creates no water rights as against the upper States. I believe that the feeling in the upper States could be relieved by a provision that the erection of the dam did not create water rights as against them, with full provision for their protection; some such action should remove any legitimate objection to immediately proceeding with the construction.

The CHAIRMAN. What was the date of that hearing, Mr. Swing? Mr. SWING. June 21, 1922.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Mr. Swing, I think you will concede at this point in the hearing that Mr. Hoover's statement there is based simply upon the assumption that Congress might have the power, by a suitable amendment, to protect the rights of the various States in the allocation of the water?

Mr. SWING. No—

Mr. LEATHERWOOD (interposing). Let me ask you this now, to find out just where you stand on this question: Assuming that the compact is not ratified and that any attempt under this legislation, if it should be enacted, to construct a dam there would immediately result in litigation that would cover a long period of time, do you still want to go ahead and do that?

Mr. SWING. I will answer your question in this way: I intend to submit-and hope to have your cooperation in submitting, because I know you are an able lawyer-a provision which we think will give practical protection to every water right claimed by the upperstream States in this bill. We will submit it to the committee as a jury and leave it to the committee to determine whether or not it does give practical protection to the upper-stream States.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Well, you are most gracious in your statement as to myself. I do not put my opinion up at all. But I am in possession of the opinion of some very, very able lawyers upon this question that already take the position, without any equivocation, that Congress has not the power to make any such adjustment; and the States of the upper basin, I am persuaded, are going to follow that advice from these eminent lawyers and, if necessary, protect themselves in court.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you not think we had better proceed with the next witness? And these are matters that we can talk about later. Mr. SWING. Mr. Chairman, I present Mr. Sherman O. Buck. TESTIMONY OF MR. SHERMAN 0. BUCK, REPRESENTING FARM BUREAU, IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIF.

(The witness was duly sworn by the chairman.)

The CHAIRMAN. Will you give your name and address, Mr. Buck! Mr. HUDSPETH. Mr. Chairman, of course I was opposed to the matter of swearing witnesses originally; but if witnesses are going to be sworn, I am going to insist that every Congressman who appears here should be sworn also.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Hudspeth, that has never been done in the deliberations of a congressional committee. A Member of Congress is a sworn officer of the Government. He takes an oath before the Speaker at the opening of Congress.

Mr. HUDSPETH. He takes the oath to support the Constitution, and all that sort of thing.

The CHAIRMAN. It would be most unusual to administer an oath to Members of Congress after they have already been sworn to tell the truth in a proceeding of this kind.

Mr. HUDSPETH. Well, it is most unusual to swear any witness.
The CHAIRMAN. I think so, too.

Mr. HUDSPETH. And I do not think there should be any exception in the case of Members of Congress.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, we are all here as officers of the Government and not as witnesses.

Mr. HUDSPETH. But we are not above anybody else as to telling the truth.

The CHAIRMAN. I agree with you as to that [laughter]; but I do not think that in an inquiry of this kind the oath should be administered to any witnesses; but the committee decided to do so.

Mr. HUDSPETH. I do not think so, either; but if you are going to administer the oath to any witness, I think it ought to be administered to Congressmen.

Mr. Buck. My name is Sherman O. Buck. I am a farmer from Imperial Valley, and represent an organization there of a farm bureau of some 1,400 or 1,500 members, and I think I can safely say that I represent the sentiment, from a farmer's point of view, of 95 per cent of the farmers of the Imperial Valley.

It is my intention to be just as brief in this matter as I can possibly be, and yet fully state, as I think I can, the view of the farmers in the Imperial Valley.

I would like to say in the beginning that we farmers in the Imperial Valley live and move and have our being in an atmosphere of apprehension.

The first point that naturally calls for consideration, from the farmer's point of view, is the flood menace.

From what I have seen of the upper reaches of this river and from what I have heard of it where it rises it is a very peaceful river; it does not seem to have any evil intentions at all. But after having gone through many hundreds of miles of that gorge, that Grand Canyon there [indicating on map on the wall], it is thrown back from one side or another, it becomes turgid and accumulates a vast amount of refuse and silt and seems to acquire a spirit of revengefulness-I do not know how to express it--but when it gets out on the lower basin and runs on that upper bed that has been formed by the silt there that you have been told about it has a tendency to break out and do ugly things, and it has done them in the past.

