To the editor:

This summer’s soggy weather hurt many farmers, but rain’s great for wetlands. Did Roger Boyd hire rain dancers? He’s supervising that “mitigation” west of Louisiana. Successful wetlands restoration requires lots of weather luck. Many other hurdles exist. The Wakarusa floodway through that property was sprayed with chemicals intended to kill weeds and bugs, including many essential to any healthy wetland. What’s “good” for crops often hurts wetlands.

With luck, enough wetland will get established by the time federal courts rule against the 32nd Street SLT route that no sane politician would dare propose redraining it for farms! Nor pay the price to allow developers to build anything on that floodplain.

Those wetlands aren’t “artificial” despite the heavy equipment that remedied decades of plow-flattened natural swales. This wetland restoration would not have any chance of success if it wasn’t located on deep hydric soils built up over centuries of Wakarusa flooding. It was a natural wetland “reclaimed” (drained) like most all of the 18,000 acres of Wakarusa Wetland that was flourishing when homesteaders arrived.

The land Baker acquired from Haskell, especially where the SLT would cross, was so much wetter than adjacent “bottoms” that nobody succeeded in draining it until Haskell administrators talked Washington into funding massive drainage projects. No locals could tame that “swampland.” They wanted to eliminate a “devil’s-den” where Indian boys and girls found refuge from government efforts to kill their religions, languages and traditions, while expanding a prison-like farm where Indian “inmates” provided free labor.