Travel at Your Own Risk

New Agricultural Empire and Metropolis Now Stands On Ruins of Ancient Kingdom

THE opportunity of seeing an empire and a metropolis in the making will be offered the tourist who visits the new San Carlos project and the town of Coolidge during the coming winter. And besides this, he will see the ruins of an ancient agricultural empire and its metropolis, for the Casa Grande Ruins, located just a mile and a half from Coolidge, was the capital of a great farming district of a prehistoric race of Indians who flourished in the valley centuries ago. When the tourist visits Phoenix and the Salt River Valley, he sees the finished product, a well-built empire and a well-built city, all transformed from a desert and a spot on the desert. When he comes to Coolidge, he sees that transformation in the act of taking place, for only a small part of the desert lands which it is possible to put into cultivation has as yet felt the plowshare and Coolidge, although already a flourishing town, has not yet nearly enjoyed the great development which will follow the transforming of the desert into green felds.

Thus the tourist who covers in his visit to Arizona, the Salt River Valley, the San Carlos project and the Casa Grande Ruins will see an empire of the past, an empire of the present and an empire of the future. It is unlikely that three tenses of an agricultural development can be seen anywhere else in the world.

The San Carlos project is watered from the great Coolidge dam which has a capacity of 1,200,000 acre feet. The first designation includes 100,000 acres of land. As more water is stored behind the dam, the area will be increased; the San Carlos project at its maximum will be only a few thousand acres behind the maximum development of the Salt River project. Besides the lands to receive water from the Coolidge dam, there are many

By AL WILKE, President, Coolidge Chamber of Commerce

thousand acres already watered by pumping systems and many more to be added later, for an inexhaustible supply of water ranging in depth from 20 to 80 feet is stored beneath the ground., The soil is declared by experts to be the equal, if not superior, to any other in the state. This season, 18,000 acres of cotton are being grown in the San Carlos district, of which 15,000 are within the Coolidge shipping radius. Approximately 125 cars of lettuce will roll out of the Coolidge station this fall. An abundance of afalfa and grain crops also are being grown.All of this is being produced on pumping lands and those having old water rights entitling them to the natural flow of the Gila river. It gives an idea of the amount of activity which will follow the supplying of water to the new lands of the project.

The town of Coolidge is the Hub City of the project, being almost equidistant from the two ends of the project boundaries. It is located on the new Main Line of the Southern Pacific and its location as the Hub is further strengthened by its situation at the intersection of the new Phoenix-Tucson federal aid highway with the main valley-wide highway between Coolidge and Florence, the towns at the east and west ends of the project.

Its location has established Coolidge as a banking, shipping, trading and distribution center and the variety of new industries added in recent months has arrived mainly as a result of the strategic position which it holds.

The Casa Grande Ruins, its principal tourist attraction, was visited last year by more than 20,000 persons. The Big House, which forms the center building of the group gives an interesting picture of the lives of the advanced race of people which inhabited the valley centuries ago. The Ruins is a national monument and park service officials are onhand to serve as guides to visitors. In March of each year a colorful spectacle known as the Arizona State Pageant is held at the Ruins and portrays some phase of the early history of the ancient land mark.

NEW SECTION FORMED TO STUDY TRAFFIC

Organization of a new Street and Highway Traffic section of the National Safety Council with Professor August Vollmer of the Department of Police Administration of Chicago University, as its chairman, has been announced.

This new division of safety work is a direct outgrowth of the Eighteenth Annual Safety Congress, held in Chicago from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4, when several hundred specialists in the field of public management assembled from all parts of the world.

Using Chicago streets as a laboratory, they made traffic tours and considered plans toward the promotion of city uniformity in traffic regulations and handling.

(Continued from page 16) Viewing Wyoming with dread. The terrible roads of Montana had been graveled. What would plain dirt roads be like? The Wyoming maintenance program has my sincere respect. I made better time through that state than any other of like distance. They have no surfaced roads, but they do maintain what they have. Road maintenance gangs were in evidence everywhere. We traveled not far behind a storm, but the roads being worked continually were in excellent shape by the time we came along.My conclusions are that we travel all roads at our own risk. So why remind us of it?