And we farmers of the Imperial Valley are constantly reminded of that conditions. When we cross that bed of the river that was cut out there some years ago, some half mile to three-quarters of a mile wide and 60 feet deep, and see the vast areas of land on each side of that river where the water has drained as it came in, cutting the land to pieces, we realize what a flood in the Imperial Valley has meant in the past, and what it will mean if it happens again.

My friend, Doctor Hartman, from the Imperial Valley, in his statement to the committee the other day in answer to a question said that he was not certain whether it would mean the loss of human life if that river broke loose again or not.

Well, that, I think, is a rather conservative statement. I believe if the river should go into the so-called Volcano Lake again-which it could very easily do-it might be dammed up by silt or anything that the river might carry down and fill up that lake again. I understand that the bottom of that lake is some 8 or 10 feet above the valley-in the direction toward the valley-I think that is correct; that some 8 or 10 feet has been raised there by silt. If that lake should fill up again, and then during the flood time the river should break over it again-which it can easily do, as you have been told-it would start down into the valley again, and I can realize very readily that there might in that case be considerable loss of human life; and it would not take very many human lives to make up in importance the value of the construction that is asked of the Government.

Now, the silt problem follows next. You have had that explained to you, and I want to touch very briefly on these things because 1 realize that we want to be expeditious as possible. We feel in the valley that delay has been one of the very great stumblingblocks in the way of getting this legislation through, and we are anxious to see action taken. But there have been some phases of the silt problem that have not been thoroughly covered.

I live on one of the company ditches; the west line of my little 40-acre farm is on the bank of the canal. When I moved there, the banks of that ditch were some 6 feet high, and some 6 or 8 feet wide. At the present time, that bank has been built up by the silt taken out of the canal by the dredges there in order to enable it to carry enough water to supply our farms there-it has been built up to a height of 10 or 15 feet, and to a width of 30 or 40 feet. Now, if that continues, and we do not have something done to take care of the silt, I do not know what the result will be. The silt will have to be taken out and distributed over the land, which is a very expensive operation.

Then there is another problem. The ditches which run out into our farms to carry the water there are filled up in the flood season, and carry a great amount of silt; and the small ditches will fill up in very short period of time; and it is an expensive proposition to keep those ditches open. The silt comes out on the land, and raises the elevation next to the ditch, and piles up, until every year or two it has to be plowed up and releveled.

Mr. HAYDEN. Would you favor, then, the construction of a reservoir on the Gila River to control the silt?

Mr. BUCK. No; I would not go into that, because I understand that when we have our all-American canal we will not be subject to that; that is my information; is that correct, Mr. Swing? We will not be subject to that after that canal is built, but at the present time we are.

Mr. SWING. The water will be taken out at Laguna Dam, above the Gila River.

Mr. BUCK. Then we also have to bear in mind the condition of Yuma. Every time we have to raise water so that it comes into our canals, we jeopardize the Yuma farms, and we feel that they are entitled to consideration; and we have to put up a very heavy bond to protect them, and that causes us heavy expense.

The next point is the Mexican situation; owing to the fact that our canal runs for 60 miles through a foreign country; and you have been told here by other witnesses what a burden that puts on us; the water is taken out of our control, or practically out of our control entirely, and goes into a foreign country-a country that, during the time that I have been in the Imperial Valley, has not had any government that was stable enough to allow us to form a treaty with it. And you know, too, that when that water runs through Mexico, the Mexicans allow people to camp on it, and they water their stock in it; and we have no means and no authority to take care of the sanitation of that water.

And it is our drinking water. We take the water out of that canal and settle it and filter it and drink it immediately. And there are many things that happen as that water comes out of that country that make it very undesirable to use it for domestic purposes. Mr. LITTLE. Your drinking water all comes through Mexico, does it not?

