if they were open freely to the oceanthere is a bar, now known as a "sand bank," that effectually shuts that in. That came about through sand carried by the waves along the shore and built up by the action of the sea. Many rivers that come down from this Piedmont country do not bring any of this material. If they did bring it, it would settle in these great settling basins, the sounds. It would never get out of there. Those bars are due to the action of the sea, and have not anything in the world to do, practically, with this problem: and, while in some cases bars off rivers where they enter directly the sea do come from such materials the Connecticut, I think, now brings down that granitic material that is accumulating in its mouth to-day-the bars in many cases in past ages were due not to the action of the river, but to the action of the sea. The CHAIRMAN. Take the case of the Connecticut River, about which you just spoke. Would not the construction of a dam near the headwaters of that stream have presented an obstruction to this sand which would eventually have filled up the pond? Mr. GLENN. I imagine it would in time; yes, sir. I have very little faith in the reservoir, Mr. Chairman. Mr. HANNA. Are there not dams all along down the Connecticut River? Mr. WEEKS. Yes; there are. At a half dozen different places. Mr. PLUMLEY. There are three natural reservoirs at the head of the Connecticut River, are there not? Mr. GLENN. I am not familiar with that at all. The CHAIRMAN. You know that one of the three great policies of the present administration, or at least a policy which has been strongly advocated in many quarters, has been to make a charge on behalf of the Federal Government for the water power arising from streams which flow from or through national reserves. Mr. GLENN. Yes. The CHAIRMAN. I do not know whether that phase of the question has ever been considered by the business men of the South, and whether they have looked forward to the possibility of the Federal Government, in the event of its purchasing and protecting these watersheds, making a charge for the use of water power which was preserved thereby. Mr. GLENN. I do not think that has been considered. I have not heard it spoken of at all. The CHAIRMAN. Do you think that would be an unreasonable charge? Mr. GLENN. I do not. I think it would be a reasonable charge, and I think further the mill men of the South would not object to it. Take, for instance, the Southern Power Company, which to-day is developing and delivering 125,000 or 150,000 horsepower over a radius of a couple of hundred miles there. They would be only too glad to see the Government take hold of the headwaters of the streams on which their dams are situated and regulate them vastly to their benefit, and they would be quite willing to pay a reasonable charge for that benefit. They are business men. They would be willing to pay for a substantial benefit which they would derive from that. The CHAIRMAN. Would they be willing to transfer the right to the Government to do that? Mr. GLENN. I do not know. You will have to ask their business officers. Mr. LAMB. You do not claim that the Government can control the waters above navigation, do you? Mr. GLENN. That they can control the waters above the head of navigation? Mr. LAMB. Does not that belong to the States? Mr. GLENN. I am not a lawyer. The CHAIRMAN. From your point of view, it would be hopeless to erect a dam on any stream, because it would fill up? Mr. GLENN. It depends entirely on the amount of erosion that is going on. If the stream is able to handle the amount of eroded material that is carried into it by its tributaries, it would be all right. The CHAIRMAN. But at the dam it would give up most of its mud? Mr. GLENN. It will give up the greater part of it. Mr. WEEKS. In the floods on the Connecticut the dams do not check its flow at all. Mr. GLENN. Low dams do not check the flow at all. I examined the Monongahela River in connection with the flood of 1897. There are a lot of locks and dams there. The dams make slack water, but the slack-water prism-the cross section, in other words-is so very slight as compared with the normal river flow there that the material is kept moving, and that largely depends on the size of the dam. Mr. Cocks. Why should not that sort of dam be put in lots of our streams, just as we are intending to put thirty or forty dams in the Ohio River, if the scheme is ever completely carried out? Mr. GLENN. There will be very little capacity for storage to that sort of dam. Mr. Cocks. They will hold back the water and make a reservoir. Mr. GLENN. Those dams will not hold back any appreciable amount of water. Those Monongahela dams are each 3 or 4 feet high, or something of the sort, and there is a current there all the time. These storage reservoirs would have to be many feet high and cover bottom lands on either side so as to make a large storage volume. Those Monongahela dams have practically no storage volume. The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions? Mr. PLUMLEY. Have you any data in hand to show how long it would take approximately for these trees that are in the deforested region to become of some commercial value? Mr. GLENN. Merchantable value? Mr. PLUMLEY. Yes. Mr. GLENN. I am hardly enough of a forester for that. I am primarily a geologist. Mr. Roth can answer that. Mr. Roth, how long would it take the young timber on this area to become large enough to be of commercial value? I believe that is the question? Mr. PLUMLEY. Yes; so that it would begin to return to the Government a fund for its own maintenance. ADDITIONAL STATEMENT OF PROF. FILIBERT ROTH. Professor ROTH. That question, of course, is one that can be answered in various ways. It is a good deal like taking over a farm. I can take a farm-whether it is good or run down makes no difference and I can run that farm intensively and put in many improvements or I can run it extensively and put little or nothing into it and take out everything possible. We have the good farmer and the poor farmer. We have the poor farmer literally speaking as well as figuratively speaking, and we have the good farmer who has lots of money. Take this Forestry Service. You have a good illustration in the forestry service that you have already established in the West. There is a large body of forest surveyed, and you are right now on the brink of making those forests self-supporting and having them give to the West, for instance, 25 per cent of the increment. Now, in the same way, you can take those mountains right there and turn them over to men who will simply give them protection, and you can make that protection off of that land now, you need not wait a day; or you can do something to it, make considerable improvement and put in a little money for five or ten years, and then have something which is self-supporting. Now, take a case in point. Here is Mr. Ayers, who takes care of a piece of cut-over land which belongs to Dartmouth College. He can tell you how it is done, and how, if you have not got the money to do more with, you can make that thing self-supporting from the start. I myself took from the forestry service in the State of Michigan some cut-over land on which there was comparatively little timber. We did not go into it in an expensive way. In other words, we cut our plan according to the cloth. You can do precisely the same thing as to these forest reserves, if you create them. You can make them self-supporting from the start or you can improve them and do much better with them. On this idea of how much you can do with the forest lands like this, let me illustrate by the example of the Black Forest in Germany. The Grand Duchy of Baden owns the Black Forest, and they are making more money per acre per year off those mountain forest lands than we are on farm lands in the State of Michigan. Mr. Cocks. What is the annual return? Professor ROTH. The last few years the Grand Duchy of Baden made $5 an acre, net. Other German States do the same thing, and a great number of their lands are nonagricultural lands. As you can readily see, if they were agricultural lands they would not remain. in forests with an extensive population such as there is in Germany. Mr. Cocks. I thought the question was, how soon could we expect to receive returns from the reforested area when trees were planted there? Professor ROTH. Oh, if you plant the trees, that is a totally different problem. Your income is not from the reforested area. Mr. Cocks. We are speaking of the young trees. Professor ROTH. You could plant locusts and get something out of them in five or ten years. Mr. Cocks. What good is a locust in five years? Professor ROTH. You can get fence posts out of them in five or ten years. Mr. Cocks. In five years? |