From one of the little Cajun towns I
drove over the prairies. The road was as
solid as any well-packed dirt road in the
United States. "Right along here," said
"when I first ran the levels for the road
and laid out the drainage ditches I could
without effort thrust a twenty-foot pole
its whole leagth into the soil, and as 1
plodded across the prairie I was always
up to my knees, and sometimes sank to
my armpits, in the wet and mushy soil."
The method of draining these lands is
simplicity in the extreme. To begin with,
they are not really under the water-line,
but practically on a level with the bayous
that flow all about them. ''Take, for ex
ample, a tract of one thousand acres.
From the bayou around the tract a canal
is dug, usually about eight feet deep and
forty feet wide, the dredge in digging the
canal throwing up the spoil from the bed
to form a levee perhaps six feet high, the
top of which is smoothed off and used for
a road. Within this is dredged apother
canal, called a reservoir canal, not so deep
and with no opening into the big canal or
the bayou. From this canal lateral ditches
about three feet and one-half deep and
some two hundred feet apart extend to all
parts of the land to be drained. Canals
and ditches are dug by machinery, huge
floating dredges scooping out the former,
and a curious machine, running on wooden
"wings" three feet and a half wide, dig
ging the latter at the rate of half a mile a
day.