Mr. BUCK. Yes, sir; every bit of it. And the company ditch on which I am located, after it comes out of the heading, runs 6 miles through Mexican territory, and is subject to the interference of people over whom we have no means of controlling; and frequently, when the man that turns on our water supply comes to our gate and sets our supply for the day-he comes there every morning and frequently the water will go down, because somebody has taken the water on the Mexican side-it will go down until we do not have a sufficient head to irrigate our lands there. That causes extra expense, and a great deal of trouble and aggravation.

I would like to speak of the noxious weeds that we have to contend with. That has been touched on: but I would like to refer to it briefly, because I come in direct contact with it, and have to pay the expense of having those weeds moved from our lands. There is first the Johnson grass, which is the greatest menace that we have. We have also the cockle burr, which gets into the river, and the water carries it down.

Mr. HULSPETH. Do you mean that the Johnson grass and the cockleburrs get into the water on the Mexican side of the line?

Mr. BUCK. Yes; they have no means of dealing with those noxious weeds; they have no laws that can be enforced regulating and taking care of the matter. So that those things come into our water, and get on our lands; and our county makes us pay for taking care of that; and it is a very disagreeable and hard thing to handle, especially the Johnson grass, when it once gets started.

I might just state at this point that the all-American canal will solve that whole problem for us. That is what we have been seeking for years. And I think that I have belonged to almost every organization in the valley that has been started there with a view of getting some legislation or some means of getting the all-American canal.

Mr. LITTLE. By the all-American canal, you mean one that you can construct immediately now, without a dam higher up on the Colorado River?

Mr. BUCK. No; I do not want to separate those two.

Mr. LITTLE. Well, they could be separated, could they not?

Mr. Buck. Conceivably, they could be: but I do not think it would be wise

Mr. LITTLE (interposing). How much would the Boulder Dam add to the value and reliability and the utility of the all-American canal?

Mr. Buck. It would add very much to it. In the first place, it would give us a stabilized water supply: it would take care of the silt, so that the maintenance of the all-American canal would not be nearly so expensive; and it would enable us to get away from Mexican complications.

Mr. LITTLE. Well, if you get the all-American canal, you would get away from Mexican complications right away, would you not? Mr. Buck. Not unless we had the all-American canal.

Mr. LITTLE. I say, if you had the all-American canal, you would get away from Mexican complications right away, would you not? Mr. BUCK. Yes; we would, and at this point I would like to state to the committee what is common knowledge to farmers on the American side of the line. Chandler and his associates, operating a large tract of land in Mexico watered by our canals and not paying their just proportion of costs of water used, have by connivance with the Mexican Government blocked our efforts to get our main canal on American soil where it belongs.

Mr. LITTLE. That is the land that he owns on the Mexican canal! Mr. BUCK. Yes; he is able to irrigate his land at a much less cost with the water running through there than we can irrigate the same acreage on our side of the line.

Mr. LITTLE. Well, that water starts on the American side and irrigates his lands at your expense and then comes back?

Mr. Buck. Largely so. I understand that we have paid over $4.000,000-since the canal has run through there we have paid $4,000,000 more, according to the acreage, than they have paid on the Mexican side for the same service.

Mr. LITTLE. Can not you and Mr. Chandler come to any agreement by which he would pay his due proportion of all those expenses? Mr. BUCK. Why, he evidently could. and I think he has been approached on that subject, but so far he has done nothing of the kind. Mr. LITTLE. He makes his arrangement with the Mexican Government, does he not?

Mr. Buck. It is my opinion that he does.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Mr. Buck, if it will not interfere with your statement, just at this point are you able to give us any idea of how many acres not now susceptible of irrigation would be made subject to irrigation by the construction of the all-American canal?

Mr. Buck. No; I can not say definitely. I think that information is available here, and I have seen figures and have heard it stated here, but I would not want to state definitely.

Mr. LITTLE. It is in the record, is it not?

Mr. BUCK. Yes.

Mr. LITTLE. It has been in for several years. There were 400,000 acres of Government land, were there not?

Mr. SWING. About 400,000 altogether, of which 200,000 were Government lands.